Photos Courtesy of ELDER-AID
As people age, they tend to need assistance with home maintenance, food, transportation and housing and more but sometimes, they don’t have the money to afford those things. Elder-Aid is a local nonprofit organization that provides low-income seniors with affordable housing and other services to help them stay in the community as long as possible.
Serving the Bryan and College Station areas since 1990, Elder-Aid was founded by Sara Loeppert when she learned that people she knew struggled with maintaining their homes and living independently. Current President of the Elder-Aid Board, James Thomas says Sara had a real heart for the elderly, and her goal was to do what she could to help them live independently in their homes for as long as possible.
“The elderly live their best, longest life and are most happy if they are living independently,” James says. “When Sara started this, she said she was aware that the elderly are often called a forgotten population. They fall quietly into the shadows, nobody pays attention to them and often they are homeless or living in poor conditions. I’ve seen some people living in mobile homes where they had to watch where they walked, or they’d fall through the floor because it was rotten. When we find people living in terrible conditions like these, we try to help them.”
Elder-Aid maintains 24 low-income houses in Bryan and 13 duplexes in College Station, which is where they focus their services, though James says they also service areas within 30 miles of Bryan.
“We started out trying to do all the surrounding counties, but when it came to doing home repairs, it was more than we could handle on our own,” James says. “It was very time consuming and difficult to go to other towns to do work when we don’t have volunteers.
However, if it is something that we can help connect them to other places that can help, we certainly try to do that.”
Besides affordable housing, Elder-Aid provides several other services, including minor home repairs, social support with the Phone Buddy System, transportation to doctor appointments and limited funding for utility assistance. For the needs that the service may not be able to help directly, James says they can refer clients to other organizations that can help.
“We have connections with the food bank and Meals On Wheels. We can help them by referring them to those types of programs,” James says. “As far as maintenance goes, we’ll either do the repair ourselves or we have contacts with licensed people that will work for reduced prices for us to help people who can’t afford it.”
The need for an organization like Elder-Aid is very important to the community as they receive between 50 to 100 calls a month from the elderly population. Though the area has other housing, James says many tend to focus on students when there is a shortage of housing for low-income elderly.
“We love the students, but there are other segments of the population,” James says. “Unlike a young family, many of the elderly are retired, past their working age, unable to work and don’t have a lot of savings, so they can’t buy a home or afford a mortgage and rent here is high. We’re trying to help them get by.”
The services provided by Elder-Aid run on solely on donations and volunteers. Since the COVID pandemic, James says the organization has had less volunteers and encourages able community members to consider donating their time to help. There are other ways to help including donating new or gently used items such as fans, heaters, canes, walkers or giving a monetary donation.
“In the past, we have depended heavily on volunteers to help us rehabilitate houses, paint houses and help with repairs,” James says. “We could always use monetary donations as the money goes directly to elderly assistance or materials to fix their homes. Recently, we had someone donate 70 fans, so we’ve been delivering fans to the elderly that need extra cooling because they can’t afford to have their air conditioner as cold as they would like in the heat.”
Even though it sounds like a lot to keep up with, James says he loves getting to fix up houses for the elderly — it’s really a labor of love trying to help good people that have come across hard times.
“They are very grateful for whatever help we are able to give them,” James says. “Many times, they will come out and give us hugs. Besides that, home repairs and building things is my hobby, so I get to do my hobby and help people at the same time, what more could I ask for?
To qualify for help from Elder Aid, you must be 60 years old or older and meet the income qualification. For more information about their services, ways to help or how to donate, visitelderaid.net.
