Volunteers are the real 'heart' of the Live Oak Adult Center
By Sandy Sims
An enormous oak tree shades the long span of windows outside the dining room, softening the heat of a sunny Friday. A squirrel skitters over a large branch, and a birdhouse hangs off the window.
It's a peaceful scene outside the dining room of the Live Oak Adult Day Care Center in Los Gatos.
Inside, elderly clients sit around tables eating lunch. A small staff of three flits from client to client serving up the food, patting one client on the shoulder, making sure another has juice.
Volunteer Lovice Hoehmann, 80, a small woman with a slight Texas accent, circles the tables, making sure each client gets a hug and calling each one by name. Volunteer Margery Vernon, who won't tell her age, sits off near the window drawing colorful flowers and clients' names on place mats for the coming week. Barbara Scott, 71, arranges little bouquets of flowers around the center's three rooms, and volunteers Bill Seran and Patricia Ziels sit at different tables engaging clients in conversation. Tina Kohr comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and does much of the cleanup after lunch.
This adult day care center is a nonprofit agency at which frail seniors who are unable to stay alone can be cared for during the day, Monday through Friday.
There, 20 or so seniors listen to live music, sing songs, dance, exercise, play word games, listen to stories, hear about current events, and reminisce. Children from the preschool across the way come to visit. So do Girl Scouts, Brownies and Los Gatos High School students. Even a dog comes to visit. Director Ines Picazo and her assistant Christine Purnell and staff member Maria Chavez coordinate all of this.
But Picazo says it's the volunteers who bring the love and the spice. And it's the volunteers who got the center on its feet in the beginning, some 19 years ago.
Margery Vernon remembers back before the center began.
Years ago, when a person became elderly, frail, and unable to be alone, there were few options for help. Many found themselves isolated at home or in nursing homes. Or maybe a family member took on the role of constant caregiver. There were sparse in-between-the-home-and-nursing-home offerings.
Aware of this dilemma, a group from the Los Gatos United Methodist Church began exploring adult day care as a way to bring isolated, frail, elderly people into a social setting during the daytime and also give relief to caregivers.
Vernon, who was on the committee, says, after 11/2 years of laying groundwork, the Live Oak Adult Day Care Center leased space from the Methodist church. The center opened in 1983 for two days a week with eight clients, and Vernon was one of the first to volunteer. She brought along her friend Lovice. Another friend, Barbara Scott, joined the group. Scott was actually hired as the second staff person for nine years until she retired and returned to volunteering. Pat Ziels found out about the center from a friend, and in 1986 she too began volunteering.
These four women have been coming regularly since. That's close to 20 years.
"It's the best thing that ever happened," Hoehmann says. "These elderly people were once vibrant, active people. I think the whole world should take care of these old people who've given so much of their lives."
Vernon says, "If they didn't come here, they might be isolated at home."
But it's not just the clients who benefit. Hoehmann says she recalls when the center first opened, a daughter brought her parent and cried. "[The daughter] said she hadn't been away from the house for five years."
But the volunteers' duties at the center have changed over the years.
"We did everything back when it started," Vernon says. She adds that volunteers served the food, planned and carried out the entertainment, decorated the place, and even took clients to the bathroom.
As the center grew and began receiving money from different agencies, state and federal regulations began dictating what volunteers could and couldn't do. Now there are restrictions. Volunteers cannot handle the food, or assist the clients, even with walking or by pushing a wheelchair. They cannot be alone in the room with a client, or take them to the restroom. This makes the staff's job even more intense, and ironically, volunteers are even more necessary.
Volunteers still give the program its heart.
The center has two modestly paid senior companion positions, filled by Mohammed Qamruddin and recently by Ziels. "Their job is to socialize with our clients," Picazo says.
"We laugh a lot," says Ziels, who comes all the way from the Redwood Estates in the Santa Cruz Mountains, sometimes by bus. And director Picazo agrees. "It's a lot more fun when the volunteers are here," she says.
"They call us Mutt and Jeff," Vernon says of herself and her friend Hoehmann. Vernon is a tall woman who brings her stack of trivia questions every Friday. Hoehmann, a small woman, says, "I'm Marge's heckler." She says she sits in the back when Vernon is calling out trivia questions and heckles. Vernon even does chair exercises with the clients.
"I'm practicing for when I'm a client," Vernon says.
Live Oak now has three other centers, in Willow Glen, Gilroy and downtown San Jose. There are openings here in Los Gatos. Clients can come from one to five days a week, and payment is on a sliding scale. Picazo says the center can always use volunteers. For more information, call Picazo at 408-354-4782.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
