Spokane’s nationally recognized Elder Services now in peril

Diane Roberson wore her waterproof mascara to work on Wednesday.

It was the day she’d scheduled a farewell luncheon for the volunteer drivers who manned Spokane Mental Health Center’s Care Cars program, which she coordinated. The group, mostly retired men with patient eyes and weathered faces, came together to eat chicken casserole and chocolate chip cookies and hear heartfelt thank-yous for their years of hard work.

For more than 20 years these volunteers have driven disabled, older Spokane County residents who couldn’t drive or use public transportation to get to their medical appointments. It ended after losing its funding Oct. 31.

The volunteers included Earl Barnhart, a 20-year volunteer with the program, retired from a job in maintenance for St. George’s School, who switched from driving to fund-raising and recruiting three years ago. He’s 86.

There was Don Kelly, the 68-year-old retired owner of Zip’s Drive Ins. He picked up one elderly woman, feeling cool in the used Mercedes he had just bought, only to have her ask: “How long have you been driving a cab?”

And there was 78-year-old Woody Hawkinson, retired Air Force master sergeant and Methodist who says, “I’m the kind of person who’s got to have something to do.”

He sings bass in the church choir. His favorite hymn: “Here I am, Lord.”

Roberson handed out proclamations, certificates, handshakes and hugs at the luncheon and in the end choked back tears.

She struggled to keep her composure long enough to tell the volunteers what they meant to the elderly women they loaded up, along with their walkers and wheelchairs and oxygen tanks, for trips to the cardiologist’s office and the hospital dialysis unit.

“I want you to know that for the time we had them, we made a big difference in their lives,” she told the volunteers.

The program has ended because of the massive budget cuts hitting Spokane’s mental health system. A program at Catholic Charities will attempt to stretch to serve both these clients and those of a Spokane Valley transportation program that also ended this year. That’s as many as 450 to 500 people.

“We’ll try to absorb as many as we can,” says program manager Tom Carroll.

Care Cars is only one of the Elder Services programs affected by the crisis in mental health funding. Another, the Gatekeeper program, is one of Spokane’s most innovative ideas ever. Elder Services trains mail carriers, meter readers and even bartenders to act as gatekeepers to spot the signs of mental decline and call Spokane Mental Health for help. It’s also lost half its funding.

More cuts loom around the corner – especially if a mental health sales tax on Tuesday’s ballot doesn’t pass.

I remember so well my interviews with Ray Raschko, the former director of Elder Services who dreamed up the idea originally. He explained to me why older people wind up happiest “aging in place” in a city like Spokane. Brand-new retirement communities in Arizona, he said, may seem fun at first. But they lack the networks of care that Spokane provides.

The rest of the world agreed. The Gatekeeper program received five national awards, including a Ford Foundation grant for $100,000 in 1992. Elder Services received calls from Japan and London, from Tanzania and Australia, from mental health programs around the world that wanted to start a gatekeeper program of their own.

At least a hundred of them have opened since in communities throughout the United States.

If Raschko were alive today, says his successor, Pam Sloan, he’d be ranting and shaking his index finger over these budget cuts.

Peter Jennings once introduced a segment about Spokane’s Gatekeeper program on ABC’s “World News Tonight.” It showed an elderly woman with no family clutching a stuffed bear she believed was her child. Elder Services cared for her.

Others have included a former pilot who filled her bathroom sink with her own waste and a man who lived on a hot dog and a lottery ticket a day. Case managers helped clean and repair both homes and reunite their owners with family members who dramatically improved their lives.

As for the Care Cars program, the drivers Wednesday afternoon talked of serving frail women who were simply lonesome. “You didn’t have to say a word when you were transporting them,” says Barnhart. “They talked your leg off.”

Before Ray Raschko died in 2000, he spoke eloquently of the need to make sure Spokane’s elders are cared for with compassion and dignity. He’s no longer here to do that. But it’s up to the rest of us to make sure his innovations continue.

Woody Hawkinson shook his head over the ending of the Care Cars program. He heard the desperation in the voices of the Miss Daisies he drove.

“The people who are doing this don’t understand what we’re going through out there,” he said. “These people need to understand someday they’re going to be senior citizens themselves. Then they’re going to look around and say, ‘Where’s my help?’ “

A tear trickled down his leathery cheek.

The chorus of his favorite hymn includes these words: “Here I am, Lord. … I will go, Lord, If you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.”

At the end of the volunteer luncheon, a staff member from Catholic Charities asked the volunteers to consider driving for its program.

Hawkinson the Methodist raised his hand. “Can I drive every day?” he asked.