Our meeting was called to order at 18:15 by President Jim Richards. We sang O Canada, toasted Queen and Country and sang Rotary Grace. There were two summer regulars, Moran Woods and Don Downee. Two other guests were also present, Vic Muncy from Pottsville, Pennsylvania and Vanessa Smith, a summer student with Haliburton County Home Support Services.

The Sergeant at Arms tonight was Don Popple. The early-bird fine went to Jim Miners for late delivery of the Rotooter for last week. Timing also got Brian Black a fine – he stepped through the New York church door just before it locked him out. Derek Knowles’ mail box was in the right place at the wrong time, lost its post and cost Derek a fine. The Sergeant reminded Bob Stinson that the time for beer is before the meeting and congratulated Kim Emmerson on the time he got married, since today was his anniversary.

President Jim read letters of thanks from the Varty and Woodcock families for our recent floral tributes.

President Jim told us that VP Steve Roberts was off to the airport to pick up our incoming student, Micki Nostella, arriving from Italy.

President Jim reported on that the Car Draw winner Martha Waind had been given her cheque. The final carnival report indicates 2,880 tickets were sold, netting the club a shade under $30,000. The net proceeds from the carnival and associated events totaled a bit more than $3,000.

President Jim reported that the Board had approved three scholarships totaling $2,200 for the upcoming graduation ceremony at Haliburton Highlands Secondary School. The acceptance of this decision was moved by Kim Emmerson and seconded by Ted Brandon. The motion carried on a show of hands. Peter Forgrave will follow-up with the school to determine whether awards for Grade 12 will change as a result of the new secondary school program structure.

Continuing with a trend started last week, Donna MacDonald introduced herself as the guest speaker. As Executive Director of the Haliburton County Home Support Services, Donna had a lot to tell us about as she did her classification presentation. Fortunately for the recorder, Donna provided an electronic copy of her presentation – here it is.

Haliburton County Home Support Services is a not for profit charitable organization of registered volunteers and professional staff that have been providing community support services since 1980. For 22 years we have been providing services throughout the entire county including: Dysart et al, Minden Hills, Algonquin Hills, Highlands East to "enable seniors 55+ and the physically disabled 18+ to remain independent in their own homes for a longer period of time.

These services include: meals on wheels (hot/frozen), transportation, emergency response system, friendly visiting, security checks, in home respite, social recreational services, wheels to meals, home help, home maintenance,

Our staffing component includes 5 full time and 2 part time along with 145 dedicated volunteers who provide the front line service. We have an elected volunteer Board of Directors and several working committees in our agency.

The need for services has grown over the years. The age of the recipients is mainly in the 75 + age range.

We must follow the criteria as established by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care in our service provision. Therefore the standards we abide by, the policies and procedures for each service, management related items in the agency, and the quality assurance guidelines ensure business best practices are followed. We also are incorporating more defined risk management criteria

We work with other non profit agencies and for profit including the access centre, paramed, DVA, VON, University of Western Ontario.

Haliburton County Home Support Services has served as a model for the development of other support agencies including Community Care Victoria County.

We are a member of the Ontario Community Support Association; - a provincial body dedicated to supporting, promoting and representing the common goals of its members who are providers of community based not for profit health and social services so that they are better able to support people to live at home in their communities. In total these agencies employ over 12,000 dedicated professional staff who work with over 50,000 volunteers to provide services.

We have memberships on several committees both in the county including the Haliburton Service Providers groups which I have chaired for 5 years, HHHS Primary Task Group. I also am on the Board of Directors of the Alzheimer’s Society of Peterborough and area (including Haliburton)

Clients range from receiving one service to receiving several. Last year we provided in home community support services to 795 clients. That represented an increase of 215 clients from the previous year without any additional funding from the government. We, representing the clients, are so thankful for the dedication of our 145 volunteers. Without their support many of our clients would be living in nursing homes or becoming ill because of the lack of receiving nutritious meals, etc.

Providing transportation for short distances trips to enable people to come into town for medical appointments, to shop for their various needs, etc.

Governments’ trend to move people to LTC facilities who now qualify for Access Centre services. If these people do not wish to move into a facility, they will be contacting us to receive home help, security checks. This will increase our services provision which takes more time to coordinate and volunteers to carry out the front line service.

Another challenge is to keep up with the cost of doing business. This includes the yearly increases in our lease, hydro, telephone staff wages and benefits and technological updating.

Presently 22% of the county’s population is 65+ and 34% are 55+. The Haliburton County 2000 Research study – Strategic Planing for the future, June 2000 documented that we can expect an additional 5,000 people retiring in our County by 2005. Many of these will need our services as well, in some cases, other family members including their elderly parents that will move here with them. We are planning now for the higher demand for our services.

We want to reach clients who require our services the most – the frail elderly, low-income elderly and malnourished elderly. People are living longer but having more health needs and require assistance to stay at home. Many seniors have only their old age pension to live on and are unable to afford necessities or services to assist them to remain at home (i.e. repairs) Some of our clients have now been placed in nursing homes or have moved in with family members due to economics and health.

We want to support caregivers by the availability of in the in-home respite (care for the caregiver) services. There is much stress on caregivers who are mainly elderly women and their children, which leads to their burning out and becoming ill. We provide the meals on wheels and transportation service to caregivers.

Last fiscal year (April 1, 2001- March 31, 2002) we provided the following units of service to our clients: 7065 meals to 236 clients; 718 meals under wheels to meals service to 193 clients; 2572 one way trips to 270 clients, 111 (times) units of home maintenance to 51 clients; 615 friendly visits to 47 clients; 1268 security checks to 19 clients; 106 emergency response system units to 106 clients; 1299 social recreational services to 56 clients; 928 (times) units of home help service to 83 clients. That is a total of 14682 units of service to 795 clients. The average cost to provide these services to 795 clients was only $532.28/per client for the year. This is based on total expenditures only. If revenue was taken into the calculation, the average cost would be $446.34 per client per year.

During our first fiscal quarter of this year the units of services we provide have grown by 65% over last years at the same time. (last year 2744, this year 4537.5).

As the services increase we need to increase our volunteer base to provide the front line service to the clients especially in those services, which do not offer any financial remuneration, and in areas of higher demand for certain services. We also need to keep our volunteers interested and connected to the agency. We must provide ongoing training and support to them. We as a society must value our volunteers. In our agency last year they represented $153,268 worth of time that they have generously given to help our seniors and physically disabled. Source: How to estimate the economic contribution of volunteer work, Voluntary Action Directorate, Department of Canadian Heritage, 1993. (9161.26 hours @ $16.73/hr)

We must keep our services affordable to our clients otherwise if they do not use our services their health and quality of life will deteriorate. For example, the cost of a frozen meal entrée (picture on one side of hand out) is $3.35. The soup and dessert each cost $1.15. For transportation, the client pays $.17 per km from the volunteers home to the clients home to the destination (whether in the county or out of the county) and return. We subsidize this an additional $.17. No remuneration is given to the volunteer for their time. A full list of costs is in the insert in our brochure. Please keep in mind that DVA persons should contact their representative, as DVA will pay for most of our services to them.

We must carry out our fund raising strategy to maintain and build on existing fundraising levels in order to balance our base budget, as there is still competition for dollars. This fiscal year our fund raising commitment is $28,000, which will be raised by various fund raising endeavours, donations, municipal grants. Your tax-deductible contribution is most appreciated and needed. We are thankful to the corporations for their sponsorship of our golf tournament, which is one of our major fundraisers of the year. We publish a quarterly newsletter and we are in need of advertisers so that we can distribute them to clients, volunteers, businesses etc. Cost is very reasonable but varies with the side of the ad. Quarter page ad: $25.00 per quarter or $75.00/ year or four ads.

We thank Rotary for your support in paying for the monitoring of one of our clients for one year.

One of our goals this year is to replace 30 old emergency response systems.

The emergency response system provides a means for people to medical help in an emergency. It is comprised of a base unit which is connected by the telephone lines to our 24-hour monitoring station. Should you need assistance you just press the transmitter button. The base unit immediately signals the answering centre. Here the staff move into action alerting the specific help you have requested immediately and quickly. It has saved lives in our county. To date we have over 80 out in people’s homes.

Thank-you Donna.

August 29 – Program by Curry Bishop and Troy Austen

September 5 – Polio Plus presentation by our district co-ordinator, Janet McLeod

September 12 – Club Assembly – get your topics to VP Steve Roberts

The meeting was adjourned by President Jim at 18:51.

Written by Jim Miners