Supporting Our Seniors On World Senior Citizen’s Day

World Senior Citizen’s Day is a day to show support for seniors in our community and uplift stories of seniors making a positive impact on others. In San Diego County, 83-year-old Rosa Davis is a senior who supports her community year-round. When she moved into a mobile home park in Vista about 15 years ago, she realized that her neighbors needed support. She saw the deep appreciation in a neighbor’s face after picking up food for him and dropping it off. While Rosa is mobile and doing well, she realizes that not all seniors can meet their basic needs. In fact, seniors must embrace unique health, economic, mobility, and nutritional challenges that can come with aging. 

Rosa Davis

Seniors and Food Insecurity

It’s not always easy, especially for seniors facing food insecurity. According to new data from Feeding America, 668,000 California seniors (ages 60+) are food insecure. Seniors experiencing food insecurity can’t always get the healthy food they need. This makes them more likely to have chronic health conditions like asthma and diabetes. They may also experience mental health problems like anxiety and depression. In addition, racism and discrimination cause seniors who identify as Black, Latino, and Native American to have higher rates of food insecurity. Seniors who live with their grandchildren are more likely to have trouble purchasing food for their entire family on a limited income. 

“People living on social security, that just hadn’t registered for me,” Rosa said. “It hadn’t occurred to me that I was moving into a mobile home park, and these people are all seniors, like me. A lot of them are on low social security. A very low amount. A lot of their incomes have dropped tremendously. They have lived their lives, they have served their country a lot of them, they are mothers, fathers, uncles, grandmas. Now it’s their time to have some help. Seniors are special to my heart. I guess sometimes it hasn’t hit me that I’m a senior.”

A volunteer helps a senior attending the food distribution.

Rosa has been doing charity work to ensure people experiencing hunger have the nutritious food they need for more than 45 years. She has long been keenly aware of the challenges that low-income families and people experiencing homelessness face in getting access to food. Now, by living in her community and aging herself, she is especially aware of the needs of seniors, particularly her neighbors who are homebound. For anyone who can’t come to the community center for the distribution, she and her volunteers make sure they get food brought to them.

The Role of Food Rescue

Every Wednesday, Rosa organizes a food distribution in the community center at the mobile home park. Other able-bodied seniors living in the mobile home park volunteer their time to do pick-ups in the morning. They collect surplus food from nearby stores, including Vons and Sprouts. The day starts at 6:30 a.m., and all the work is done by volunteers who live in the mobile home park. There are drivers who do the pick-ups, volunteers who sort the food and weigh it, and volunteers who check people in and help them through the distribution.

Some of the food Rosa and her volunteers rescued

Feeding San Diego connected Rosa with the stores years ago, and she has been a solid fixture in making food rescue possible ever since. In 2022, SB 1383 went into effect in California. The legislation requires businesses like grocery stores to donate edible surplus food to food recovery organizations like Feeding San Diego. Clearly, Rosa was ahead of her time, rescuing food for her community well before it was the law.

“[As a society], we throw away way too much food going into the landfill. But the problem is getting people to pick the food up and do what I do,” she says. “It’s different foods every week. Foods that I probably would never eat or haven’t even tasted, a lot of times because it’s too expensive. But we get it through food rescue. Our food bill has dropped, gone way down, from the pick-ups we do.”

Supporting San Diego Seniors

Many non-profits in San Diego serve seniors, and Feeding San Diego is proud to be one of them. We need to provide food for no-cost distributions like the one at the mobile home park and other non-profits serving seniors. Feeding America’s research shows that more than 9 million seniors could be food insecure by 2050.

One of the seniors who lives in Rosa’s community is Jesse. He has lived in San Diego all his life. While he’s just 63, he has chronic kidney disease and impaired speech and mobility issues from a stroke. He rents at the mobile home park and says that rent keeps going up and that it’s hard to put gas in the tank. He lives with his wife and gets food for both of them.

Jesse with a bag of food he received at the distribution

“Getting food here helps me tremendously. It’s maybe the equivalent of $70. I like to get vegetables, fruits, Sprouts sandwiches,” he tells us. “I would say thank you to people who make it possible.”

To support seniors like Jesse who experience food insecurity, you can become a monthly donor, donate your time as a volunteer, or help spread the word about senior hunger on social media.