June 8, 2017
Meals on Wheels San Francisco is thrilled to announce a milestone in our two year-old Adopt-a-Building campaign. Beginning on Monday, June 12, Salesforce employees based out of the company’s San Francisco office will become our first group of volunteers to take over 100% of meal deliveries in a large, low-income residential building. Employees of Salesforce will deliver all meals, five days a week, to Meals on Wheels recipients residing in the Rene Cazenave Apartments. Run by the Community Housing Partnership, the Rene Cazenave Apartments offers 120 subsidized studio and one-bedroom apartments for formerly homeless residents of San Francisco. Meals on Wheels serves residents in this building who are senior citizens and/or homebound.
The Adopt-a-Building program matches corporate volunteer groups in philanthropically-minded companies with residents who live in one of 30 low-income buildings Meals on Wheels serves. With the additional partnership of Salesforce – and their commitment to deliver 100% of our meals to the Rene Cazenave Apartments – this burgeoning program now relies on corporate volunteers to deliver over 20% of the meals to homebound seniors in the Tenderloin and SoMa. These two neighborhoods contain the highest concentration of poverty among seniors in San Francisco.
The Adopt-a-Building program is an essential means by which Meals on Wheels will work to keep pace with the sky-rocketing demand for home delivered meals. We have tripled the number of meals we deliver in the past decade – from 523,000 in 2007 to 1,725,000 in 2016.
By matching volunteers with homebound seniors, this program alleviates many emotional and physical concerns that arise from a lack of nutritious food and daily human contact. Eighty-three percent of Meals on Wheels recipients report that their physical and emotional health improves after receiving daily visits and nutritious meals; it is this kind of meaningful and measurable impact that Salesforce volunteers who participate in this program will have on the lives of homebound seniors. Meals on Wheels is deeply grateful to Salesforce for their commitment to San Francisco’s homebound seniors, giving them the opportunity to age with independence and dignity in their own homes.
