To help kick off our first week of service since before the pandemic, a group of seven leaders spent their morning Tuesday at the Montpelier Senior Activity Center (MSAC) preparing and handing off about 350 meals for delivery.
Head Coach Mehran Assadi, Matt Frazee, Dawn Minter, Eric Sandberg, Achim Schwetlick, Michael Veilleux, and Chris Zimmerman joined MSAC volunteers to prepare and package that day’s meal as well as frozen meals that go out on Thursday to get seniors through the weekend.
MSAC is the largest senior center in the region. They serve over 1500 older adults in Montpelier and surrounding communities.
“We love to help in the communities we are part of,” Mehran said. “In the smallest capital in the U.S., we can do a lot of good.”
MSAC has been around for a long time and National Life has been involved from the beginning. In 2009, the MSAC building was ravaged by fire, but with the help of the National Life Group Foundation contributing significantly to their capital campaign, they were able to rebuild.
National Life’s Do Good Cupboard is located there. In 2020, National Life partnered with the City of Montpelier to install the cupboard in front of the MSAC on Barre Street. The Cupboard offers basic items to those in the community, augmenting food shelves with nonperishable food and toiletries.
Last year, National Life also funded a “Do Good Van” which transports seniors, children and food in the capital city.
The senior meals program includes Meals on Wheels and for some recipients that one meal a day is all they have to eat. Hot meals are delivered Monday through Thursday by over 35 volunteer drivers, some of whom are National Life employees, one of whom – Kris Clark – has been doing it for over 30 years! They also host a weekly congregate meal. The meals they provide are locally sourced in part by food grown by the MSAC farm where they grew over 5,000 pounds of food last year.
Additionally, they offer wellness and fitness classes including tango, poetry, writing, music, and many others. All of these programs support older community members to thrive as they age at home.
Our whole group seemed really happy to be there.
“We always work together well,” Mehran said. “It’s a close-knit team. We respect each other and there’s a lot of love amongst this team.”
He also encouraged National Life employees to use their 40 hours of volunteer time to do good.
“We started offering volunteer time before it became cool, and we’ve been cool for 175 years as a company, so, I encourage my teammates to take advantage of this volunteer time and to be part of the solution in the communities of which we are a part,” he said.
