 Okay, welcome everyone. We'll start in just a moment as we allow some time for other people to get connected in. We want to say hello. Welcome to all of our Amherst community members and we thank you for joining us on our community chat today. My name is Brianna, communications manager for the town. We'll be holding short live chats like this on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon for the next couple of weeks. In this webinar we do ask to ask a question from the Zoom application. You can click the Q&A button to type your question. Your questions will only be visible to the hosts of this meeting. Additionally, if you'd like to speak, please use the Zoom raise hand button or press star 9 from your phone. We ask that you introduce yourself before speaking and to main a civil discourse. As a reminder, this webinar is being recorded, so please refrain from asking any personally identifying health questions. So, today, joining your town manager, Paul Bulkman and I, we have the Amherst director of senior services, Mary Beth Ogilewicz. I had to practice that. Welcome to you both. We're going to have the chance for folks to ask Q&A today, but before we launch into questions, are there any general status updates? Paul? Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. Pretty much things are in status quo. We're happy that the Coley Dixon Hospital is managing well under our circumstances. Our call volumes for police and fire is at historic low levels, which is really good news for us. We continue to have cases in Amherst, but not at the rate that is happening in other communities, so I think we're in pretty good shape. Today it's about the senior center and what's happening with our seniors, and so I really want to focus in on Mary Beth. So, Mary Beth, where are you today? It doesn't look like your office. That's correct. Hello, everybody. I'm so happy to be with you today, virtually, and I am actually in the poll room, so if I stand up here, you can see here I am, where normally we would be using the weights that are located down here and doing some exercises and movement, but this is now my headquarters for now, and the reason being is that we have been busy remodeling and refurbishing the senior center, so when everybody returns, you're going to find that it's a beautiful, beautiful place for us to gather as a community. We have new carpeting. We've had the walls painted. Today we have countertops being installed. The kitchen's been remodeled, and it's all been designed with an eye towards accessibility in terms of disabled persons and those who may need further assistance, so it's going to be absolutely beautiful when we're able to open again, so this is where I am live and work here every day still, so please don't forget to call us if you have any needs or we can support you in any way. It's been amazing how you've kept the senior center functioning and expanding its outreach and helping people connect with you on multiple levels, whether it be food or counseling services or just a friendly call, so talk a little bit more about what those things that you've added since we can't have people come into the senior center anymore. Yeah, well a couple of things that we've done is we have shifted our food distribution, so we used to have a congregate meal where everybody would come and have a hot meal together. We have shifted to that being a takeout meal, so folks can come any Amherst resident who is age 60 can get a free lunch here, so it's a takeout format, you just dial and call us up at 259-3060, we'll register you, we just need two days advance notice, and you can get a free lunch Monday through Friday, so it's a fantastic opportunity to kind of support your own nutrition and also sometimes get out of the house. So people either drive up in their car or we have six-feet cones and tables and people walk up and then we deliver the meal. We're also still doing our meals and wheels delivery and then we're still doing the survival center boxes, that's a wonderful program and again there's no income eligibility if you are a senior, again contact us and we'll help you through the paperwork, we'll walk you through, and we have about 60 different persons who are receiving boxes of food, it's been fantastic, we've upped that amount, there are two huge boxes intended to support you for an entire month now, so we deliver those to your doorstep and we also are still doing the western masks of food bags and again we now deliver those to you so that you don't have to come out of the house. We've added in masks, so we've begun to add some press and media to that, so any senior who needs a mask, we've been working very hard, we've donated 10 boxes of fabric to community sowers throughout the whole Pioneer Valley and they've been bringing them back to us in groups of 20 to 30 masks, so anyone who needs a mask again call us and I will deliver them to your doorstep and then most importantly and excitedly we have been going online, so we've all been figuring out how to do Zoom, so many of our classes, the exercise classes and healthy bones classes, yoga classes have been recorded, they're on Facebook and also on Zoom, so if you would like to connect with that please let us know and also our yoga teacher has, I've connected her with Amherst Media and her yoga classes are now posted on Amherst Media and she's also been working, she has young children so she's just recently recorded a family yoga class that parents can do with their young children, so we're trying to also be good neighbors not just for our seniors but for the whole community and lastly what we're going to be rolling out this week is all of our support groups are going to be going online, so grief support groups are online, caretaker support groups are online and our Aging Together group will be facilitated by Dr. Bruno Martins from UMass and we will be working together online, so we're looking forward to doing more online and figuring out how to reach people. Great, thank you for that update Marybeth, sounds like you guys are pretty busy above and beyond your normal um busy schedule, so thank you for that. I just want to remind those who are joining us if you would like to ask a question you can hit Q&A or raise your hand and zoom star nine from your phone, we do have a couple questions if you guys are ready to launch in. Sure, okay so this question I have here for Marybeth, I'm concerned about a friend she seems very depressed and anxious lately being alone all the time, how can we help her? The first thing that I would say is to contact us, so again our numbers 259-3060, our first level of sort of triaging those kinds of problems is we connect those individuals with our social workers and they do an assessment around how somebody is feeling and what kinds of supports they might need. We have low level supports in terms of volunteers who do well-being calls on a daily basis and check in with someone which has really been a wonderful connecting point and then we also have social workers who call on a daily basis and can do a little bit more therapeutic work in terms of helping people to name how they're feeling and help them through that. Another level of support we also have is we've hired a nurse, so our senior center nurse Karen Reynon is online as well and so she often calls people who might have co-occurring diagnoses or more complex presentations that could be. There we have a few important updates on schools, child care, and the launch of this. Is that the governor's zoom bombing? Yeah, so levels of sports and then lastly I have something that I'm very excited to be launching is we're going to be working with the psychology department at UMass and Dr. Bruna Martins who has worked with our senior community in my Live Your Best Life program. She and her doctoral students will begin running a zoom program, so an online program that people will be able to access by either dialing in on their phone or through using their computer and coming online or their phone and it will be a support group for how to get through this very complex time. What has really come across for us is that when I speak to people what I'm hearing is grief and that we are going through a period of time of collective grief. There's been a lot of loss and people say when I say oh it sounds like you have grief it's not necessarily that someone has passed away but there's been a loss of routine, a loss of gathering, a loss of worship space and so it really helps to join these groups. It normalizes the experience that we're having. It also helps us to name it because if we name it then we can feel it and work through it. So she is going to be a tremendous asset. It's a free group that people will be able to access and we will be posting that information on Facebook. We're also going to be sending out a newsletter in a couple of weeks and you can call the senior center and get more information on that. But I want people to know that if you are having any struggles that that's something that we're all experiencing and we can help each other with this scaffolding and that is not a linear process but we can make our way together by kind of walking each other through. Great, thank you. That sounds like it's going to be a great resource. It will. And you have two social workers on staff who are able and well and available to help people. I also know that sometimes you'll have a someone who lives out of town concerned about their parent who lives in town and worried about the connection with that. Are you able to help with that too? Absolutely. So we actually receive probably on a daily basis two to three calls from adult children who are out of town in Boston or some other location that are concerned and we can absolutely follow up and then depending on what the level of information is some of it we won't necessarily be able to share but we always circle back and let family know and that honestly has been a wonderful asset for us. People calling in and saying, jeez I'm a little concerned about so-and-so and we can follow that up. So our two social workers are working remotely and they are there Monday through Friday eight to four and making hundreds of phone calls every week. Yes. So we have another question here. I was signed up to get my taxes done for free by AARP. Will they still be able to complete them? Yeah. So nationwide AARP suspended their program until further notice and at this time we don't have any information that they will be returning and in terms of what that date is. So what we've been advising people is that deadline has been extended both for federal taxes and Massachusetts filing till July 15th. So if folks want to give a certain amount of time that they feel comfortable in terms of waiting to see if we have AARP coming back they're welcome to do that. We are not endorsing any other individual tax preparers and also advising people that if they don't feel comfortable waiting for that period of time or if they want to file because they need that return money to go ahead and do it on their own. So there they're basically three options that people have at this point in time since we don't know if they will be returning those volunteers are not able to take any tax questions on their own because unless they are working under the auspices of AARP they can't perform the work. So folks can either hire a private preparer. The second option is they can try to e-file on their own. So that would be www.irs.gov backslash file and then the last one would be if they might know a friend or family member or an adult child or perhaps a niece or a nephew who might be able to help them to file on their own that would be the other form of assistance. But right now we don't have any information that they expect to return before July 15th. Okay great. Another question here is when do you think the senior center will reopen? That is the million dollar question. So we certainly know you know we're going to have a brand new really beautiful remodeled and refurbished center and we'll be waiting to see what rolls out in terms of advice both from the CDC the federal government and also the town and Massachusetts councils on aging. So I will say that we are part of a state organization statewide Massachusetts councils on aging and they spearhead a collective wisdom for 350 plus communities throughout Massachusetts and they have been closely watching what's been happening in China in terms of how they are opening senior services and functioning and taking wisdom and guidance both internationally nationally and also within the state. So they work very closely with the governor and with the executive office of elder affairs and we will all be collaborating to make that decision when the time is ripe. So we don't have a firm date but we do know that some point we will all be back in here together. So just to add to that so so I've closed the buildings and you know the bank centers all of our buildings until May 4th and today we expect to hear from the governor in terms of and this aligned with what the state had done. So today or tomorrow we expect from the governor about what his decision will be about or advice will be about closing schools whether it's going to be to June 1st or to the end of the academic year if he closes to the end of the academic year that will tell us a piece of that'll give us a piece of information. We try to stay aligned with our operation with how the state is managing and advising people. His stay at home advisory is still in effect until May 4th but I anticipate he'll make some kind of call on that today also. So we will continue to align ourselves with what the state is doing just like Mary Beth said. Great, thank you. There's a couple new participants who look like they've joined from the phone so I just want to remind you if you'd like to speak and ask a question press star nine from the phone or from zoom raise your hand and we will acknowledge you. So we have another question here. I am in need of a wheelchair. Do you have do you have one that you could loan? At this point in time our medical equipment loan program has been suspended. As you can well imagine that was our decision that we were aided with the board of health in terms of there being a risk of exposure and cross contamination. I know that Stavros was still lending equipment for folks. I've had a number of calls for bedrails, walkers and wheelchairs as people have convalesced. So they are still an available source and they have a hospital grade sanitation machine. It's tens of thousands of dollars that has like ultra violet lights and it sterilizes equipment in a way that makes it consistent with hospital standards of sterilization. So that's one resource. In terms of other councils on aging and who might be lending equipment. I also know that the Westfield Senior Center is collaborating to clean and work with some equipment and they were doing some loaning. But for right now we have had to suspend that out of just a sense of safety. That makes sense. We have someone here who is stating that they're in a vulnerable age group but they still are healthy and would like to volunteer in some way. Do you have any tips for seniors who might want to volunteer during this time? Absolutely. So one of the best ways to work with both the anxiety and grief that people are feeling is to engage in some kind of taking care of one another. That's just all of the research shows that's a great way to help people to get through and navigate this really challenging time. So people who are interested on our website we have some online fillable forms. So people if you have a skill you can offer the skill. So we've had some people you know they're going grocery shopping and are happy to pick up another person's groceries. Other people have you know they're going to CVS and they'd like to help out and pick up somebody else's prescription for them. So we've been trying to match skill sets and ability. So it's not to say that everybody can and should volunteer but for people who feel like they are able that's a really wonderful avenue. We also have folks who are making masks and sewing masks and we have some other smaller tasks within the senior center in terms of helping us even with our newsletter and other needs that arise on an individual basis. So if people are interested the best way again would be to contact us. We're happy to help you let us know what our needs are on a daily basis and on a weekly basis and kind of fill in depending on what your skill level is and ability. So you can do something small even as just calling a neighbor to sewing masks to delivering food for us. Great thank you. We have another question regarding someone having questions about their Medicare coverage and who can help them with that. Yeah so one of the functions that we performed quite riskly here at the senior center was helping people with the Medicare process both in terms of enrollment and also problems they might have with coverage or other issues. And so that was performed primarily by one of our social workers Michelle Schmura and then also we had SHINE representatives they were volunteers who assisted us. We are still doing that work. So folks who might have a problem or a question or needing to enroll in Medicare please do contact us at the senior center and we will link you with one of our volunteers or our social worker who can help walk you through that process. It's a bit more challenging because we can't meet face to face to review documents or scan them or send them but we will figure it out. It might be a little bit more taxing or laborious in terms of the paperwork and mailing things back and forth but we're still providing that service and want to make sure that people have all the support that they need to assure that their insurance is up to date and that they're getting the full coverage and the full benefits that they need. And we had another question that just came in from Jennifer. Can the senior center help with healthcare proxies? Oh I love this. I swear to God I just wrote down on my notebook healthcare proxies because there's one thing that I could do in this whole community it would be to say to every single person please sign a healthcare proxy. So right before we closed down the week that we closed down I had a presentation that I was going to be working on that we had organized about healthcare proxies. A healthcare proxy is basically you naming a substituted medical decision maker so that if you should become unable to communicate your desires or wishes for your own healthcare there is a named person who can execute that on your behalf. I will tell you in my conference calls with Cooley Dickinson the first thing they ask me is how many of your seniors have healthcare proxies and I say yes that is exactly my number one you know campaign that I wish that I could implement right now and a healthcare proxy does not require an attorney or any special person to execute for you there are downloadable forms you and if you can't download one again call me I will mail you one I have hundreds of them here and you mail it and basically all it is is you name a person one person is what I would recommend to make your decisions for you should you become unable to communicate them and then you have to have two witnesses sign that so that becomes a little bit more problematic just come with two pens you can even come here to the senior center you can ask neighbors to sign it it doesn't require a notary just two individuals make sure that they they witness it the same date that you execute it because if it's a different date it will be deemed ineffective so it's an important document to name them and then also to talk to those people about what your wishes are with this particular virus your medical condition what we know is right that it can shift rapidly within 24 hours and your desire to go on a ventilator or not would be a critical discussion you should have now while you still have all of your faculties and you have the ability to think about how that might feel and even perhaps the duration that you would like to be on a ventilator but it's it's much better to have the conversations and to designate those people and then make sure that that person that you designate knows it because if the person doesn't isn't aware of it they can also decline to serve so you want to make sure that you talk to that person say I'm going to name you as my health care agent so I know I read recently how some people are getting you say you have to have two witnesses with who witness you're signing this and what some people are doing is they're in their car they sign it people can see from outside their car then they can validate that they watched you sign it and so that's a clever way to sort of do the social distancing by being in an encased structure in a way yeah and you could even just drive up here to the senior center two of us can walk out and that's and that's perfectly adequate that's great and the and the attesting is really just that you are you are over 18 years old and that you are of sound mind and body making this decision doesn't require any sort of um you know uh expertise or or a notary or anything like that but please everybody in the community every single individual should have a health care proxy that includes people who are 18 years and above so all of my children who went off to college I made them execute a health care proxy before they left my home so it's a really important tool for us right now. Mary Beth do you have any tips for people who have questions about either updating a will or don't have a will right now and there might be afraid of being um sick? Yeah um I well I think that first of all people um there are misperceptions about wills so so I'm not sitting here as as necessarily someone who's giving legal advice with my legal hat on but I can draw on that background knowledge to share with people is that a will only in controls the disposition of assets that don't have a named beneficiary so what that really means that you have a bank account with somebody else's name that asset does is not controlled by the will it is controlled by the other named beneficiary so it automatically go to that person it wouldn't be subject to any provisions of a will so the the quickest thing that I would tell people is that if you have assets this is a great time if we're sitting around all day long to check on things like IRAs and check on other assets you might have and making sure that there's another person's name on it so that if something should happen to you that asset immediately devises to that named person and that it's the person that you still name so sometimes people put a name um on life insurance when they started a job 25 years ago and that person might have passed so you want to make sure that the beneficiaries are up to date and they are in fact the persons but every you know your assets from your motor vehicle to stocks to IRAs to any other asset that has the ability to name a beneficiary that is the quickest way to make sure that your intentions are followed through and and you're able to do what you want in terms of whether you execute a will for any other assets beyond that again that that would be a matter of hiring an attorney in having that conversation we do have community legal aid which is still performing work and still working in the community and they do do wills for elders you know based on income eligibility but I know that they are very backed up in terms of the cases and sort of prioritizing emergency legal aid legal aid as opposed to something that is more about planning assets so so that's what I would make for a suggestion for people yeah so I should I should know that uh well Mary Beth is an attorney and really is very knowledgeable in this field one of the most knowledgeable people in the field she's not offering legal advice right as you said right but she is really knowledgeable this has been a specialty before she came to work for the town of Amherst working for a large law firm so she really knows her stuff so if she said this this is important and I'm taking away some of this information too it makes sense I already wrote it down on my to-do list yeah for when we're done so thank you so we probably have time for just a couple more questions I'll do a last call from our attendees star nine from the phone raise your hand from zoom or use q and a from zoom we have a question here regarding someone who's about to be eligible to sign up for social security in the coming weeks and they're wondering how they navigate this mm-hmm so social security is still functioning albeit uh in a much slower fashion so uh in individual if they need to access and begin the process to sign up for social security they can choose to do the online forms so that's one option and that's probably one of the quickest options the other one is is that they do have an 800 phone number that you can call and someone walk you through that process that tends to be a bit more time intensive and there are very very long wait periods some people I know have been on the phone for up to six hours waiting for somebody to answer if you don't have access to technology you'd like to get some assistance to fill out the online form we can also help you so our social workers have helped a number of clients who need some assistance in terms of signing up what we have also seen is that a number of individuals are electing to receive social security at the earlier stage due to some of the economic and security that is happening right now so typically it behooves you to wait several more years before you access social security so you can receive a higher portion of that amount of money but some people are having to elect earlier options so again contact us if you don't have the ability but they are still accepting applications and processing them in a slow manner great thank you so are there any things Mary Beth that you'd like to share that you weren't asked directly today about any services or programming that you have going on I think that the the most important one really was just emphasizing that we're going to be trying to offer some more online programming to help people around boredom and also some of the emotional aspects and that's something that it takes courage to ask for help and to acknowledge that that you might be facing a challenge and I find that that we have a lot of people offering help but not as many people acknowledging that they might be having a struggle themselves and so I think that for me the most important message that I wanted to share today is that it helps to be part of a group that's having a conversation to name and feel what is happening because then we can all help each other to process through it so please don't hesitate our aging together group will have the ability to have up to 300 participants in it and they are fantastic experts Dr. Martins as well as her doctoral candidate students are going to be assisting and we'll be doing a different topic each week and I think that that's going to do a lot to not only help us get through but to heal through this entire process because we're looking at a long duration great thank you so much Mary Beth Paul did you have any yeah so while we are on the governor announced that school will not reopen this year this academic year so the students will be home with additional distance learning opportunities being developed he has not made any recommendations in terms of opening up the economy at this point in time we're still at the nearing the peak of our pandemic in Massachusetts so that's news and the only thing I would say is great to see Mary Beth I don't see her as often as I used to it's for us to connect as well as it is for the general public to see us too so thanks for being here Mary Beth oh thank you it's such a pleasure I love my job and I love this work it is such a thrill to be here I have to tell you there's no place I'd rather be during all of this than right here with all of you so thank you for your leadership I really appreciate it you're doing great work great all right well that's all the the time we have for today I will say that we're going to be doing this again on Thursday the 23rd at noon with health director Julie Federman and every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of weeks at noon you can use the same link and the same phone number as today to join us in future sessions if you have any follow-up questions feel free to email us at info at amherstma.gov or you can contact the town manager's office by phone at 413-259-3002 thanks thanks have a great day have a great one bye bye