 You are tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT, 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm your host, Autumn Lab-A-Reno, and today is Tuesday, April 28th. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is Episode 13, and the show airs live at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays and repeats at 5 p.m. both days and at noon on Sundays. And you can listen anytime online at kdrt.org. My guests today are Sheila Allen of Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance and Chris Granger of Cool Davis, and we'll have that first interview in just a few minutes. This Friday, May 1st, Congressman John Garamendi will be back with us again with updates from Washington. Recently, I interviewed Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor, and something he posted on Facebook yesterday struck a chord with me. It felt like a good update, so these are his words. As of this morning, 161 Yolo County residents have been confirmed to have COVID-19. Of course, we know that there are more cases of the virus that have not been tested or confirmed. Of our 220,000 residents countywide, we've conducted 1,803 tests. Of the 161 confirmed cases, 14 people have perished, and nine of those deaths are associated with the outbreak at the Stollwood Nursing Facility in Woodland. Great attention is being directed to support the residents and staff of that facility, and this side note is mine. As of this morning, deaths had risen to 16 with 11 of those at Stollwood. It's a sad situation. 270 homeless individuals are sheltering in place in individual motel rooms across the county. They're receiving health and social service support, and there is an incredible network of volunteer efforts and people stepping up outside their usual roles to give help where it is needed. The shelter-in-place order remains in effect until May 1, and we all need to continue to do our part. We've had our countywide shelter-in-place order in full effect since March 18, with some earlier measures beginning on March 10, so that's a bit more than two complete 14-day incubation periods. This week, the Board of Supervisors for Yolo County will consider the Yolo County Health Officer's roadmap to recovery that outlines possible modifications to the order, and the conditions that would drive those modifications. And we can expect that things to continue changing from here on out. We are far from finished with this, and the virus is far from finished with us. Stay safe. Thank you, Don. Again, that update was from Yolo County Supervisor Don Saylor. And just a reminder that as of yesterday, April 27, face coverings are now mandatory in Yolo County when conducting any business in public, although not when exercising so long as social distancing is maintained. Again, everything's changing daily. Find out more at YoloCounty.org. They have the COVID-19 dashboard there, and also the Road to Recovery link. And in other news from our elected officials, tomorrow, April 29, Senator Bill Dodd, Democrat of Napa, will host a virtual town hall meeting at 6 p.m. to discuss the public health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. He'll be joined by Dr. Karen Smith, who's the former director of the California Department of Public Health, and also by a representative from the Napa Sonoma Small Business Development Center. There'll be presentations and then Q&A from listeners and viewers. You can get a live stream of the audio at ksvy.org or listen live locally on ksvy91.3. That's in Napa. You can catch the video on YouTube, on Sonoma TV's channel. You can email questions to townhall at ksvy.org, or you can call them in to 707-933-9133. Shout out to our fellow community media outlets, KSVY and Sonoma TV, and I'm working on getting Senator Dodd booked on the show, so hopefully we'll get to hear from him directly soon. Let's take a minute for music before our first call. Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to enhance the well-being of older adults in Yolo County through education, collaboration, and advocacy. They work to identify and address gaps in services and connect people to the many resources and services throughout the county. Sheila Allen is their executive director, and she's here with us today. Hi there, Sheila. Hello, Autumn. Thank you for inviting me. You bet. Good to hear your voice. All right. Tell us a little bit about that big mission you have of education, collaboration, and advocacy. Yeah, well, we started with our 10-year anniversary, and then we started because there was an identified need, especially for a unified voice for older adults in Yolo County. And we did an assessment about what was needed, and so we came up with these three major categories for our mission statement, and that's how we implement our programming. So we have educational programming that we do for the communities that we work with, like the Alzheimer's Association. We have town hall meetings. We work with AARP. We also do educational programming for providers of services so they know about the latest research and community binding together of information. The next area is collaboration, and we found that there were, we thought there were a lot of services in the community. And when we started, we had 10 different organizations that provided services to older adults in Yolo County. And now we have 97 different organizations that all provide services. So now we know about them, so we can talk to the community know about them, and for each organization to know about the others. So if you go to Meals on Wheels, they'll coordinate on those. Well, you're isolated at home. Well, I know about the library. And I know about, you know, the phone, how to get a phone with bigger dials on it. They know about each other and can refer. And then advocacy is really the voice. So we have a group of older adults who are our senior advocates, and they look at local, regional, state, and national issues and provide some input on that kind of thing. Those are our three main things that we do. That's an amazing level of growth in 10 years. That's pretty phenomenal. So COVID-19 impacted your organization right out of the starting aid gate, because I know you had your annual benefit dinner scheduled right around the time that everything shut down. So tell us about that. Yeah, we were scheduled for our 10th anniversary that I already mentioned, and then we also have an annual senior superstar award ceremony. So this is our, you know, we are a nonprofit. And so this is where we get our biggest influx of funding for the year is through our annual fundraiser. And because of the need to shelter in place, and in particular for this population of older adults, we needed to postpone that right away. We have scheduled it to October 4th and have decided that it's October 4th no matter what. We'll figure out a virtual way if that's a safe way to do it, because we are very interested in making sure that people are safe and healthy. Or we might have some modified in-person. We'll just have to wait and see in October. Right, right. It's really hard to project that far out, but when you're planning events, I get that. So those you advocate for are, they're among the most at risk for contracting the virus. How has the organization adapted to serve them during this time? Well, we asked our older adults to please shelter in place and stay home. First, they will likely be the very last to be released and have it be safe for them to be out in the community. So we knew right away we needed to do something to address their isolation and also their need to still be connected to program services and to people, as all humans need to be connected. So we, by March 30th, launched a new program called Phone Friends for Seniors. And the way that we implemented that is that we asked for community volunteers, which people in Yolo County is so awesome about stepping up. So we had a nice group of volunteers right away who were ready to make the phone calls. And we were able to identify older adults who were lonely or isolated. Either they directly referred themselves or we did work with some of our partner organizations, or 97 different organizations to say, hey, do you know of anybody who could use a phone friend? I tell my people when they are, during the orientation, the volunteers, that we're not asking them to be a therapist or to be a nurse, we're asking them to be a friend. So we asked them to start with making, they would please anticipate calling each day, but then they can work out with their friend what feels right. Some people are still calling every day. I call my mama Wisconsin every day to make sure she's okay and what she did and what the weather was like. And some people call once a week. Some of the calls are just a five-minute check and some of them are two-hour calls. It really depends on the need. And then while they're talking with them, if they identify a need that the person has, then I give them a list of home-delivered food options, both grocery stores and restaurants, and also home-delivered medications. So the two of them can kind of, as friends would, hey, I know about this if you want to try it. And then if there's anything, any higher level that they need, then the volunteer lets me know and then I go ahead and help to coordinate and get them connected to the right program or service. So it's a wellness check, but it goes beyond that, too, into friendship. That's really nice. Were you at all surprised by, so on April 24th, Governor Newsom announced a whole bunch of services to benefit seniors, which is wonderful, and one of them is a program to call them at home. Did you know about that? Are you surprised by that? No, I didn't know that was coming out. I thought, well, what a good idea. Let them know, hey, in Yolo County, we're already doing that. Yeah, since that time, I've had the opportunity to talk to people at the state about it. So they're like, oh, that's great. So I think it's totally fine to have that. They're really focusing on areas that don't have local call programs. So there's a little bit more of that. And it's totally fine if people in Yolo County volunteer for that or volunteer for ours, or get calls either way. I think that there's plenty of people who are stuck in their house and would like somebody to talk to you. So there's plenty to go around. I don't mind at all. Good idea, Governor Newsom. At least he's paying attention to the senior population, right? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So one question that's really stuck with me because I've been phoning my own friends and in particular a couple of senior friends who, they're having trouble envisioning what it's going to be like to come out of their houses. It feels risky. It feels scary. They're not sure they want to do that. What are you hearing from your constituent population? Yeah, I think, well, first of all, there's a reason why they probably feel that way is because there is still a risk out there. So I would not recommend at any point right now anybody be going out unless they actually have to and if they're wearing their mask. But as we get to the point where it is safe or there's less chance for community acquisition of the virus and people are universally using their masks when they're out, it's going to take a while. So I could totally understand somebody's apprehension about going out. So I was just, I had to hang up on the, well, they didn't know I was there, but I was watching the board of supervisors which is discussing their road map to recovery and they're really talking about a step-wise approach. So I think that that will give people confidence to know that they're, we're doing this stuff and then we do a check. Did that work? Is there a friendly increase in infections? Okay, well now we're going to take this step. So it's more of a, you know, from an over adults like, okay, so now you're like open the front door. Is everything safe out there? Okay. Now it's not like going to front yard. So I think it's going to take some time and it might be some time before, and who knows if we'll actually go back to what our previous normal was. Yeah, I think that's a really big and valid question right now because, you know, with talk of a possible resurgence in the fall, I mean I do have one friend who said, I don't think I'm ever going to leave my house again, you know, and she's very old, but it's a strange new world we're navigating. Yeah, when my husband was on sabbatical in Hong Kong and I went and spent some time with him when he was there and they had SARS a few years back that had a significant impact on their population and even now when I was there a year ago, you could see that they had, like in museums, the touch screen says these touch screens are sanitized every hour and the handrails going into subway had a similar sign and it was very much the culture that if you were sick, you better have a mask on just so that you protect the people around you. If somebody called a cop on the subway, like heads would turn, if a person didn't have a mask, they'd be like... I think we're getting to that point here, at least among some of us. Well, it's been great to hear from you and hear about the work of Yellow Healthy Aging Alliance. If people want to reach you, how about a web page and a phone number where they can get more info or get involved? Yeah, absolutely. It's yellowhealthyaging.org and on that front page there, we have a whole section on COVID, that's where you can find phone friends for seniors, you can find reliable resources for information and educational things and also some of those community resources. So that's on the front page and also you can find my email and phone number on there also. Happy to talk to anyone who has any questions. Great, thanks so much for joining us today. Absolutely, thank you, Adam. All right, take care. That was Sheila Allen, Executive Director of Yellow Healthy Aging Alliance and again, yellowhealthyaging.org is their website. We have another call in just a couple of minutes. I want to squeeze in a couple of announcements. I was excited to get an email today from my friend Danielle Fodor. Danielle is a visual artist who's led many community mural projects here in Davis and studies have shown that art makes public health programs more effective and impactful and in that spirit, it's just been announced that the City of Davis is giving mini-grants to visual artists to create new public art that promotes community health and resilience during the coronavirus crisis as well as long-term environmental vitality and stewardship. This is a project that will employ both artists who are struggling economically and volunteer artists who just want to help out in solidarity. Artists must be from Davis environs or working here. All projects will be created while following public health guidelines including the wearing of masks, and the distancing of our physical selves. The project has two components and there's a couple of hashtags that go with this. Hashtag health is in our community, uses sidewalk stencils with hip humorous health messages to promote social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, and other smart stuff. And hashtag plan for resilience uses temporary murals and parks and plazas to honor public holidays while reflecting on long-term resilience and planning. You can apply for a mini-grant ASAP or sign up to be a volunteer artist. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis starting April 30th and there's an online Google link for the app. I'll just direct you to email the project manager again artist danielle fedore at danielle fedore at gmail.com I'll spell her name d-a-n-i-e l-l-e-f-o-d-o-r at gmail.com You can also call her at 530-302-7143 And I think time for one more the downtown gifting stimulus program we talked about last week with Brett Moraska has completely sold out which is great news for downtown merchants. Moraska says they are working on funding for round two of the project. And finally at 5 p.m. and Fridays at 3 our friends at the Yolo County Library feature ask the librarians for personalized book recommendations check in with them on their social media Facebook or Instagram to ask your question in real time and we are going to get set up for our next caller and I think she's here Cool Davis is an active network of residents, community organizations businesses and community institutions committed to expanding the city of Davis's climate action and adaptation plan there normally are upstairs neighbors here at 1623 Fist Street but today I'm talking remotely with their executive director Chris Granger. Hi there Chris Hi there Autumn How are you today? I am well nice to hear your voice I've actually I've been looking forward to chatting with you because the environment may be the one thing benefiting from this pandemic what are you seeing and what are you talking about in climate change circles around that Well there's a lot going on as can see on data that's coming in from satellites and we're looking at those emission reductions all around the world and also watching those economies come back online as people start to move around again and so we saw some of this kind of change happen back in the great recession not quite as dramatically and so what it's shown us is that sort of temporary reality of when we do make major changes in our lifestyles how much control we really do have over impacts on the environment and so I guess right now we're all trying to think a little bit about how do we help people think deeply about this moment about how much control we really do have about how what we do really does make a difference I think that that's something that we're all learning about as we hunker down in our homes or out in the community doing important work to keep our community safe and that every every decision we make going forward can make fundamental change in what happens on our planet when discussion point I've seen is that there were a lot of large companies that didn't want to let employees tell a commute because they didn't think it would work they didn't think it was possible and so now I think a big what if we're finding out it is possible it's maybe not ideal but it's possible and so how can we lessen the load of commuters and carbon emissions and all of that moving forward there's a lot of challenges but there's a lot of opportunity there too yeah our Michael McCormick who is the board president for Cool Davis spoke kind of deeply about that on our Earth Day Zoominar that we had last week which is available for people to view if they're interested and he talked about that in his own company and how they're really doing some major rethinking about what they're going to do with the way they move around and whether they move to each other for meetings or use the kind of format they're using now I think also we're facing as a community what kind of decisions we'll be making for ourselves in the future whether it's what we build it's also about how we move around and so really looking at how we can collectively invest in the future in appropriate ways that we can we can work together we're so lucky to have unitrans and like road infrastructure but it's going to be more of a challenge for us to use unitrans and so it's going to take some courage for us to really be willing to live the future that we want in the middle of this pandemic we're trying to keep going with things like how do you do electric vehicle ride and drives when you can't put people in cars well we're going to continue to do online demos for people from our local owner driveways and we're trying to build out a network with our business community so that we can connect interested owners with those businesses who are interested in getting their products out to people even if they're going to do it on a one on one basis at their home or in their neighborhood so it's complicated but I think this moment kind of finds us about how important it is the work that we've been trying to move our community forward and you, Cool Davis has not been sitting still during this I know you've had a busy few weeks you mentioned the Earth Day Zoominar but there was also the Sing Out that you took part in and I know you've started a vlog so tell us more about your COVID-19 activities the vlog is kind of interesting it's actually something we had been thinking we wanted to do but it didn't seem as maybe important as actually our person-to-person kind of contact that we do helping households so but what we did is launch a video vlog we have a new Cool Davis YouTube channel called Live Cool Davis and we're focusing right now on energy conservation and energy efficiency because we think we've all moved all of our office work to home our kids are home from school everybody, all of that energy used that used to be in a business and used to be at the school is now in our home our utility bills are all going up and so luckily it's spring and it was cool but now it's gotten hot we're all going to be facing some increased utility bills so we're doing some advising on different simple things you can do to cut your utility bills and also how to analyze them and also what kind of rebates and other things are out there and for those who were thinking about getting solar and working or maybe they're going to need to replace their heating and cooling systems we're trying to provide them with appropriate advice and point them at our materials that help with that kind of decision-making because it's not that it's hard right now to think about major activities like that in your home but planning them is something you can do right now so we do have what we call our cool solutions documents and cool solutions campaigns and we have a lot of information on our website and PDF forms for people to use to help them through those decision-making processes great and we'll mention this again at the end but that's cooldavis.org and I'm sorry would you say the YouTube channel again it had a name it's called live cool davis okay so we've talked a little bit about some of the societal struggles and challenges as we move out of this time and start to return to you know businesses I don't want to say business is normal because they don't think that's going to be it but business what are some of cooldavis's struggles and opportunities there I think like all nonprofits you've had to stop doing things that you normally do I know you're usually out at farmers market you're out at community events you're you know you're pressing the flesh and spreading the good word and you can't do that now so what does the next six months look like for you well it kind of keying off the the video blogging we're trying to do already do more consulting via phone and we're trying to build up our volunteer core that folks who may be actually based in their own homes or in their own neighborhoods who might be interested in helping us with getting the word out and also advising other homeowners on different actions we have some really great parts of our organizations our working groups that are doing really interesting things our Davis Electric Vehicle group has moved all of their content online and their membership meetings that happen every other month and like I said they're looking at providing what we used to do at the farmers market via Zoom so those are some of the things that we're working at and at long term we have to see how we're going to move around the community but you will see some more visibility for cool Davis cool solutions checklist tool and kind of mobilizing the whole community around making a plan alright thank you so much for joining us we are out of time for today so take care Chris thanks so much alright bye bye that's Chris Granger with cool Davis thanks for tuning in I will be back on Friday congressman John Garamendi joins us again