 Welcome to INSITE, produced in partnership with Lakeland Public Television, serving North Central Minnesota. Today we are chatting with Teresa Eklov, Executive Director of Faith and Action for Cass County. Teresa has generously agreed to share some of her experience with us. I'd like to thank you, Teresa, for joining us today. Thank you. So providing services to the elderly in a geographically dispersed rural region has very, very specific challenges, and your organization has been doing this for quite a while. Talk about the challenges that you face in ensuring that our elderly Americans have a good quality of life here in Cass County. Right. Faith and Action for Cass County is a volunteer-based program. We have small staff and a lot of volunteers in the community who are matched with needs that we see in the community. Currently in terms of transportation, in Cass County, Minnesota, there are no bus systems. There are not any taxi services that you can hire. So if your friend or neighbor or family member can't give you a ride to see the doctor for your appointment or to pick up a prescription, you are stuck. There are not a lot of options. But our Faith and Action volunteers can provide that access to services by giving people rides, by providing that transportation. The volunteers also do other friendly, neighborly, helpful things. They help with homemaking and chore services, changing light bulbs, lawn work, dishes. If you go into the hospital for a knee replacement or hip replacement, it's weeks before you can bend over enough to mop up a floor, and pushing a vacuum cleaner is just impossible. So to have a neighbor or friend that's great, but some people who retire up in this area, they don't have a lot of those connections. They're far away from family, and they just need an extra helper, an extra friend. So Faith and Action tries to provide their neighbors helping neighbors by connecting our volunteers to the people that need those kinds of services. Talk about the footprint of Cass County. How many people are in the county who require the kinds of services that you provide? Talk about the area of the county and population density. Sure. Cass County is a large county in that it's about 100 miles from north to south, about 70 miles wide, and it is not very densely populated. There are a lot of lakes. It's a retirement and tourist destination. So it does not have a large population, and yet about a quarter of that population is age 65 and older. So we are struggling with finding enough people to provide the services for those folks who are aging. Another piece with Cass County that's important to know is that the largest community in Cass County is just a little over 1,000 people. So we do not have a public hospital. We do not have big medical centers. We do not have large regional community services. So many people will visit their local clinic for their basic connection with the doctor, but if they need any kind of services, dialysis, specialists, any kind of treatments, tests, surgeries, they will need to leave the county. And the math is very compelling here. If you take a look at the situation that you face, you have 25% of the county being served by 75%. So it's a very high proportion of people requiring service versus people able to provide those services. You also have rather high poverty rates. So the people who cannot afford to serve because of their own circumstances, that drops out of the 75. So you're only talking about 60% of the 75 who would even be in a position to serve. And you need to take the children out of that. And you need to take the children out of that. And then you start to subtract. You need to take the children out of that. You need to take the people who are struggling to get along. They're not at the poverty level, but they're struggling to get along. So all their time is absorbed in that struggle. And so you really have not a one-to-three relationship. You have a one-to-perhaps-one relationship, or maybe it's even tilted in the other way. So the math here is extraordinarily compelling. How do you ensure that you can connect, given the size of the need and the scarcity of the resource in people and time, how do you connect those two elements when there is always going to be some shortfall to manage? Well, we look at the services that people can hire. You can go outside of the county and hire services that can come in. But they are difficult to find, to locate, and to coordinate. Sometimes they don't want to go as far into the county, and they can be very expensive. So the volunteers that we work with are all from, they're very active in their own community area. We work real hard at Faith in Action to provide that very personalized match-up of what a volunteer is able to give and do within their community to what the need is. And I think by doing that, we are able to locate resources, people who can help fill in those gaps, and that is a lot of what Faith in Action does. We don't want to replace the existing programs. We don't want to take the place of services that could be for hire, those businesses need support too. But we know that there are a lot of gaps, a lot of people who can't quite afford things to hire, people who just can't get that far, people who need those helpful neighbors. So I think our key, our strength lies in providing that very unique match-up and building those relationships between volunteers and people in the community who need the services. So part of your analysis is about gaps and part of your service is about gaps and ensuring that you're not supplying services that others can either supply or that the consumer of those services can pay for. That's correct. So you're focusing on where the need is greatest. And then you're also scaling, you're categorizing that need and you're mapping that need to the people who are volunteering. So you have a match process. Does this require high managerial overhead or is this more of a self-managed organization in which the people with need communicate? And then the people who have capacity select and then you're managing those needs that are not automatically fulfilled. We tend to manage it in the office with just two staff people, primarily by- So you're lean in terms of your administration as well. We work very hard with very little, but we screen the volunteers and ask them what they're willing to help with, where, how far they're willing to serve, and we have a very complicated database of information that helps us to match up the volunteers with the needs. People who would like to receive services, they can just call and we can get things set up. We try to make it very easy. We don't have a lot of barriers. We don't have any income guidelines. We don't even have age restrictions. We actually will provide services to anyone of any age, although 70 to 75% of the people we serve are age 65 and over. Talk about the faith in faith and action. One of the things that strikes me about the name of the organization, it seems to be a translation of values into action, of faith, but not in terms of a desire necessarily to convince somebody to take that faith, but instead to experience that faith through the actions that your volunteers take. That's exactly correct. That's how we envision our mission of compassionate volunteers serving people in need. Every major faith has a component about serving your neighbor, about helping the people who live with you in your community. Yelling the world. Every single faith does. Even though we were formed in 2001 by a group of friends who attended several different churches and said our church can help so many people, but we can't help the people who won't come to our church. So we need to be able to reach further and be able to provide those resources further out in the community. So how can we work together? They saw this model of faith in action and thought it would work very well starting with these churches that partnered together to help with services. Here we are 16 years later with over a hundred volunteers located all throughout Cass County. It's an amazing thing. And it only works with the partnerships that we have. Teresa Ekloff, thank you so much for sharing the experience that you have in delivering services to the elderly in Cass County. And thank you so much for your insights.