This past Tuesday, we changed up our meeting location and joined the South East Edmonton Seniors Association (SEESA) for lunch. They meet in what was at one time, a Catholic Elementary School building, that shared the school yard with Holyrood Public School (which is still in use). We ate lunch in their cafeteria along with their usual lunchtime crowd.
We heard from Kim Beuhler, their Executive Director, who gave us a brief introduction to SEESA and the programs that they offer. SEESA was founded in the late nineties by a group of neighbourhood people who were concerned that the school, which was set to be sold to Arch Greenhouses, would be attracting too much traffic to their neighbourhood. The Seniors Association, has become a very popular neighbourhood hub, with almost fifteen hundred members, which definitely attracts more traffic all year round than the greenhouse ever would have! This seniors association has an official outreach area that takes in all neighbourhoods south of the river, north of the Whitemud and east of 99 St, although they also accept members from outside this range.
Membership is currently thirty dollars per year with extra fees charged for their various activities. They offer many different types of services and programs for seniors. They are a community hub for Meals on Wheels drivers. They have a Home Supports Services Co-ordinator who vets and then can recommend local businesses that offer many different types of home maintenance and cleaning services. They have a cafeteria that serves a hot breakfast (for seven dollars) and lunch (for ten dollars) five days a week, as well as other smaller items to anyone who wants to drop in. They also have a library, a gymnasium, a woodworking room, a pool room with several pool tables, and several more classrooms which are used for all kinds of clubs and classes. The building is open from morning to evening five days a week, with all kinds of clubs, drop in activities and classes going on at any one time. Their most popular classes are the fitness classes, which range from Cardio Salsa, Fitness for Life, Clogging, Yoga for Men, Line Dancing, Pickle Ball and Nordic Pole Walking, to Soft Pilates, Ballroom Dancing and many more. They have music classes, choirs, clubs for Guitar players, Bridge, Cribbage, Table Tennis, Toastmasters, Knitting, Quilting, Wood Carving, and many more. They also offer courses on using your iPad, managing investments, estate planning, creating your own cook book, and elder abuse, among many others.
One project involves giving medical students a look at what life is like for a healthy senior, as opposed to the patients they see in hospital. They partner with the U. of A. Medical School to give all fourth year medical students one day in the center. They host one or two students each day, give them a tour and then let them join in on which ever activities they would like. They soon learn that they can barely keep up with these seniors and often get their buts quite soundly kicked by someone in their eighties, at the various sports.
Another project they currently have is the neighbourhood bench program, which started a few years ago when Kim heard about this type of program and decided to try it herself. She got her brother in law to build her a bench, painted it up brightly and chained it to a tree in her front yard. It was such a hit with her neighbours that she decided to expand the project. The association applied for and received a grant of twenty five hundred dollars to produce twenty three benches that were placed all over the Holyrood neighbourhood, on the boulevard, with a home owner to make sure the bench is looked after and accessible all year round. They then started making the benches for sale to people who were willing to look after them and it has burgeoned into quite a popular project, with seventy eight benches sold so far, for one hundred dollars each. The bench comes unpainted, with a gift certificate to pay for paint, a chain and a padlock. The purchaser must sign an agreement to place it on their street and to look after it.
One day in the cafeteria Kim overheard a lady tell someone that if it was not for SEESA, she would have killed herself. She lived nearby and her husband had recently passed away. She felt very alone and isolated. Then one day she came for a meal at SEESA. As Kim said in closing, you should never under estimate the power of a meal. You never know what changes in someone’s life, providing a cup of coffee, or a meal for someone can achieve.