By David F. Rooney
At last! A comprehensive guide to being a senior in Revelstoke has just been published by the Community Social Development Committee.
The slim, 52-page booklet, contains scads of accurate information, including phone numbers that will actually lead you to people you want to talk to.
This has been along time coming and should be welcomed by seniors who identified the lack of an accurate guide as a major gap in service.
“When we surveyed seniors last February we found that 25 per cent of survey respondents over the age of 85 said having a printed guide would be very important to them,” says Social Development Coordinator Jill Zacharias.
“And 77 per cent of seniors indicated it was important to them to have more information about government services.”
Researched and written by Zacharias and designed by Shannon Robinson the simply laid-out booklet provides valuable information to seniors in a clear and easily-understood manner.
It covers 20 areas of interest from financial assistance through legal services, nutrition and health services to churches, safety and security and, finally, volunteer opportunities.
Zacharias said in an interview on Monday that 1,500 copies of the booklet have been printed and are being made available through agencies such as the Seniors’ Association, Community Connections, Interior Health and other outlets. It is also available online at www.revelstokesocialdevelopment.org.
“I believe this will enable our seniors to live out their lives and continue to feel secure and self-supporting,” she said.
“It helps make the community more accessible and it also contributes to efforts to retain our community character.”
You might think that most of the information contained in the book can easily be located elsewhere. That’s not necessarily so. Try finding the number for Community Care in the phone book. The listings in the blue pages are so small you practically need a magnifying glass to see them and, when you do locate Community Care for Revelstoke the number is wrong, Zacharias said.
“There are lots of other things in there like how to get a disabled parking pass,” she said. “I had to literally hunt for that information. Another really important thing in here is information about consumer fraud. Seniors are frequently the victims of scams and this information can be very useful.”
