30 Years of Service:
Our Clients Energize Us

“When I was leaving (the nursing home), they told me I was going to get Meals on Wheels and I said, ‘What’s Meals on Wheels?’ ”

Sarah Brown, Whitinsville, quoted in
Tri-Valley’s 1983 Annual Report

Thirty years since its founding, Tri-Valley doesn’t hear that question much any more. And don’t be surprised to learn about other services we offer today. Tri-Valley’s growth is simply the result of filling unmet needs in our communities.

There were only three communities in 1976 – Southbridge, Sturbridge and Oxford – when the organization was founded by people active in the local Councils on Aging. Then called Elder Home Care of Southern Worcester County Inc., it was truly grassroots. Ethel Snell, for example, recalls volunteering in the kitchen of Sturbridge’s Senior Center for several years with her late husband, retired college professor Robert Snell. Then Robert took his activism to the next level and became a founding board member.

Based in Southbridge, the board, led by President John J.
O’Shaughnessy of Sturbridge, set up small offices. One on the rounds of Harrington Memorial Hospital was for home care programming. The other, in a medical arts office building at 39 Elm St. was for nutrition services. By 1977, they forged contracts for home care delivery by Catholic Charities and Harrington and opened the first meal sites in the three communities, serving 220 meals in addition to 18 home-delivered meals daily.

The appeal was magnetic. By 1978 a staff of 31 was active from Blackstone to West Brookfield, and a second office in Milford had been set up to serve an area elderly population estimated at 30,000.

The agency sought a state demonstration grant to offer “adult foster care,” now called Adult Family Care, to offer a bold new housing arrangement for elders struggling to live alone, even with home-care services. The program was approved for a wide area reaching into the heart of Worcester County and continues to serve 45 towns today.

With its core 25-town area firmly established from Warren to Franklin in 1983, the name was changed to Tri-Valley Elder Services Inc. to reflect a broader base of activities. Most of today’s areas of service were by then established, from crisis intervention and companionship to nutrition and respite care.

Two major forces contributed to this growth: support from the state’s Executive Office of Elder Affairs, and the groundswell of volunteer activity that gave Tri-Valley its momentum from Day One. A dedicated staff carried out their missions, including some who remain on board to this day.

Jim Wedge of Sturbridge started riding circuit, signing up elders who were asking “What’s Meals on Wheels?” back in 1977, using a one-page form. Today they welcome him and his laptop computer into their homes to accomplish the task. Then as now, he’d keep his eyes and ears open for other needs elders have, besides nutrition.

“Tri-Valley is like an umbrella,” he says, “and there are a lot of different stories under that umbrella.”

Requested donations of 50 cents a meal ($2 today) were generously given in the early years. There was a greater hesitation to accept publicly funded services that proud seniors back then often equated with “welfare,” Wedge recalls.

Now there is little hesitation to call Tri-Valley’s Information & Resources Department about services. Each year the agency receives nearly 6,000 such calls on behalf of elders, but also on behalf of younger, disabled people.

In 2005, Tri-Valley Inc. became the agency’s name to reflect the emphasis that includes services to disabled individuals. With 90 staff members, nearly 1,000 volunteers and several thousand people receiving services, it was also time to consider larger working space.

The 20-by-20-foot offices of 1977 in Southbridge had given way to successively larger central quarters in that city and later Webster. But the work piles kept closing in. October 2005 saw the move into Tri-Valley’s renovated office space in a former mill building in Dudley.

“Elders and disabled people should not hesitate to request, or even to insist, on the means to live with dignity and as independently as possible,” says Marilyn Travinski, Tri-Valley’s executive director since 1994. “They and their families have been contributors to our communities. I’d like to think Tri-Valley has worked not just on their behalf, but worked beside them all these years.”