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June 22, 2008

Gas prices drive up the cost of doing good

By Michelle Martin

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Drivers have had to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets to fill their gas tanks in recent months — and that includes people who drive for charity.

Al Kaczmaryn has been delivering Meals on Wheels for Catholic Charities in Lake County for eight years. He started driving two days a week; now he does two routes — a total of 22-24 people — five days a week.

Gas was a bit less expensive then — somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.50 a gallon — but Kaczmaryn isn’t one to count the cost. He’s never figured out how much his volunteer driving costs, and he’s not about to try now. But he is happy to be driving a four-cylinder Nissan that gets good mileage, he said.

The Sisters of St. Joseph aren’t as lucky with their “School on Wheels,” a retrofitted bus that they take to various sites in Cook and DuPage counties to offer English as a Second Language classes, basic education and citizenship classes to mostly immigrant adults.

Filling a bus

With diesel fuel approaching $5 a gallon, the bus costs about $150 to fill up. During the school year, it needs refueling twice a week, said Sister Marybeth McDermott, who founded the program and still directs it.

During the summer, the bus does not travel as much. The School on Wheels has a limited summer schedule, and most of the classes are moved indoors, she said.

But no one budgeted to spend so much on fuel, she said.

“We were lucky,” she said. “Last year, the Women’s Club at St. Cletus gave us $1,000 just for fuel.”

So far, the School on Wheels has not had to curtail its activities, and McDermott does not expect it will.

Meals on Wheels also will continue to be delivered, since most of the volunteer drivers for Catholic Charities Meals on Wheels services feel the same as Kaczmaryn, according to Catholic Charities administrators, but it’s getting harder to find people willing to sacrifice not only their time, but their gas money.

Last year, Catholic Charities senior services provided meals for 1,321 clients total in Cook and Lake counties last year. Catholic Charities coordinates the Meals on Wheels program throughout Lake County, with about 500 volunteer drivers delivering more than 130,000 meals in 2007 to 927 homebound people who had no one to assist them with food purchases or preparation. The program also served 55,929 meals to seniors at two senior centers and six community nutrition sites. Catholic Charities also delivers about 275 meals a day in the south suburbs in Cook County.

Impact on volunteers

“It impacts the department staff and the volunteers,” said Carol Headley, department director for Catholic Charities Senior Services in Lake County. “We haven’t lost a significant number of volunteers yet but it is harder to recruit new ones. These volunteers are an incredibly important part of the program. Their donations really help to offset our costs, because if there aren’t enough volunteers we pay our staff to deliver them [meals].”

The agency now has eight part-time staff delivering meals in Lake County, she said. The Cook County Meals on Wheels program run by Catholic Charities uses paid drivers, but their gas reimbursements are not keeping up with rising costs.

At the same time, the costs of buying food have gone up, a phenomenon also related to high gas prices, and the state and federal money to reimburse food and gas costs remains stagnant.

“The amount we budgeted for gas last year is much less than what we’ve actually had to spend,” said Wendy Siefert, manager of Catholic Charities’ Division of Senior Social and Health Services. “It’s a serious problem, and we have had to try to trim costs from other important areas of the budget because of it.”

Kaczmaryn, who volunteered through the St. Vincent de Paul Society at St. Joseph Parish in Round Lake, doesn’t foresee trimming his budget by cutting back on his rounds.

After so many years, the people he sees are like family, he said. They’ve met his five grandsons (who like to take turns riding along because “somebody always gives them candy”) and sometimes share pictures.

“People ask why I’m always smiling,” the retiree said. “I say it must be because I like my job.”