In Focus: The Staunton Senior Center

The new Staunton Senior Center still has that new-car feel. The Senior Center moved into its new home in Gypsy Hill Place on Churchville Avenue in October, but there are still some finishing touches to be made to get the location fully operational.

The “last piece of the puzzle,” director Lynn Harris said, is the kitchen. “Once that’s done, we can move our Meals on Wheels program here to join us once again, so that the volunteers who come to drive the meals, the people who are helping us in the kitchen to package the meals, they will all be meeting here now instead of having to be at two separate locations,” Harris said.

The Center is open to members five days a week – Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. In addition to the hot lunch, members benefit from the social aspect to getting together and being able to take part in classes and other directed activities that have been made easier to accommodate with the dedicated space at Gypsy Hill Place.

The Senior Center had operated for the past four years out of space donated by Third Presbyterian Church. The staff and members were of course grateful for the donation of space, but because the church also needed to use its space for its own events some weeknights and on weekends, it was hard to make it feel like home.

“I just want to thank them so much for their generosity and their graciousness in allowing us to be there until we found a place of our own,” Harris said.

The new space allows for multiple events to be going on at the same time. “We have a space that is separate in a room that we call the activity room where right now we are doing a cooking demonstration. We will have lunches in there. There’s bingo that goes on in there. And at the same time, because we have a whole separate space, we could have a speaker in our conference room doing a program about ceramics or Russian history or dance,” Harris said.

“Because we have this other space, it can all happen at the same time, so that provides us with that extra bit of programming opportunities,” Harris said.