APPEAL TO THE VOTERS OF HILLSBOROUGH

Appeal to the Voters of Hillsborough

 

The Greater Hillsborough Senior Services is a non-profit organization staffed by a large group of volunteers interested in providing support, services, opportunities to socialize and advocacy for the senior citizens in our area.   Seniors make up over 35% of our population with an increase of 14% participation in 2015 in GHSS activities.  Most of our Town dollars goes to supporting the schools, town services i.e. police, fire and rescue, maintenance, youth programs for the parks/recreation with little if any for seniors. 

Hillsborough has been unable to address a number of senior issues currently being offered by Greater Hillsborough Senior Services.  There are limitations as to what the Town can fully offer because of constraints on the Town government, lack of facilities to host events, lack of public transportation, lack of man power and more.  GHSS has stepped in, thus providing a host of opportunities which previously were not available.

List of specific examples we do that the Town does not provide are:

Monthly Luncheons, Cultural/sporting/Shopping excursions, Crafting, Weekly games/cards, group exercise opportunities, information sessions/meetings, a monthly newsletter, support groups and most importantly the Volunteer Driver Program which is staffed by GHSS members.

Since  GHSS purchased a bus in 2015, we have expanded our offerings to our community at large: taking Maple Leaf residents shopping, saving $2400 using senior volunteers as drivers, working with the Chamber of Commerce to provide transportation for the Living History event, loaning the bus to the Girl Scouts, the United Methodist church, Farmstead, and other town organizations for various trips.  If the Town owned such a bus, many of the aforementioned trips could not be provided due to legal and financial constraints.

We have begun to address some of the needs of our seniors in our area, but we still have a long way to go.  For these reasons, we request that the voters of Hillsborough approved Warrant Article 26 so that we can continue to offer and provide many needed senior activities and services.