To reach more food-insecure senior citizens across the county, Meals on Wheels Yolo County signed a five-year lease agreement executed in February for a 5,300-square-foot facility in Winters that will double the number of seniors currently nourished by the nonprofit organization.

Now, the organization is poised to hold a grand opening for its new meal production kitchen from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 2, at 111 Main St. in Winters.

The event will allow attendees to participate in facility tours, see cooking and equipment demonstrations and celebrate the funders, donors and volunteers who made the kitchen possible.

The kitchen will expand service to at least 1,300 aging adults throughout Yolo County and improve support for seniors in the western part of the county, specifically the Capay Valley.

“It’s really nothing short of amazing how far this organization has come in a short period of time, and that’s thanks to many different entities in the community that have stepped forward to assist,” Joy Cohan, executive director for Meals on Wheels Yolo County, emphasized. “It really speaks to the spirit, drive and passion that our staff members have for our mission. This really is a team effort and it takes everyone believing in what’s possible for us to achieve these goals.”

Cohan said that although her organization won’t be able to start doing deliveries in the Capay Valley until the kitchen is up and running, people are encouraged to join their waitlist.

“We already have a few names on that list so that when we are at that point where we can start to run a route up the valley, we can get right on it,” she highlighted. “It’s still our plan to have that Capay Valley route begin before the end of the calendar year.”

If interested, people can email welcome@mowyolo.org or call their office at (530)662-7035.

“They will engage with one of our program team members who would go through the process of onboarding them onto the program,” Cohan said regarding the sign-up process.

The new kitchen is part of the nonprofit organization’s “Operation Accelerate” initiative, which was started by Cohan when she took on the executive director role in 2022.

“We were only serving 380 people in January 2022 countywide,” she emphasized in a May interview. “We were way underperforming and not even coming close to meeting the need.”

Cohan highlighted that 2020 Census data showed that Yolo County had roughly 8,100 senior citizens living in poverty with most likely also being food insecure. The initiative focuses on creating more nutritious and equitable meals that will be distributed to more seniors throughout the county.

Cohan has created many changes for the nonprofit including the recruitment of more staff and collaborations with other local organizations that could help advance its goals.

In the less than two years since she joined the nonprofit, it has started serving 65% more people — roughly 630 — countywide and has branched out to underserved rural areas.

“We added delivery routes in Dunnigan and in Clarksburg where there had been no deliveries done before and we’ve expanded deliveries in the other unincorporated parts of the county,” Cohan stressed.

Additionally, the nonprofit has ramped up its services in West Sacramento, where the county’s food insecurity issues are “deepest and widest,” according to Cohan.

“We actually now serve more seniors in West Sacramento than Woodland,” she remarked.

Furthermore, the nonprofit held a ribbon cutting in late July for its new downtown Woodland administrative office located at 711 Main St., Suite B, in an attempt to increase visibility and create more awareness for the organization.

The administrative office was previously adjacent to the organization’s kitchen located at 40 N. East St. in Woodland.

“The visibility in that part of town was not as good,” Cohan emphasized.

The nonprofit was also unable to update its logo and branding on the front of the building.

“So it wasn’t congruent with our current themes and our current logo and branding,” she stressed. “It still said Elderly Nutrition Program out there, which was our old name.”

Cohan was named Yolo County Woman of the Year by Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, for her efforts to expand her organization through “Operation Accelerate,” including the kitchen expansion and the new administrative building.

She thanked several entities who have contributed donations or secured funds for her organization including the Bayer Fund, Yolo County and Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Cecilia Aguiar-Curry.

More recently, the nonprofit received a large amount of money through Aguiar-Curry’s securing of $1.1 million in funds for Yolo County organizations. The funds included $487,484 for Meals on Wheels, which Cohan called a “game-changing investment.”

“Those funds are devoted to the kitchen capacity, which basically equals the Winters kitchen project,” Cohan explained. “Those are going to continue to sustain the equipment purchases, the raw food purchases and the personnel required to bring that capacity of the Winters kitchen to its full potential.

“Immense gratitude for all of the aforementioned entities that have come forward to say ‘we believe that food security for the seniors of our community is important, that relieving their isolation is important and have made this uplift possible.”