Mike Reitz

Community Service

SEC 345 45 Consumers In Our Society

Seton Hill University

Professor Stubbs

November 27, 2022

 When I first started working on my term project, I was planning on focusing on the

elderly and how they were being held in the constraints of being low-income. However, after I

went out into the field and started talking to seniors and people who work with them daily, I

discovered that one of the ways they were being marginalized was through the use of technology

and it was contributing to their low income, so I decided for my term project to hone in how the

use or lack of use of technology was affecting the elderly.

When looking back at all the work I have done at Seton Hill this project has been one of

my favorites. Getting to go out and work in the community and apply what we were learning

about was a fantastic experience. For my community service, I spent about thirty hours over the

month of November working with the elderly. Once I started, I kept finding other avenues I

wanted to explore. For example, I started my community service at a Senior Center in

Westmoreland County, which is ran the Area Agency on Aging. While I was there, I was able to

speak to the center director along with speaking to the participants at the center. I had the

opportunity to serve them lunch as well as partake in one of the gardening classes they were

offering at the center that day.

After volunteering at the center, I asked if it would be ok if I did a ride along with one of

the drivers that deliver meals to people’s homes. While conducting this ride along I was able to

see the living conditions that a lot of these people were living in and it was sad, for some the

meal that we were delivering was the only food they would have that day, and honestly some of

the houses we saw probably should have been condemned.

In addition to this, I was able to participate in packing emergency shelf stable meal boxes

that would be shipped all over the state to the elderly in need. These boxes ranged from small

boxes that contained five meals, an entrée, fruit, cracker, juice, and cocoa to very large boxes

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that weighed around thirty pounds. The larges boxes contained essential items they could use to

get through the winter. For example, peanut butter, toilet paper, gloves, hat, scarves, etc, are all

items that people tend to take for granted but for some of these people could be a difference

between life and death.

I had the most opportunity to speak to individuals while at the Senior Center. While I

was there, I was able to ask them some pointed but open-ended questions. I was sitting at a table

of five ladies playing cards and I asked them if they knew about the different programs that

existed to help them and they asked me like what. I started to name a few and they had no idea

what I was talking about and asked me where they could get information about the programs or

sign up for them. I told them that I found the programs listed online, one of the ladies laughed

and said “you’re crazy I am not putting my personal information online”. It was then I started to

realize that the elderly really are being held back by technology, especially the older generations

of elderly some of whom have never used a computer in their life, and decided I wanted to focus

my research a little more and see how and why technology was such a road block for the elderly

to receive the assistance they not only need but is available to them.