Talkeetna-area senior center growing with community

A Talkeetna-area nonprofit has been growing steadily with the community for nearly 40 years.

Since its inception in 1986, Upper Susitna Seniors Inc. has served the area’s elderly population, while doubling as a resource for all residents. In addition to focusing on the needs and concerns of seniors, the organization also provides a safe place where the community can come together for meetings, classes, and special events.

In 2007, the senior center housed students after a fire damaged the high school. More recently, the center demonstrated its wider usage by serving as an evacuation point during the 2019 McKinley fire, which ravaged scores of structures and scorched thousands of acres in the area.

For most of its existence, Upper Susitna Seniors was made possible only through the tireless work of volunteers. But over the years, community support met increased demand. As the area’s aging population increased, so did financial assistance.

The Talkeetna and Susitna community councils, Talkeetna Bachelor’s Society, Alaska Community Foundation, MEA and MTA foundations, and the Mat-Su Health Foundation, among others, all stepped up with grants that allowed the center to hire three part-time positions in 2021. Kevin O’Connor, the organization’s executive director, said the addition of paid staff has enabled the expansion of services and a much broader reach for Upper Susitna Seniors.

“The center has been fortunate to receive grants from local agencies,” he said. “The largest contributor to the center’s success has been the Mat Su Health Foundation. This support has greatly expanded the center's ability to serve the communities of the northern Valley.”

The nonprofit Mat-Su Health Foundation has supported the Upper Susitna Seniors every year since 2017, including a $125,600 grant in April to help fund operations. As part owner of the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, the Foundation has returned its share of profits to the community through grants to nonprofit groups around the Valley. Since its inception in 2007, the Foundation has invested more than $130 million in community health and wellness initiatives.

That investment has been a boon to seniors in the upper Valley. The center’s Meals on Wheels program now offers food delivery three days a week, and services have been expanded southward to Caswell.

“With dedicated part-time staff, the center can now offer services more times a week,” O’Connor said. “It also helps us seek and obtain new funding for additional projects.”

Those projects include a planned addition to the existing center that will expand availability of exercise equipment and showers for members, as well as upgrades to the electrical and mechanical systems that will allow extra classrooms and laundry facilities to be added for the community’s use.

“The senior population in the upper Valley is expected to grow, and with that more services will be required,” O’Connor said. “Funders like MSHF are a true blessing that many nonprofits would have difficulty existing without. They are to be commended.”

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