Are you a senior who’s been looking for more ways to get involved with the community? The township will host its first senior spring fling at Croft Farm Thursday for that very purpose.
The event is open to Cherry Hill seniors 55 and older and will feature food, live music and the opportunity for seniors to connect with each other and learn about resources available to them. They can also dispose of unused prescription medication.
“The whole inspiration is because of COVID,” Mayor Susan Shin Angulo explained. “I wanted to make sure that senior citizens feel included and part of this wonderful community that we call Cherry Hill … This is another way to celebrate all their lives, living here in Cherry Hill, giving back to the community and being very active in the community,” she added.
“This is a way of thanking them.”
The past two years were a difficult time for the senior community due to a pandemic that caused their club to be shut down, limiting socialization.
“(For) some of these people, that club was the one thing we did every week that they looked forward to,” said Gaye Pino, senior services program coordinator. “ … I had people crying because they couldn’t go dancing anymore, because they had been going dancing for years every Thursday morning.
“They saw their friends, they got some physical exercise, they got some social interactions – it was fabulous,” she added of those clubs. “And all of a sudden, we shut it down, so we struggled to bring it back.”
The service that provides seniors free transportation shut down for a year, making it difficult for some of them to get groceries. But the township has restarted the service, its senior clubs and added some new virtual ones, like a senior movie discussion club that meets on the fourth Tuesday of every month at 10 a.m., or the senior discussion group that meets on the second Monday of each month at 11 a.m.
In-person senior groups such as the Maturity, Retirees and Super Seniors clubs are also meeting again, though at the Croft Farm Arts Center rather than the usual Carmen Titelli Community Center, which is undergoing HVAC improvements.
Club representatives will also be present at the spring fling to answer questions. The event will take place from noon to 2 p.m. at the farm, 100 Bortons Mill Road. To learn more about senior services in Cherry Hill, visit https://www.chnj.gov/102/Senior-Services.
