By Adam Kramer
Borough senior citizens from Services Now for Adult Persons of eastern Queens and students from PS 33 will present handcrafted banners to three city politicians for everything they have done to help the senior community throughout the borough.
The intergenerational group of retirees and public school students will give a banner representing Queens’ multicultural community to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Borough President Helen Marshall and state Sen. Frank Padavan (R-Bellerose) on Thursday, May 16.
“The program is important for the seniors because it helps them to relate to today’s young people, so they have a better chance to develop a relationship with their great grandchildren,” said Dr. Linda Leest, the executive director of SNAP. “It has taught both the elderly and the children to respect each other.”
The banners, she said, are hand-drawn and sewn by two generations and the beauty of their work is captured through personally embroidered words.
The event will be held at the Queens Village School at 91-37 222nd St. and will start at 9:30 a.m. In another project, SNAP, working with students at PS 115 at 80-15 261st St. in Glen Oaks, also will give a banner to Edwin Mendez-Santiago, commissioner of the Department of Aging on May 20 at SNAP.
The process of designing and making banners is run by SNAP’s center director, Elaine Fleishman.
In addition to representing the borough’s multicultural community, the banners depict love, friendship, freedom and patriotism as seen through the eyes of the PS 33 students and the members of SNAP, she said.
Linda Nadel, SNAP’s office manager, said the relationship between the seniors and schoolchildren is part of the Adult and Children Together program. She said it is a kind of mentoring program.
“Seniors spend one day a week at the local school working with at-risk children,” she said. “They are children who do not have grandparents or are having problems in school.”
The men and women from SNAP spend time with the children, reading to them or working on projects, Nadel said.
SNAP is just off Hillside Avenue and tucked away in the southern half of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center campus in Queens Village. The senior center is one of the few senior citizen facilities in northern Queens.
Founded in 1979, it was housed in St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Floral Park and the Queens Reformed Church in Queens Village until March 15, 1999 when the program was transferred to the Creedmoor space with the help of local politicians and the city Department of Aging.
SNAP is a senior citizens’ day center, serves the aged living in the area that stretches from Glen Oaks to Bayside and from Queens Village to Douglaston. The center is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
SNAP provides 150 home-delivered meals seven days a week; transportation to doctors, hospitals, supermarkets, malls and senior centers; a telephone reassurance program, where volunteers will call SNAP clients who are sick to see if everything is all right; personal case management; and trips to museums, Atlantic City and Broadway.
Reach reporter Adam Kramer by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 157.
