Seniors who may be in the early stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s regularly make homemade meals for people in need.
Emily Leayman, Patch Staff
LAKE RIDGE, VA — Through the Lasagna Love program, people going through hardships can find comfort through a home-cooked meal delivered to them. Now, some recipients in Northern Virginia will find their meals marked as prepared by senior living residents.
Ingleside Westminster at Lake Ridge, a senior living community, contributes to Lasagna Love through its Ingleside Engaged program. Amy Hewes, director of memory support and programming, told Patch the Ingleside Engaged program focuses on seniors who are showing early to mid-stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s and may experience memory lapses.
“Our target participant or member of for the group is somebody who is still is living with a spouse or with family or even independently, who, because of cognitive change, is having more difficulty navigating through, planning out their social life, their activities of interest,” said Hewes. “So what the program does is give structure to the individual and gives them friendships and a sense of community.”
According to Hewes, the program provides structure to the day and an opportunity to make friendships. Each day, participants join a history discussion, coffee and conversation, lunch together and seated exercise. Other activities can vary by day or participants’ interests, such as outings, music therapy, virtual travel, pet visits and more.
The Lasagna Love project is another example of activities the Ingleside Engaged group will work on. Hewes, who previously worked at Greenspring Village in Springfield, has worked on Lasagna Love with seniors since 2021. Now at Westminster at Lake Ridge, she and her group have been doing it monthly since February. The process is simplified for the seniors using ingredients like no-boil noodles and jarred sauce.
“Some of the men who haven’t spent much time in the kitchen in their whole lives, they get to try a brand-new skill,” said Hewes. “And for others who have that background, they’re sharing memories, they’re chit-chatting around the tray of lasagna and the different bowls with the sauce and the ricotta. So it’s really collaborative, and something that everybody can contribute a little bit to, no matter what they’re dealing with.”
The senior can also learn how they’re making a difference for someone in need. Lasagna Love doesn’t disclose names of recipients but will share a little bit about the person. Those recipients could be people facing food insecurity, single moms, people who just had a baby or are caring for aging parents, or people with lost income. Hewes, in turn, will share with the Lasagna Love contact that the lasagnas are being prepared by people with cognitive impairment.
“Just to give you a sense of who we’re helping, the lasagna that we made last week, it’s going to a woman who’s battling breast cancer and surgeries and everything right now. So she really appreciated it,” said Hewes.
By working with Lasagna Love over the past few years, Hewes has been a large need for the volunteers’ home cooked meals in Prince William and Fairfax counties, as well as areas that might not have enough volunteers.
“Usually those requests in these areas, there’s always somebody to bake for, but they get filled pretty quickly,” said Hewes. “But if you go out further into more rural parts of the state, they could definitely use more volunteers.”
Hewes says the Ingleside Engaged group is open to seniors even outside of Westminster at Lake Ridge, although there is a fee to participate. Aside from Lasagna Love, the group is doing fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Association’s D.C. walk happening in September, making crafts to sell to neighbors and friends and will make holiday goodie bags for kids who visit their grandparents. The group is always looking for more project ideas and is accepting suggestions from the community.
“I feel like it’s a human need to be able to serve each other, to feel you feel helpful to other people. That’s so hard when somebody is dealing with Alzheimer’s, or they’re in a nursing home or something,” said Hewes. “I think that’s part of the reason that there’s a link with depression and Alzheimer’s. You can lose that sense of feeling like you’re contributing to the world. So any way that we can bring that to people, I think it’s really helpful.”