Franklin native Lizzie Scott was recently named the Senior Corps Senior Companion of the Year at the Virginia National Service Awards in Richmond.
The recognition honors Scott’s outstanding service to the community. Senior Services of Southeastern Virginia coordinator Robin Barton nominated Scott for “exemplifying what the senior companion program is all about.”
Senior Services is a regional not-for-profit helping the elderly and those with disabilities live with dignity in Hampton Roads. It administers the Senior Companion program locally.
Scott, a volunteer, is partnered with seniors who are living independently but in need of care and companionship. She assists them with daily tasks from grocery shopping to filling out applications. She even helped a client work out the financial details for advanced funeral preparations.
THE BEGINNING
“I’m from Virginia. I worked early on as a school secretary and as a secretary at an insurance company. But in 1984, I had an accident that kept me out of work. I’m not a person to sit down, so after I got hurt I took a course on cooking, and I took another course on working with seniors. I was also doing a lot of volunteer work at my church when a woman from Senior Corps approached me there and asked if I wanted a job. That was in 1999, and I’ve been working as a senior companion since.”
THE WORK
“Volunteers are matched with people in our area who need help: People living on their own who themselves or their relatives or friends call in to ask for weekly assistance from us. I had to get a background check and fingerprinted. I also had to attend a few meetings and take a class with the health department before I could start.”
“Now I work at least three days a week, sometime four or five. I have three or four regular clients at a time. One I’ll have been with for six years in September. Once I get somebody, they usually don’t like me to leave them until they pass. I like to sit down and talk to them — to entertain them. I work with a lady who is 89 years old. I have to feed her, because she’s bedridden. Whenever I visit her she doesn’t want me to go.”
“Today, I took a lady to her doctor’s appointment. I take my clients to get groceries. I do paperwork with them. I filled out an application for a woman to get her cooling system repaired the other day.”
“WE GET ALONG JUST FINE”
“There really aren’t any challenges for me. Everything that I do, I like to do it. My clients rely on me. Even it’s not my day to visit them, they ask for me. They try to get their appointments scheduled for days that I do come over so I can be there to help them.”
“Nowadays, there are a lot of people looking for jobs with no work in them. I can’t really say if we’ve had more or less people wanting to volunteer with senior corps, but I know some people want to have a job like this. I would tell people to do this work you have to like seniors citizens and you have to have patience with them.”
“I love seniors. We get along just fine.”
LOOKING AHEAD
Scott doesn’t plan on keeping up her work for too many more years. She’ll be retiring soon. But in her 19 years of service to the elderly, she has certainly touched many lives in Franklin and throughout the region.
Scott has two grown children, a son in Franklin and a daughter in New Jersey. When she’s not serving and entertaining seniors, she’s in her kitchen. She cooks and cans as a hobby and often brings her recipe samples to clients for a first taste.
She is also active in her church, Diamond Grove Baptist, where she does secretarial work and teaches Sunday school.
