After witnessing firsthand how hunger and isolation affect homebound seniors, longtime Meals on Wheels driver Toni Carroll has become a passionate advocate for ensuring every older adult has access to the nutritious meals, support and funding they need to thrive.
Drivers and volunteers like Tonia “Toni” Carroll are the heart and soul of the Meals on Wheels network. For more than 25 years, Toni has served seniors as a member of her local Meals on Wheels team, a service administered by the New Orleans Council on Aging, for which she delivers nutritious meals with a side of heart and humor. “I came on to make them laugh,” Toni says. Toni brings to her job a unique combination of care, dedication, longevity, and an instinct to go above and beyond.
Toni, a former nursing assistant and rehabilitation center employee, has served seniors her whole life. In fact, helping others is part of her family’s heritage. “I’m from Natchez, Mississippi, and back in the country, everybody helped everybody,” Toni says. “When somebody got sick in our family, they’d come stay with us, because they knew we were gonna take care of them.” Bringing joy to lonely seniors is a way for Toni to honor that legacy. “I love my job,” Toni says. “I love Meals on Wheels, because it puts me in a place where I can help [others]. I mean, truly help.”
For Toni, delivering meals is not enough. The instinct to go beyond the call of duty is something she tries to cultivate in every new driver. “Get to know your people, because all of them are different, but they are all special,” Toni says of her message to drivers. “Don’t drop the meal off and keep it moving. Ask ‘How are you doing?’ That question makes the elderly feel really good.”
Toni recognizes that getting to know seniors (and opening up to them about your life) builds a deeper bond. “By listening to a senior, they feel they have a support system,” Toni says. “And they’ll tell you anything after they feel like that.” That closeness opens the door to a better understanding of each senior’s individual needs.
“Each senior has their own thing,” Toni says. “For every house I go to, I have a different personality.” Toni has been a caregiver, a motivational speaker, and even a comedian. “A laugh a day makes you live a day longer,” says Toni, who’s learned to be whatever her seniors need her to be on any given day.
Over the course of 25 years, Toni has taken ailing seniors to the hospital, heated up meals, picked up groceries, and once reached out to a family member to arrange a wellness check for a senior who they later discovered had been on the floor and unable to get up for two days. “I try to do anything that I can to help make your day a little bit better, “ Toni says. “It makes my day better.”
Toni knows that without Meals on Wheels, many of the homebound seniors she serves would have nowhere to turn. “Certain people are by themselves, so that meal sometimes is their whole world,” Toni says. She often encounters empty refrigerators and seniors who lack the mobility to cook for themselves. “If they don’t have a support system, some of them probably don’t eat.”
Beyond the nutritious meals, Meals on Wheels can renew a sense of purpose in seniors who feel forgotten. As one senior once expressed to Toni, they want to do more than simply exist; they want to live. “Meals on Wheels [drivers are often] the only people they see in a day,” Toni says. “And that brings them joy. It makes them perk up.” The reality that there’s a waitlist of more than 400 seniors in New Orleans is unimaginable to Toni.
“When you see other people hurting and really needing something, and you can’t help, that’ll hurt your soul,” Toni says. It’s even more disheartening that those who could advocate for more resources for Meals on Wheels, to end the wait for hundreds of seniors, are instead cutting budgets. “I don’t like to talk about politics, because I don’t understand what they’re doing,” Toni says. “I work with my heart.”
Her big heart is the reason she’s dedicated her career to touching as many seniors’ lives as possible, for as long as possible. “Meals on Wheels has been the best job of my life,” Toni says. “They asked me when I was gonna leave, and I said probably when I’m dead.” Toni’s humor never fails to shine through.
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