Giving people rides is nothing new for Jan Matheny. In fact, it’s her calling.
For the 20 years since she retired, the La Grange Park resident has been a volunteer driver with Community Assisted Rides, or CARS. Its mission is to give rides to older residents who no longer drive. The passengers are referred to as VIPs, rather than clients.
“I thought it would be fun to meet new people and hear their interesting stories,” Matheny said. “I love to read, and when I’m at the doctor’s office with a VIP, that is my guilt-free reading time! So that worked out very well with my schedule.”
She spends two or three hours volunteering most weeks, including some regular transportation requests. “One of the things I enjoy is I can go on the ride requests board. I can pick the rides that I want to do. When someone calls the office with a ride request, they put it online for all the drivers.”
Matheny mostly volunteers as a driver, but if there’s a special request for additional help, she’ll do it if it fits her schedule. “It’s a joy,” she said.
Like many volunteers, she’s found that when she talks about the service with friends, some of them become volunteers as well. “It’s a good way to give back or pay it forward,” Matheny said. “Some day I might not be able to drive, and they’ll do it for me.”
She stressed that it’s “very valuable” and “one of the most needed and most appreciated services in the community. That word ‘Community’ is a broad range. We go from Riverside to Downers Grove.”
But some of her passengers are her neighbors who she spends time outside of the car with, playing bocce ball or cornhole together on one of the 27 teams where she lives.
VIP Anna, 87, began getting rides with the organization seven years ago. “I donated my car that I drove for the last 17 years and had no transportation to go to the doctor or go to the store,” she said.
She gets two rides each week for errands such as going to the bank, doctor’s appointments and the store, but it’s not the rides that she appreciates most. “It’s the driver that walks with me to the doctor’s office and sits with me and listens to me,” she shared.
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“CARS is needed for people like myself with no other ways of transportation to get to the doctor, just doing some basic things as needed,” Anna said. “CARS is extra special because of the driver – it’s like family members.”
She said her relatives, who live far away, are thankful she “found an agency like CARS that can provide transportation.”
Anna also enjoys another service that might surprise people: recognition during their birthday month. “It’s a big thing for people who receive the card and flowers. A lot of people don’t have families or are by themselves,” she shared. “We usually get flowers for a reason. This is just out of the kindness of their heart. I know that makes me very happy.”
Janet Garreau, who’s been executive director at CARS for about 10 years, said the organization “rescues flowers from local grocery store chains” and brings them to the office to be put into small vases and delivered to VIPs during their birthday month.
“We have a big room and have volunteers who arrange them and deliver them,” she said. “We also snail mail birthday cards that are handwritten, not computer-generated, so we have office volunteers who write cards every month.”
Volunteers also make phone calls to connect to older adults that way. “They can have them once a month or once a week,” she said. “They tell us they want friendly phone calls, and we give them one, two or three, so when a volunteer logs in, they can find the numbers and record how they talked.”
Every other Saturday, volunteers deliver library materials. “The VIP would call their library and tell them what they want to check out – they need to get a library card if they don’t have one – and we make those deliveries.”
But rides for seniors is the most popular part of the organization’s work. “That is the majority of what we do,” Garreau said.
The group was founded in 1999 by members from a group of area Christian churches who wanted to do visitation for older neighbors. It became a 501(c)3 a year later. “What they found was that getting people transportation was a bigger need, so they started doing that – giving rides to neighbors like medical appointments and the grocery store,” she said.
The organization has grown to serve 22 communities: Broadview, Brookfield, Burr Ridge, Clarendon Hills, Countryside, Darien, Downers Grove, Hinsdale, Hodgkins, Indian Head Park, La Grange, La Grange Highland, La Grange Park, Lyons, McCook, North Riverside, Oak Brook, Riverside, Westchester, Western Springs, Westmont and Willowbrook.
“When I started 10 years ago, we had 30 rides a week, and now it’s more than 100 a week,” sometimes up to 120 rides per week, Garreau said. “With the population we serve, because they’re passing away or moving to assisted living or moving in with family, our VIPs aren’t always with us for long periods of time. But we have had people with us for more than 10 years.”
Volunteers also can turn into VIPs, such as a man who started as a driver in 2003 and now is a client. CARS has about 475 VIPs and about 195 volunteers who do everything from providing rides to working in the office, delivering books, working on special projects and serving on the board.
People 60 and older within the villages CARS serves go through a screening process, although participation isn’t based on income.
“We’re not a need-based organization. We ask them to call our office and then we do a phone screening,” she said.
One thing they check for is if a potential VIP is able to get in and out of a vehicle unassisted. “We can’t take people in wheelchairs because we don’t train our drivers on how to lift someone. At that point, we refer them to services that offer wheelchair lifts,” Garreau explained. “We take people with walkers, rollators, canes, crutches if they temporarily broke something – just not wheelchairs.”
She added, “Our drivers, like our clients, come in all different sizes and we might get someone who can’t handle that. We want to keep everyone safe: the VIPs safe and the volunteers. Nothing is more mortifying once someone falls. Once someone falls, we have to reassess if they can be with us in the cars.”
Volunteers go through a one-hour training session on how to conduct a ride and what to do in case of emergency. Rides are booked a week out, and volunteers can choose the rides they do based on the time they have via an online ride request board.
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“A beautiful part of what we do is help people build relationships – we offer that opportunity,” Garreau said. “If they’ve built that friendship, they become the person who drives them, like a personal driver. We call that recurring – they let our ride coordinators know ‘I’ll always take Betty Lou to the hairdresser.’ We can enter that as well.”
Most VIPs call the office to request a ride, although some email or have a relative who does so, and they can request several rides at a time. “We do two per week and don’t charge. We ask people to donate if they are able, and we don’t turn anyone away for the inability to donate.”
Because CARS receives no state or federal money, it seeks funding through grants, supporting churches and private donors, as well as its annual fall benefit.
This year’s event, Crusin’ for a Cause, takes place at 6 p.m. Sept. 24 at Drury Lane Theater in Oakbrook Terrace. Tickets are $125 per person and include beer, wine and a plated dinner. They are sold at www.communityassistedrides.org.
The event celebrates the 100th anniversary of Route 66, complete with a performance by Hugo Elvis, a DJ playing Route 66 songs and vintage cars on site for people to view, as well as a paddle raise and silent auction. Sponsorships, silent auction donations and spreading the word about the event are ways the public can help the event, which is expected to draw about 200 to 250 people.
“What a life-giving service this is for the community,” Garreau said. “Ways to help would be considering being a driver, if you know someone who would like a ride or you like to support a local nonprofit. Tell a neighbor, tell a friend.”
Melinda Moore is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.