Our Staff

Being a teenager is tough. The hormones. The physical and emotional changes. The peer pressure and drama of high school. Good grief. It’s stressful just thinking about it. Just ask Zaire Sims. She knows. She went through the struggles just like everyone else, but with an added challenge weighing her down. A big challenge.

Her family was homeless.

Throughout most of her four years at Western Hills University High School in Cincinnati, her family bounced around, finding shelter where they could. Sometimes they stayed with friends. Sometimes they stayed in a hotel room. Zaire ended up moving in with an aunt during her senior year just for a little bit of stability.

While the weight would crush most people, Zaire somehow survived. READ MORE

People go to Las Vegas for a variety of reasons—the gambling, the shows, the bright lights of Strip. Not Austin Ross. Nope. When Austin goes to Vegas, he’s all business, and that business is bowling. And he has the bling to back it up.

As he takes a break from his job of packing five-day snack boxes as part of the distribution team, Austin reaches into the pockets of his Carhart khakis and pulls out two large medals, one silver and one bronze. They are the reward from his last visit to Las Vegas  when he participated in the National Unified Sports Bowling Tournament put on by the Special Olympics. He finished second in the singles competition with scores of 156, 212 and 186, and third in the doubles.

The medals shine in the morning sun, one side decorated with a bowling image and the other with the Special Olympics logo. Proud but unassuming about the hardware and hard work it took to get them, he shrugs and puts them back into his pocket.

“I have a whole basket of them at home,” he says. READ MORE

Bob Reid looks at his watch. It’s a little after noon on the first Tuesday of 2022 and he’s running late. He’s usually done delivering meals by now and the delay has him a little concerned. Three times a week for the last 30 years he’s been meeting some friends at the tennis courts in Delhi Park for a few friendly sets. It’s their chance to stay in shape, share a few jokes, and maybe solve the world’s problems in between rallies.

Before he can leave, though, he has one more task: Turn in his Meals on Wheels-issued phone. Each driver is issued a phone, which has preloaded all of their day’s deliveries. It lets them map out their routes, call the seniors if they don’t answer the door, mark that the meal was delivered, and, in pre-COVID days, allowed the seniors to order their meals for the following week. Usually the drivers just hold on to the phones at the end of the day, but after 21 years of delivering meals to seniors on Cincinnati’s West Side, Bob is calling it a career. This is his last day and turning in the phone is his last task.

Before he escaped into his new life, though, we wanted to capture his memories and experiences of what life has been like as a Meals on Wheels driver in the years since he first started back in 2000. READ MORE