Advocacy & Education

Good morning.

Thank you for being here.

My name is Gino, and before I tell you about what Better Together Transportation does, I want to tell you why it exists.

For four years, I worked in paratransit, driving patients to and from doctor’s appointments and dialysis.

During that time, I met two men. Their names were James Henrick and Billy, and I grew close to them.

It was through their life experience that I saw firsthand how a lack of transportation options and a lack of social connection can rob a man of his will to live.

The picture before you is the only living memory I have of James, who on his forearm had a faded military tattoo of a snake around a dagger.

I will not share their full stories here today. But suffice it to say that, through their lives, I saw proof that the human spirit can die long before the body does.

It is out of my love for these men that I founded the transportation service called Better Together Transportation.

Our organization offers free, non-medical, door-to-door, wheelchair-accessible transportation for seniors and people with physical disabilities who live within Buncombe County.

Our mission and our goal is to provide relational transportation.

Now, what is relational transportation?

I believe a story can best illustrate it.

Before you is a picture of Amanda, seated in the center, surrounded by her loving family.

Amanda was a person who needed relational transportation. Her family was gathering from all corners of the state to meet at a house just south of Marshall to celebrate her father’s life, who had passed away earlier in the year.

Amanda, though only living 30 minutes away, was not going to attend because it is very hard to find affordable wheelchair transportation.

She reached out to us, and we helped her to be with her family.

On the way there, she was very anxious and said to me, “I don’t know how my family will receive me, because they have never seen me in a wheelchair before.”

We dropped her off and came to pick her up the next day. I noticed a change in Amanda.

She seemed warmer, brighter, more confident.

As we pulled away, she turned to me and said, “You know, I’d forgotten how funny my family really is.”

That is relational transportation: bringing people to be with the people they love.

But for people in wheelchairs, and for seniors who live in our county, finding transportation is difficult, let alone finding relational transportation.

Each of us here knows intuitively that the day we surrender our driver’s license is the day we surrender our independence and our mobility.

For people without transit, they start to feel very alone.

Before you are quotes from riders who have used our service, expressing how they feel without transportation options.

The first is by a young man with cerebral palsy. He says, “Being without transportation is like having a second disability.”

The second is from a senior. She wrote to us, “Prior to Better Together, I was only able to go to medical appointments. That was no life. Being stuck in my home, I felt like I was just waiting to die.”

We have driven over 250 different clients, and I have heard these sentiments echoed by many of them.

Unfortunately, the need for transportation is growing while the transportation options in our county are shrinking.

Today, over 70,000 people in our county are age 60 or older, meaning that one in three people are approaching an age where they will soon have to give up the ability to drive.

At the same time, the City of Asheville is moving toward shrinking our bus routes. They have commissioned a study. In that study, it says that one in three people who are today near a bus stop will lose access to it.

For a senior, this is a double blow, because by law, ADA paratransit service — service like Mountain Mobility that goes door-to-door — is contingent on the bus routes.

So if someone loses a bus route, they lose two transportation options at once.

And when you don’t have options, you are isolated.

And all medical research shows that isolation kills people.

That brings us to a question.

What infrastructure exists for the people we love to age with dignity, and to do the things they love, and meet the people who give their lives meaning?

Asheville presents itself as a place where retirees can come and age gracefully in place.

The reality is that our county lacks the infrastructure that allows that to happen.

And so, we are building that infrastructure from the ground up.

And we are doing it in a simple way, with simple tools, like the van you see before you and that you may have seen driving around the city.

We are solving it by giving people free, non-medical, wheelchair-accessible, door-to-door rides.

And we are doing it while adhering to a mission.

Our mission is to restore the social fabric of our community by connecting seniors and people with physical disabilities to the people and places they love.

If a person qualifies for our service, they get up to three round-trip rides per calendar month.

They may use them for up to two relational trips, which are scheduled first and are our highest priority.

And they may also use one errand or support-service trip, which can be anything from groceries, to hair salons, to attending adult day services.

They schedule with at least 24 hours’ notice by calling the number or by using our ride form at RideBetterTogether.org.

All of these rides for individuals are free, at no cost to them.

The first question that might pop into your heads is: why does a service like this need to exist?

How come existing transportation options can’t help these people get to the places they need to go?

And that is because relational transit falls through the cracks of all existing transportation options.

Business will do rides if it is profitable.

Government will do rides with restrictions and stringent guidelines about where they can go.

And medical transit is focused on only one thing: getting people to and from doctor’s appointments.

Meaning that if a wife wants to visit her husband in a nursing home just to sit and hold his hand, she will find it difficult to get transportation options there.

Likewise, a man who wants to go to his dear friend’s birthday party will also find it difficult to find options to get there.

Those are the very rides we specialize in, and that we have provided for people in our county.

Now, how are we able to do this?

Right now, our funding comes from three areas.

The biggest chunk is government grants, mainly one from Buncombe County itself and their Aging Council that supports programs that help seniors age and helps them with their health.

About 15% of our funding comes from donations, particularly from riders and the families of riders themselves who will for the program to continue.

We also draw from a foundational donation that started this charity.

For full transparency, that was $100,000 that I donated myself.

It was my house money.

But as I drove for paratransit, I saw more and more good men and women dying of loneliness.

And so I bought a van and founded a charity.

I believed then that this was the better investment in my community.

To this day, I believe that still.

Before you is a graph that shows you all the different places that our clients like to go.

I’d like you to take a moment to reflect on your own lives.

Where is it you like to go when you drive?

Who are the people in your life that you yearn to see?

Now imagine that tomorrow you had to surrender your license, and getting to the bus stop was too difficult for your knees.

How would your life change?

You see, the people who ride with us want to live good, healthy lives and do much the same that you do.

Every year, we conduct a rider survey so that we can see the impact that our rides have on our riders.

The results show that what we are doing is targeting the exact thing we are trying to solve.

Because 92% of people who rode with us and completed the survey have said that they feel less isolated, and 100% say that they feel safe in using our service.

Ultimately, what we are trying to solve is the same problem the medical community today is very focused on solving.

They call this issue the social determinants of health, and offer a clinical definition for it.

But I believe there is a simpler way, and a more human way, to understand this.

All that the social determinants of health means is that for a human being to live a long and healthy life, they need human connection.

They need to be with their family, with their friends, in their community, and in their houses of worship.

When a person is provided that, it bolsters the human spirit and gives them purpose and dignity.

If a person has human connection and a vibrant human spirit, what they have is a will to live.

And it may sound absurd, but a simple ride can give a person just that.

Now, I’d like you to meet some of the people who ride with us, or have ridden with us in the past.

On the left is Linda. She requested a ride to go to the activity day at her granddaughter’s school.

On the right is Joe. He attends adult day programs, but spoke often and lovingly of horses. So we found a farm and a kind farmer and brought him there to feed carrots to the horses.

On the left is James. James can now regularly attend his church. He was absent for more than a year and told me that the first day he returned, his congregation looked at him like they had seen a ghost.

They accepted him all the same.

James calls his church his church family, and we bring James to be with his family almost every week.

On the right is Retha. Retha loves nothing more than to knit shawls and clothing that she wears herself when she comes out and rides with us.

Her favorite trips are to ride around Walmart, not because she wants to buy very much, but because she wants to be among people.

She has admitted to us that the only time in a given month that she goes out is when she rides with us.

And so we have proven that there is a tremendous need for this program, and also that it improves the lives of our neighbors.

But before we can even consider expansion, our priority is on strengthening the foundation of our service.

Right now, we have no redundancy.

We have one van and one staff, meaning that all scheduling, dispatching, fundraising, and driving is done by one person.

Our goal is to make this foundation stronger and durable, because more and more of our neighbors are relying on this service as their means for social outings and human connection.

I’d like to end this presentation by showing you how meaningful these trips are in the lives of the families who ride with us.

Before you is the Boone family, and seated is Jeff.

Jeff and his family would call us for rides, often to go eat dinner as a family.

Their daughter, who was in college, would drive up halfway to meet them.

They also called us for his birthday, to take him out when existing transportation options failed to bring him there.

Last December, the Boone family stopped making any calls.

I learned later through a friend that Jeff had passed away from brain cancer.

That means that the last rides Jeff ever took were through our program.

And we did not take him as a body to be ferried between medical appointment and medical appointment.

We gave him rides that brought him a sense of dignity and allowed his wife and his daughter to form memories of him as a husband and a father.

We want to keep giving this dignity to our neighbors, our parents, and our grandparents.

But we face certain difficulties.

Before you are some questions that are the problems we face as an organization, in the hopes that you can think on them and give us some solutions.

But above all else, what I ask of you is that you please reconsider how you think about transportation, and see it as necessary for human connection.

It is only when the community sees transportation in this light that together we can build the infrastructure that keeps people connected.

Thank you.