The Battle Ground Senior Citizens, Inc. earned the Senior-Focused Nonprofit Award at the 2024 Senior Heroes Awards held in Vancouver in July.
After being nominated in 2023, the senior center volunteers and community members gathered on July 18 at Vancouver’s Luepke Center to celebrate their achievement during the awards ceremony. The group has bounced back since the COVID pandemic and continues to experience success, highlighted by the recent award.
“This was quite a remarkable thing to have for our rural area, and I do the rural area part tongue-in-cheek because we’re growing so fast in Battle Ground, but to have them recognize us … is pretty prestigious for not only the city of Battle Ground but for our group,” Sharon Wodtke, president of the Battle Ground Senior Citizens, Inc., said.
The group has been operating for 49 years, but Wodtke and other new faces came into the picture a year or so before the pandemic, she said. After surviving the challenges of the pandemic, they opened the doors to the senior center once again.
“When the doors were opened again in the city and we could occupy the senior center again, we had always had a potluck, but these new officers decided that probably wasn’t the best idea right off the get-go after the pandemic,” Wodtke recalled. “So we went out to Albertson’s and bought enough chicken for 50 people. Well, we had 90 people show up, and so from then on it just started growing again.”
The group arranged to have its monthly luncheon at the Battle Ground Community Center to accommodate the growing group.
“We had just had the pandemic time period where we formed a list. We kept in touch and the people were so anxious to get out and socialize that we just grew rapidly,” Wodtke said. “So we went from about 30 people prior to the pandemic and now we have 526 people on our roster.”
