Meredith Osta has dedicated her life to helping vulnerable people.

She began her career working in child welfare at Schenectady County Children and Family Services. Now, she is working at the other end of the age spectrum, helping elderly residents to stay in their homes.

A common thread in her work is pulling community members together to serve those vulnerable populations.

Since January, Osta has served as the director of Community Caregivers, which pairs volunteers with people in need in Albany and Rensselaer counties.

“It really opened my eyes — I’ll be totally honest — about the number of people living in our community who are totally alone … A lot of us probably are not aware of it,” Osta says.

She cites the example of a woman who had to ask her landlord if she could use him as an emergency contact “because she literally had no one else.”

Osta told of another Caregivers’ client — “the sweetest, sweetest woman,” in her nineties — who called “because she wanted somebody to go out and just take her on a walk.”

Osta thought, “What a simple request …. It shouldn’t be that difficult.”

The volunteer who then walked with the woman spoke very highly of her. Sometime later, after Community Caregivers had partnered with the Guilderland Public Library to send valentines to Caregivers’ clients, the woman called and left a message after she got her card.

She said, “I’m 95 years old … I want you to know how touched I am because I can’t tell you the last time someone thought of me to send me a card.”

As the small staff at the Caregivers’ office listened to her message, Osta said, “I don’t think there was a dry eye because it was bittersweet … We were so happy that it made her happy, but, at the same time, it tugged at our hearts because we’re thinking: Just a simple card, you know? …. Something so simple has such a huge impact.”

Osta believes that even small acts of kindness have a ripple effect.

She has a sign posted prominently on her office wall with a two-word message: Kindness matters. She believes that is the heart of the Community Caregivers’ mission.

“Through our small office here and our small band of volunteers, we are making an impact,” says Osta.

The volunteers — 200 strong — can choose among a wide range of opportunities to help clients.

Osta likes the organic start of the not-for-profit organization with neighbors helping neighbors more than a quarter of a century ago in Altamont.

“We have folks in the community that come to us because they have needs,” said Osta, “such as maybe transportation to a medical appointment, maybe they need help with grocery shopping, or maybe they’re just homebound and lonely and want additional social connection through a phone call or visit.”

Osta stresses the flexibility volunteers have — both in terms of the tasks they choose and the hours. “Retention is so high because we do offer such flexibility,” she said.

Using the platform Mon Ami — French for My Friend — volunteers can browse online to see what tasks would fit their schedules and sign up for them.

While each volunteer goes through a background check and onboarding process, there are no prerequisites, says Osta. A volunteer with any educational or employment background is welcome.

“The only prerequisite is that you have a desire to help people in your community …,” said Osta. “There’s something for everyone.”

Loneliness, noted Osta, affects not only emotional health by physical well-being too.

“I think COVID taught us a lot of different lessons …,” said Osta. “We really had to take a hard look at the people that we knew were already isolated and alone.”

Lunchtime chats were started, and are still going strong, where anyone can dial in to listen to a presentation and then stay on for a conversation.

“We’ve had everything from the history of the New York State Thruway to a chat on Dolly Parton …,” said Osta, adding that, to join the chat, “There’s no technology.”

She explained that a lot of Caregivers’ clients “don’t have internet … they can’t afford it; they don’t know how to access it. A lot of them don’t have smartphones.” So the chats are a simple matter of dialing in on an old-style phone or getting a call if the listener has trouble seeing well enough to dial.

The Caregivers’ staff of nine are all part-time and all dedicated to the mission of serving those in need, said Osta. There is a service coordinator for each county — Albany and Rensselaer — and another service coordinator for clients with “more complex and challenging needs that we couldn’t serve with our traditional volunteers,” said Osta.

The service coordinators, she said, “make the magic happen between the volunteers and the clients.”

There is a community-engagement coordinator; a development director; administrative staff; two nurses who act as intake coordinators, visiting new clients; and a coordinator for an AmeriCorps federal grant.

The AmeriCorps program is for volunteers 55 and older who meet income requirements and receive a stipend of $4 an hour, which offset costs, like gasoline, that they may incur.

“It’s a great team and everybody’s here because they believe in the mission and love the work,” said Osta.

Osta herself was raised in a family committed to service.

She was born in San Antonio, Texas when her father was stationed there in the Air Force but she has lived in the Capital District since she was a kindergartner.

Her sense of public service came from her mother, Osta said. Her mother worked for the YWCA of Northeastern New York for over 25 years, retiring a decade ago as director of services to women and children. She was very involved in helping women who suffered from domestic violence.

“When your mom works somewhere and they need volunteers, they tend to call on you,” said Osta.

She has always been interested “in just helping people,” Osta said and, after graduating from the University at Albany with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, she started her career as a caseworker helping with foster care, child protective service, child sex case — “you name it … I really worked with pretty much every different type of situation that you can imagine,” said Osta.

She went on, “As disturbing as sometimes that work was, I also felt a real affinity towards working with people.” The “small moments” where someone would say “you really helped change the trajectory of where things were going” fueled her passion for the work, said Osta.

After a decade of working for Schenectady County, Osta, as a program director at the not-for-profit Welfare Research Inc., developed a statewide initiative for foster parents using the knowledge she had gained from her work in the field.

“It was really looking to the community,” she said. She would tap into different faith communities — “pretty much anywhere I could think of to recruit volunteers to support foster families,” she said, citing research that shows the outcomes are better for children if foster families have support.

So, Osta said, of taking on her current work at Community Caregivers, “I certainly knew the challenges of what it can be like to recruit volunteers … but I also know the value of really connecting people in the community and the impact it can have.”

The impact, even for a single client, can be much deeper than originally known, said Osta, sharing an example.

Community Caregivers sees “helping folks get to essential medical appointments” as a priority. “And we’ve seen an uptick in people needing dialysis,” she said.

One woman, who had a very limited budget, needed transportation to dialysis sessions three times a week. After a while, the woman shared that she had formerly spent up to $300 each week getting to her dialysis appointments, which involved having someone wait for her while the machine did the cleansing normally performed by healthy kidneys.

The woman asked, “Do you know what a relief it is to know that I don’t have to worry about the finances?”

The kidney patient getting dialysis and the Caregivers’ volunteer transporting her “built a caring relationship,” said Osta. “The volunteer could see how grueling the dialysis treatments were … so she started taking her to the park, started taking her to get ice cream.”

Osta concluded, “And, for us, that’s really what it’s all about. It’s about making those connections and making sure that everyone in our community feels connected to someone.”

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Meredith Osta urges anyone who wants to learn more about being a volunteer or about receiving service from Community Caregivers, “Please don’t hesitate to give our office a call. Oor number is 518-456-2898.”

The organization also has a website with information: CommunityCaregivers.org.