A longtime Davis volunteer helps nourish both bodies and connections through Meals on Wheels Yolo County’s Café Yolo program
by Peter Hecht
After a 35-year biotech career, including 20 years as a facility and lab manager for a Davis biosolutions company, Juelie Roggli had no worries about what to do in retirement.
“I volunteer a lot,” she says. “The companies I worked for were doing good things, but I always felt I could be doing more. I felt the need to do more in the community that I love very much.”
A Davis resident for 45 years, Roggli served as a board member with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows’ Davis Lodge, supporting community projects from helping foster families to building bicycles for residents with disabilities. She was a PTA mom at Cesar Chavez Elementary School and Holmes Junior High and later volunteered for Yolo Food Bank.
Now, at 69, Roggli has a new volunteer cause and community. Each Wednesday, she drives to Woodland to serve fresh, local, nutritious food to fellow seniors through the Café Yolo Social Dining program. Operated by Meals on Wheels Yolo County (MOW Yolo), the program provides nourishment and social connections for adults age 60 and over in Woodland, Davis, West Sacramento, Esparto and Winters.
Through her prior volunteering with Odd Fellows, Roggli says she felt as if she were “nourishing people’s souls.” And joining Meals on Wheels to provide food to nourish a “community of seniors coming together and being together appealed to me,” she says.
“I have become so attached not only to the people who come to Café Yolo every week for meals, but also to the other volunteers. We’ve become very tight. There is so much out there, so much to do. And there is so much joy that you get out of it.”
Juelie Roggli, Café Yolo Volunteer
At the Woodland Community and Senior Center, Café Yolo offers a restaurant-style setting with tablecloths and elegant centerpieces. Roggli and other volunteer staff serve meals from chicken florentine to lasagna to vegetarian dishes, along with bread, salads and soup.
Some 25 to 30 people, including some with Parkinson’s disease and other challenging conditions, dine together weekly at the Woodland location. Through the social dining program, each table forges a unique community.
Roggli recalls one woman who came to Café Yolo without knowing anyone there. She quickly bonded with her tablemates, now close friends who she says “have really become tight.”
“Just recently, she had to go in for outpatient surgery,” Roggli says. “Those people came together to take her to the hospital, pick her up and bring her food. Things like that happen.”
She described Café Yolo as “more than the food.” As a volunteer, it’s about “the community that I’m making with them and that they’re making with themselves.”
MOW Yolo provides both standard and medically tailored meals to 1,200 seniors weekly through residential delivery and in-person dining options in cities and rural communities. The organization’s strategic plan is to reach 1,800 food-insecure seniors countywide by the end of 2028.
That effort requires the devotion of volunteers such as Roggli, who says she is also reaping rewards herself.
“I have become so attached not only to the people who come to Café Yolo every week for meals, but also to the other volunteers. We’ve become very tight,” she says. “There is so much out there, so much to do. And there is so much joy that you get out of it.”
For more information on how Meals on Wheels Yolo County can help you—or how you can help MOW Yolo—visit www.mowyolo.org or call 530-662-7035.
