Meals on Wheels Metro Tulsa

Hardesty Service Center

Fueled by more than 1,400 volunteers, Meals on Wheels provides nutritious meals, safety checks, and friendly, caring contact to elderly and disabled homebound individuals — helping them to maintain independence, dignity, and well-being. Delivering far more than just meals, their goal is to help create a community in which no one is left alone, hungry, or isolated due to illness, disability, or impediment to daily living.

Having outgrown their dated facility, Selser Schaefer Architects worked with Meals on Wheels Metro Tulsa to select a new building site that offers a strong visual presence at a convenient location off 51^st street between Yale and Sheridan, adjacent to the Tandy YMCA.

Once the new site was selected, Selser Schaefer Architects created a design that helps the organization meet its two major goals for the new building:
(1) Increase daily meal production operations
(2) Promote community interaction

The new facility incorporates an office headquarters for Meals on Wheels staff and volunteers as well as a large-scale commercial kitchen/work zone for the production, packaging, and distribution of meals, allowing the organization to increase its served meals capacity from 300,000 per year to 1,000,000.

Engaging the Community

The design of the new Meals on Wheels building outwardly communicates the organization’s mission, brand, and services. Large graphics and signage incorporated into the exterior of the building increases brand recognition, raises community awareness, and attracts new partner organizations and volunteers.

The design features shipping containers as a visual representation of the deliveries the organization makes every day to hundreds of people. The containers were re-purposed to provide material cost savings while visually communicating the concept of “delivery” — they are the basis of form and signage on the exterior of the building and are also functional on the interior, serving as a retail space in the lobby.

The interior space plan sectors the functions of the building into public, semi-public, and private zones ranging from employee work/break areas to volunteer/event spaces to the commercial kitchen. The public lobby, designed with large-scale photography of real Meals on Wheels patrons and volunteers, offers views into the heart of the facility — the meal preparation kitchen.

The new headquarters is a center where the community can come together to help ensure no person suffers from hunger, isolation, and depression due to neglect.

Learn more about Meals on Wheels Metro Tulsa here.