Senior-living community uses scholarships to tackle staffing shortage

Masonic Village at Sewickley in Sewickley, Pa., has started offering scholarships to dining workers to help with the ongoing staffing shortage, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

The idea for the scholarships came from Masonic Village residents, who formed a dining services scholarship committee with the community’s executive director.

The committee was able to raise over $63,000 in the first six months of the campaign and awarded $4,000 scholarships to 11 servers.

Servers must have worked at least 312 hours in order to qualify for a scholarship. They also had to submit an application with a short essay and had to be accepted or enrolled at a college.

In the first three months after announcing the scholarship program, five new servers were hired.

The committee hopes to continue the program annually.

As senior-living communities continue to face staffing issues, some have also turned to robots to help make up for lack of staff.