Cathi McWhirter delivers Meals and Valentine’s Day love to Glady’s and John Geary, who live in Forest Park in North Fort Myers on Monday. With John Geary is the couple's son, Greg.

Volunteers for the Meals on Wheels program showed some extra love to the clients they serve this week.

Participants in the Meals on Wheels program were delivered sweet treats and handmade valentines from the community and from Child Care of Southwest Florida’s early learning centers.

Volunteer drivers arrived at the Community Cooperative offices in Fort Myers early Monday morning to get their daily meals and treats to deliver to the more than 350 clients served by the program.

Tami Holliday, community relations manager at Community Cooperative, said they were excited to, on the sweetest day of the year, to deliver sweet things to their clients.

“We’re serving sweets to our sweetest clients throughout Lee County. We’ve done this for years. We have a partnership with Child Care of Southwest Florida, so we love that we have our youth supporting our seniors,” Holliday said.

Clients who are in the Meals on Wheels program are homebound, with the volunteers often being the only in-person contact they have all day, not only to deliver meals but to make sure they’re OK.

“People are homebound for different reasons, primarily it’s about mobility. They can’t grocery shop or cook a meal,” Holliday said. “Sometimes they have no support services and these volunteers are who they see every day, so they get attached to each other.”

Among the volunteers is Cathi McWhirter, who delivers Meals on Wheels in North Fort Myers. She started with the program with her daughter in Girls Scouts when she was 6 (she’s now 20).

Now, Cathi has her mother, who used to make calls for Meals on Wheels, join her and they deliver meals three days a week, with mom serving as navigator.

She loved making the clients happy on the most loving day of the year, especially since they don’t have much human contact.

“We have candy and little love notes for them. I think they’ll like it. We’ve been to a few houses and they were so excited,” McWhirter said. “For some of these people, we’re the only people they see. We have a woman who’s 97 and has outlived her husband and kids and she loves us.”

The Meals on Wheels program has 32 meal delivery and transport routes in North Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres and Bonita Springs, all served by volunteers, supplying daily nutritious home-delivered meals, groceries, pet food and friendly safety and security checks to eligible homebound neighbors who cannot shop or cook for themselves.