Why Should Delaware Care?
The Wilmington Senior Center has been a service hub for the elderly in and around the city for seven decades. But in recent years, the center has faced funding hardships, leading to pared back services.
Days after posting their March lunch menu onto social media, officials from the Wilmington Senior Center closed the doors of the 70-year-old facility.
According to multiple sources, including residents and elected officials, the senior center’s abrupt closure is now sparking conversations in Delaware’s largest city about what led to the decision and whether the center plans to reopen. As of Wednesday, the center remained closed during what would have been its normal operating hours.
Wilmington Senior Center officials have not made any public statements about the closure nor did they respond to questions from Spotlight Delaware.
The news comes about four months after the Senior Center ended its Friday operations and laid off a third of its staff, amid ongoing funding shortfalls. At that time, the center’s executive director, Sam Nussbaum, told Spotlight Delaware that it needed to make up 70% of its budget for the year.
“I need to save this agency,” Nussbaum told Spotlight last October. “We don’t have money coming in.”
According to government records, the Wilmington Senior Center received $3 million in state funding between the fiscal years 2018 and 2026. Most of that money came from Delaware’s legislative program, called grant-in-aid, that distributes taxpayer dollars to various organizations that serve the public.
In the most recent fiscal year of 2026, the Wilmington Senior Center received over $160,000 from the state.
New Castle County also allocated just over $63,000 to the organization between 2019 and 2023, according to the county’s open checkbook, with about one-third stemming from CARES Act funding given during the COVID pandemic.
Located near the city’s Brandywine Village neighborhood, the Wilmington Senior Center has been a social and wellness hub for the elderly community since 1956.
It serves people over 50 years old, offering a range of programs including affordable meals, health workshops, computer classes, Bible study, Pilates, and trips to local farmers’ markets. Memberships only cost $25 a year. There also are one-time lifetime memberships available for $500, according to the senior center’s website.
While Nussbaum cited financial difficulties last fall, it’s not clear whether potential shortfalls are what caused the facility to close earlier this month.
The organization has not filed an annual non-profit tax return form with the Internal Revenue Service since 2020, according to a federal database.
The database does show that its nonprofit status was revoked in 2024. It is unclear why that happened, but revocations can occur when an organization fails to file its tax forms for three consecutive years.
Nonprofit organizations are required to file tax forms, called Form 990s, which are publicly viewable online.
The Wilmington Senior Center brought in almost $875,000 in revenue in 2020 — the last year tax data for the organization is publicly available. Its 2020 finances capped a steady decrease in revenue that occurred over the previous decade. In 2011, the center brought in nearly $2 million.
Last spring, the IRS reinstated the Wilmington Senior Center’s nonprofit tax status but the organization’s tax forms for 2021 through 2024 are still not available online.
In October, Nussbaum told Spotlight that the center receives just over $200,000 annually from the state, while operating on a roughly $660,000 budget, leaving the center to make up more than $400,000 each year.
Is the closure temporary?
Several individuals who use the Wilmington Senior Center told Spotlight Delaware that earlier this month they received phone calls from senior center employees, announcing that services would be discontinued.
Verna Clark, a Baynard Village resident, was among those individuals. She said a senior center employee told her that the organization was closed indefinitely.
“That’s all she could tell me,” Clark said.
Clark, who has attended the senior center for nearly a decade, said that, with a car, she’s fortunate to have the option to go elsewhere. For now, though, she plans to wait and see if it reopens.
“There are other centers that I would go to, but I said ‘I’m going to just hold off, and wait and see,’” she said.
Nussbaum did not respond to requests for comment for this story. When reached by phone, board member Loraine Bertuola declined to comment. When reached a second time to ask about new information that had been uncovered, Bertuola hung up shortly after the conversation began.
Senior center officials failure to publicly address the closure has left residents and some local and state officials in the dark. Many say they only heard about the closure from neighbors or employees.
Meanwhile, one legislator suggested that the center may reopen open.
Rep. Stephanie T. Bolden (D-Wilmington) said she met with senior center leaders who said the center closed temporarily because Nussbaum had been “dismissed” and replaced.
“They may have been closed for a couple of days to reorganize, but they have not shut down the Senior Center,” she said.
But other local government officials say they’ve heard differently. Wilmington City Council President Trippi Congo said he received calls from residents and Senior Center employees last week and learned that a reopening may be uncertain because of funding challenges.
Congo said he is working to schedule a meeting this month with officials from the senior center, the mayor’s office, New Castle County officials, and officials from Gov. Matt Meyer’s office to better understand the center’s situation and to see who may be able to assist.
“I wanted the state and the county to be there because they also have value for the seniors, and they have a lot more funding than we do,” Congo said.
State Rep. Nnamdi Chukwuocha (D-Wilmington)was also told last week about the center’s shutdown, and noted that he has not heard from leadership at the center.
Chukwuocha says he is in ongoing discussions with other senior centers, such as The Jimmy Jenkins Senior Center at the Kingswood Community Center, who said they could offer a pipeline for the seniors who are no longer being served.
He plans to hold more conversations with legislators and the Controller General’s Office to understand how to continue to support the seniors who were being served at the center.
Logan Herring, CEO of Kingswood Community Center, said he had been in discussions with the Wilmington Senior Center for about a year about creating a pipeline between the Wilmington Senior Center and the Jimmy Jenkins Senior Center. He said Nussbaum initially reached out to his office for guidance, but they were never able to move forward with the plan.
Asked if unresponsiveness from Senior Center officials led to the plan stalling, Herring suggested that if communication delays did occur, they may be due to the center operating in a crisis mode.
“I just think that they were really in a tough spot financially, and when you’re in survival mode, it’s hard to think beyond that,” Herring said.
