The Almanor Foundation recently welcomed their 19th funder, Helping Hands Senior Services. Based in Quincy and serving all Plumas County seniors, the service was started by Melissa Simmons, whose passion for helping seniors has evolved into meeting the everyday needs of those in their Golden years.
For Melissa, helping others has always been more than an idea; it is a way of life. When she sees a need, she considers it “her calling” to do what she can to be part of the solution or, at the very least, lend a helping hand.
That philosophy took on new meaning in 2024 when Melissa was helping with the Camp Fire recovery effort. She saw firsthand how many seniors were overwhelmed, confused and frightened as they faced an uncertain future.
“Many people were helping, but I recognized there needed to be a service that focused specifically on seniors,” Melissa recalls. Her desire to fill that gap became even more personal after she was involved in a serious car accident and suddenly found herself in need of help. “I understood what it was like to need someone to help,” she says.
With little more than an idea and a strong determination to make a difference, Melissa founded Helping Hands Senior Services in January 2026. Quincy has been home to her, on and off, for more than 30 years, and despite living elsewhere at times, she says she always considered Quincy home. This makes her organization even more of a labor of love.
Today, Helping Hands Senior Services provides assistance that can make an enormous difference in the lives of older adults living on limited resources. Services include minor household and yard repairs, house cleaning, hauling debris — particularly debris that can create a fire-safety hazard–and companionship.
Melissa has assembled a small team of regular workers and has been encouraged by the community response. Volunteers of all ages have stepped forward to help, including students from Portola Charter School. Several small local businesses have also offered discounts on supplies, helping with operating costs.
As the service has grown, so has the generosity of people who believe in Melissa’s mission. Donations have begun coming in to help support the work, creating a new challenge for Melissa: finding a way to manage those contributions while keeping her focus where it belongs—with the seniors she serves.
That led her to The Almanor Foundation (TAF), where she recently established a fund to support Helping Hands Senior Services as it works toward becoming a nonprofit organization. “Having The Almanor Foundation walk beside us, manage donations, revenue and payments for services is a huge weight off my shoulders,” Melissa says. “I’m so grateful that people have wanted to support what we are doing. By having TAF do this for Helping Hands Senior Services, I can focus on what we really want to do which is to help seniors with limited resources in our community.”
For Melissa, becoming a TAF funder isn’t simply about managing donations. It gives her a way to accept and steward the community’s generosity while allowing her to concentrate on the reason she started the organization in the first place: responding to a need she saw in her community and turning her personal calling into meaningful action.
For The Almanor Foundation, Melissa’s story is another example of how an individual with a vision can turn an idea into a community resource and how TAF can help make that vision easier to sustain. “Melissa’s journey from seeing a need to creating a solution is one of the reasons TAF was founded. One person cannot do it all, and if TAF can oversee the administrative portion, it allows the funder to do what they do best and in this case, lighten the load for our seniors,” says Susan Bryner, CEO of TAF.
Sometimes making a difference starts with simply seeing a need.
