Castle Country Radio has selected Active Re-Entry’s PERKIE Travels program as March’s Charity of the Month. For the duration of the month, the radio station showcases a local non-profit organization to bring awareness to listeners. Castle Country Radio was able to sit down with Coordinator, Derek Jensen to discuss all things PERKIE Travels.
This is a free service for individuals who are seeking cancer treatments in Utah County. “PERKIE Travels is a transportation service we provide at Active Re-Entry. We take people that are getting radiation treatments up to Utah Valley, Revere Health, and Timpanogos Hospital. We go five days a week and it’s on call, so if we don’t have anybody, we don’t go but we go when we are needed. We work with all three of those hospitals really closely. Usually, they call us and let us know when someone is going to be joining us,” explained Jensen. This is just one less burden a patient has to worry about when receiving treatments and dealing with their health issues.
The drivers are great to work with and are so caring when it comes to the patients. “We spend upwards of eight weeks with some folks. Some of them have the means whether that’s monetary or they have people that want to drive them but those burdens are something they don’t want to have on other people or maybe they don’t have the monetary to do it. We’re able to step in and we have four fulltime drivers that take care of them,” said Jensen. The patients even form life-long friendships with other patients as they all have treatments in common so they become a great support system for one another.
The PERKIE Travels program is run solely on generous donations from community members and local businesses. “So PERKIE Travels is fully based off a donations. So, we pay all our drivers, we pay our back-up drivers, its goes into gas, it goes into maintenance. We have a Carbon County van and an Emery County van. So it help all the way around for those things,” said Jensen. If any individuals or businesses would like to make a monetary donation to PERKIE Travels they may do so by stopping at Active Re-Entry on 10 North Fairgrounds Road or give them a call at (435) 637-4950. If you would like to learn more about PERKIE Travels visit the Active Re-Entry website at https://www.arecil.org/