DEERFIELD BEACH — John Offerdahl sits on the couch beside 93-year-old Barbara Munday, who turns to hug him and says, “Aren’t you handsome!”
The former Miami Dolphins linebacker laughs. “This is why I like to come see her.”
“Be still my heart,’’ says Mundy.
For the next half-hour, they talk about things big and small at her Deerfield Beach apartment with Offerdahl’s wife, Lynn and their friend and co-worker, Ellen Crane. Only as they’re about to leave does the reason for their visit come up.
“Should I put the food in the refrigerator?” Offerdahl asks of the 10, prepackaged meals of fresh food brought from Offerdahl’s Off-the-Grill restaurant in Lighthouse Point.
Mundy is one of the more than 450 seniors across Broward receiving these weekly meals as part of his restaurant’s Hand-Off Meals program, a non-profit venture to help homebound elderly. The idea is to nourish them with more than just food, too.
Friends. Laughs. A new community. That’s the idea here, and something Offerdahl wants to talk to you about, as you’ll soon see.
“We can make this such a good program,’’ he says.
It’s Thanksgiving, a time to be thankful and admit sometimes you get lucky as a community in ways you don’t even grasp at the time. Four decades ago, Offerdahl sat at his home in Sun Prairie, Wis., and took a phone call on NFL draft day from San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh, who said the young linebacker soon would be moving to the Bay Area.
Offerdahl took the phone off the hook to watch the next draft pick play out. Only San Francisco didn’t draft him. It traded the pick. Offerdahl quickly put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang immediately.
“Offerdahl, you’re a Miami Dolphin,’’ coach Don Shula said.
Yes, sometimes you get lucky as a community because the Dolphins didn’t just get a linebacker who played well enough to sit in the franchise’s Ring of Honor today. It got a man who raised a family and carried himself in ways that showed his worldview was more than 100 yards.
As a player, he once dove into a canal and helped rescue people who had driven into it. He once drove to Homestead during Hurricane Andrew and provided some bagels from his former restaurant, Offerdahl’s Bagels, which he built to the point of selling it to Einstein’s Bagels. For years after his NFL career, he held the Gridiron Grill-Off, a community mix of food, football and charity.
So, this Hand-Off Meals program is just the extension of who he’s always been, even if he never saw it coming.
“The opportunities kept pulling us along to get here,’’ he said.
It started in 2020 when Dolphins owner Steve Ross got the team’s alumni restauranteurs — Offerdahl, Kim Bokamper, Bob Brudzinski — to provide meals during the pandemic for the community around Hard Rock Stadium. That taught Offerdahl’s team how to package fresh food in meals.
It expanded the following year when Broward officials faced an emergency of people needing food as the pandemic lengthened. They knew of Offerdahl through relationships in the Gridiron Grill-Off. They used government COVID funds to have his restaurant deliver meals around the county.
County officials then encouraged him to apply for a government grant through the Older American Act, which provides funding helping programs like Meals On Wheels.
“I’d never heard of the Older American Act,’’ Offerdahl said.
His four restaurants across Broward (a fifth is in the Fort Lauderdale airport), became one of three services to supply homebound seniors in Broward. It was the only one serving fresh food in the entire state, too. Mundy for one, said how she loves the chef salad with turkey that’s delivered.
“Try to give a frozen salad to someone,’’ Offerdahl says. “It doesn’t work.”
The problem was fresh food meant higher costs. Offerdahl got the county’s approval to allow his restaurant’s venture to become a non-profit organization, so donations could be secured. His previous relationships with the likes of the Jim Moran Foundation and the Community Foundation of Broward literally bore fresh fruit for this new program.
Ten fresh meals are delivered by former Miami Dolphin John Offerdahl and his wife, Lynn. The delivery is part of Offerdahl’s non-profit, Hands-Off Meals, which brings meals to homebound seniors. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
While this provided the funding and know-how of good operation, Lynn Offerdahl then provided its heart. She accompanied a volunteer and the volunteer’s teenage daughter to visit a homebound woman as part of a six-week, charitable food effort of Heart-to-Heart International. She was struck by the interaction between them.
“We walked in the door, and they delivered the food, and the (homebound woman) asked the daughter, ‘Hey, Christina, can you make a pot of coffee?’ ” Lynn said. “And the 16-year-old goes in the kitchen and the woman says, ‘How is your swim meet? I’ve been praying for you.’ And the girl’s like, ‘Thank you so much.’
“Later, I said , ‘John, I wish we could find a way to do the government program with food like we’ve been doing but with volunteers like that, because that’s the missing piece.’
“I mean, the food is important. But that relationship with the food is wonderful. These people are starved for human interaction.”
This is where you come in. The Offerdahls want to make a sales pitch. They’re looking for volunteers to deliver the food. They mostly use paid drivers now — “And they’re great,’’ John said.
Volunteer drivers can make the program special, though. Both sides, the driver and homebound senior, benefit. They’ve seen it. This helps seniors stay at their homes, so there’s a quality-of-life aspect to it. It also keeps down government costs in assisted living.
Their program has 31 volunteer drivers. They include: Lynn Offerdahl, who takes an hour every Tuesday morning to deliver food to two people; and Crane, who now only delivers food to Mundy in what she calls a “feel-good moment of my week,” but has a monthly newsletter for all those getting food to help make it a community.
“Sometimes I think 31 volunteers is a lot, and sometimes I don’t,’’ John said. “We’d love to get up to 150 by the end of the year, even if that’s a big number. But don’t tell anyone that. You never want your team to know it’s not going to get to the Super Bowl.”
In creating this program, Offerdahl has become a voice for private and public partnerships in food delivery. He’ll talk Dec. 2 in Washington at a Senate hearing on aging about the benefits of home-delivered meals. Maybe he should take Mundy with him. She has no family, but isn’t shy about making new friends.
“Who wouldn’t be friends with someone as big and strong as him,’’ she says of Offerdahl. Soon, she says, “I like the shrimp pasta they bring, too.”
Yes, sometimes you get lucky as a community. Sometimes, the star linebacker isn’t just a star linebacker. Sometimes, decades after football, you realize how much he’s a star in the larger community. And you realize just how how fortunate we were San Francisco didn’t draft him.
For information on how to volunteer, go to handoffmeals.com.
Former Miami Dolphin John Offerdahl, delivers a week’s worth of meals to Barbara Mundy, 93, in her Deerfield Beach home on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025. The delivery is part of Offerdahl’s foundation Hands-Off Meals delivery to seniors. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)