Janet Sainer, who died Monday at 88, was commissioner of the city’s Department for the Aging between 1978 and 1990, and introduced Citymeals on Wheels and the New York City Alzheimer’s Resource Center, the first municipal Alzheimer’s center in the nation.

A career gerontologist of national reputation, Sainer created the pilot for the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, a national organization that deploys older volunteers as teachers, builders, and relief workers. In 2005, RSVP participants logged more than 60 million volunteer hours. The program grew out of Sainer’s work using senior citizens as volunteers during the 1960s, when she was a social worker at the Community Service Society of New York. Sainer received a presidential citation for her work on RSVP.

As Mayor Koch’s commissioner for the Department of the Aging, Sainer served through all three Koch administrations, the only commissioner to do so, the mayor said.

“She was one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met in terms of dedication to senior citizens,” Mr. Koch said. “She cared for them as though every one of them was a sister or a brother.”

Citymeals on Wheels was one of several public-private partnerships Sainer helped to create. Citymeals came about when the food writers Gael Greene and James Beard set out to provide meals for homebound elderly over the Christmas holiday in 1981 as a stopgap because city nutrition programs were not open on weekends and holidays. The program has since grown geometrically and spread to cities around the nation.

“I got her on the line and said, ‘We have $35,000 and some chickens,'” Ms. Greene said. “It was her imagination and her ability to see in two minutes that something was happening here. Who knew that we would be delivering 2.9 million meals a year?”

Sainer grew up in New York and attended Hunter College. After receiving a master’s degree in social work at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, she began working for two Manhattan synagogues, where she led a once-aweek seniors group. Later, she worked at the Community Service Society of New York, where the program that would become RSVP began garnering national attention. In 1969, Congress made it a national program as an amendment to the Older American Act.

In addition to her nutrition and Alzheimer’s initiatives while commissioner of the Department for the Aging, Sainer founded the Aging in New York Fund; the Grandparent Resource Center to help grandparents who are acting as parents; and the city Health Promotion Unit’s Stay-Well exercise program.

For the past 16 years, Sainer worked as a consultant to the Brookdale Foundation, where she focused on programs to help relatives act as surrogate parents.

She died in Denver, attending a gerontology conference, a spokesman for the Department for the Aging, Christopher Miller, said.

Janet Sainer
Born July 4, 1918, in New York; died June 4 in Denver; survived by her children, Alicia, Eliot, and Debbie, and three grandchildren.