Productive Roles in an Older Society (1986) / Chapter Skim
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The Older Volunteer Resource
The Older Volunteer Resource
Pages 51-72
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From page 51... ...
Other studies and documents discuss volunteer activity among people in the group aged 55 and over.2 Both in common usage and in studies of volunteerism the notion of volunteer work ranges from the unstructured help a person gives a bedridden neighbor to highly organized programs in which thousands of older people provide tax assistance to other older people on a volunteer basis. Some volunteer programs regard a volunteer only as someone who provides services without any type of monetary return even one so small as the reimbursement of a bus trip or a meal.
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From page 52... ...
is performed but probably would not be if, at a given time, the worker had to be paid. People who have paid jobs may do volunteer work in their spare time or on a released time basis, the latter on the basis of an agreement with their employers.
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From page 53... ...
Instead, society pays the costs in year-by-year increments through its often belated efforts to cope with underemployment, unemployment, fear, insecurity, crime, isolation, poor health, dependency, community decay, lost business profits, and Tower property values. The growing numbers of able older people could be a major resource in easing the impact of personnel cuts that lead to reductions in social service and other types of service agencies.
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From page 54... ...
The response indicated that 1 in 10 had such an interest (about 2.55 million people in the population over age 65 in 19811. Worthy noted that this 2.55 million added to the 5.9 million people in the same age group who said they were now doing volunteer work might mean that about 8.5 million people over age 65 could be considered to be the current and potential volunteer pool in that age category.
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From page 55... ...
In terms of volunteering, many of these women have skills and experience that could be used at once in a wide variety of social service organizations; others would need training or skill updating; and still others would need extensive training and counseling or could be used only in low-skill capacities. Older women traditionally have been a major source of volunteers.
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From page 56... ...
The Reagan administration also has not increased the size of several small, oldervolunteer programs that it inherited. And Congress has not moved in this area or in attempting to provide more incentives to volunteer.
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From page 57... ...
Like older people who work for pay or seek paying jobs, older persons actually serving as volunteers-or looking for such assignments face many of the same kinds of age discrimination and discouragement policies and practices in the workplace. Such policies and practices are often found in organizations that commonly employ volunteers.
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From page 58... ...
Many people now in their upper 50s and 60s bought homes or rented in these suburbs, and increasingly they are cut off from many pursuits because of inadequate transportation. Older people sometimes stay away from volunteer work, using the excuses of poor health or lack of time, when they are actually feeling "burned-out" or "turned-off." After lifetimes of work and contending with their own concerns, some people do not wish to become involved in activities that might entangle them with other people's problems.
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From page 59... ...
More and more often, professional staff are being inserted between volunteer governing board members and volunteers who make up the rank and file workers of organizations. In addition, when paid professional vacancies develop, the "inside" professionals tend to pick as replacements other professionals from inside or outside the organizations involved; they seldom fell the positions from among the inside volunteers who might aspire to a paid job.
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From page 60... ...
Each action, if taken effectively, could be helpful in reinforcing the other actions proposed. Positive Appeal to Older People and Strengthened Recruitment Many reasons were given earlier in this paper for the failure to develop major efforts in the recruitment and retention of older volunteers, despite the obvious resource they could be for meeting the growing workload problems of social service and other types of service organizations.
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From page 61... ...
Organizations such as the American Association of Retired Persons, the National Council on the Aging, the National Council of Senior Citizens, and ACTION (a federal agency) have tried for several years to bring attention to the older person as a valuable volunteer resource.
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From page 62... ...
Also, some employers might be willing to donate money to service organizations in proportion to an hourly rate for the time their employees work for these organizations on their own time. Beyond the methodologies of recruitment efforts is~the content of recruitment.
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From page 63... ...
Recognition can also reassure the family members of older volunteers, who sometimes feel that organizations may be exploiting their older relatives. Recognition award ceremonies allow the families to become more acquainted with the volunteer organization and what it does; they can then fee} proud of their parent or grandparent for doing such useful things.
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From page 64... ...
Using imputed budgets, they and their employers and the professional staffs of the organizations would see at a glance what would be lost if the volunteer force disappeared. Volunteers could then assign a dollar value to their work in the salary/wage-history portion of their resumes or when they are talking to prospective employers (for paid or other volunteer work)
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From page 65... ...
Some useful preventive as well as "damage control" ideas have been assembled by the national volunteer support organizations. Although some of these ideas are intended to help deal with situations involving volunteers of all ages, those outlined below would have particular utility in organizational relationships with older volunteers.
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From page 66... ...
Some organizations are developing job descriptions for their volunteer jobs. Such descriptions, if brief and clear, can help the volunteer understand both his or her own duties and also clarify the relationships between fellow volunteers, paid staff, and supervisory levels up the line.
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From page 67... ...
Clerical staff must be carefully briefed on how to deal responsively with volunteers who need help with typing, supplies, space, reimbursements, and directions on where to find people, equipment, forms, and other items necessary to their work. Some organizations try to centralize staff responsibilities for meeting the logistics requirements of volunteers to avoid situations in which the clerical staff is placed ureter pressure from many sources at the same time.
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From page 68... ...
Substantial numbers of capable older people are available to help the nation cope with its growing crisis of unmet needs. It should be possible to open up more opportunities for these people to serve as volunteers in providing services of many types and at the same time protect the public against abuses and avoid casual and unwarranted displacement of paid workers.
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From page 69... ...
Some will not have participated in training of anv kind for decades; still others may doubt their ~ ,,, endurance and their capacity to work long periods. Organizations that have volunteer programs can structure their training programs to alert professional staff and other volunteers to the worries and doubts that some older volunteers will have.
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From page 70... ...
The voluntary organizations consider the liability subject to be a gray area that needs careful study and consideration. Most realize that they are operating "at risk," and that the whole voluntary community could one day wake up to find some court decisions that have awarded major damages to someone hurt by a volunteer on duty.
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From page 71... ...
But gaining solid performance data on older workers has been increasingly difficult, at least on a current and acceptably large enough scale, because our society has assumed for years that older people were supposed to leave the work force and therefore were not worth observing for testing purposes. The reduction in the number of people over age 55 in the work force continues, and now some believe that the small remnant of this population still working is not representative of the older population and its performance capacities.
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From page 72... ...
6. "The Office of the Older American Volunteer Programs, a part of ACTION-the national volunteer agency-includes three programs: the Foster Grandparent Program, the Senior Companion Program, and the Retired Senior Volunteer Program.
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