A New Force in Volunteerism

As baby boomers begin to retire, charities learn to take advantage of their skills and motivation

Jack McConnell, a retired physician in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has a prescription for the nation’s health-care ills.

Looking ahead to the retirement in the next two decades of millions of baby boomers — those people born between 1946 and 1964 — Dr. McConnell hopes that many of the doctors, nurses, and other health professionals among them can be mobilized to volunteer in clinics that provide free health care to people who don’t have insurance.

Three years ago, Dr. McConnell founded Volunteers in Medicine to see if the idea would work. Last year, retired people who volunteered their time provided $4-million worth of care to some 13,000 patients at a cost of just $400,000. Using Dr. McConnell’s model, dozens of similar clinics are cropping up around the country.

The clinic is being hailed by experts as the kind of cutting-edge volunteer program that will attract a new generation of retired people who will be very different than those of past decades. People born during the post-World War II baby boom are often more highly educated than their parents and grandparents and, having come of age in the 1960s, more likely to want to spend their retirement years helping to solve social problems.

What’s more, medical advances make it likely that they will live longer than did earlier generations and be healthy for much of their retirement years, which could span three decades or more.

The health-care clinic has begun to take advantage of those advances and offer volunteers challenging and sometimes strenuous duties, along with the chance to apply their skills toward solving a pressing social problem. It provides continuing education — required medical lectures each week — and a collegial atmosphere of peers. That goes a long way toward preventing the isolation and uselessness that retirees often feel.

Dr. McConnell has clearly hit on a popular idea. He says four doctors and three nurses who recently retired specifically decided to move to Hilton Head because they wanted to volunteer at the health-care clinic. “They’re intelligent enough to know that they can’t play golf and eat at restaurants every day and have a fulfilled life,” says Dr. McConnell.

The volunteer opportunities at the health-care clinic are a far cry from the assignments many charities now offer. Many charities continue to struggle with ways to make volunteer assignments less demanding for time-pressed middle-aged professionals who do not want to make a big commitment. But charities may need to take the opposite approach if they want to take advantage of the coming explosion of retired baby boomers who will clamor for more meaningful assignments, experts say.

In addition to being more highly educated than any previous generation, baby boomers will also live healthier, longer lives, according to Census Bureau projections. Since 1900, life expectancy has increased from 47 to 75 years, and three out of four non-institutionalized people aged 65 or older consider their health to be good or excellent.

Many baby boomers can look forward to an earlier retirement than their parents. As of 1993, the most recent year for which figures are available, only 38 per cent of men aged 55 and over were still in the labor force, down from 69 per cent in 1950. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the trend toward earlier retirement will continue, albeit at a slower rate. That means that many baby boomers will be spending 20 or possibly even 30 years in retirement.

Such characteristics make retiring baby boomers a tremendous future resource that non-profit groups and society at large cannot afford to ignore, says Marc Freedman, vice-president of Public/Private Ventures, a research and public-policy group in Philadelphia.

Mr. Freedman says that boomers, who came of age during Watergate and the Vietnam War and advocated for social change, are capable of bringing about a powerful new force in volunteerism. “The group who can really usher this in,” he says, “may be the 1960s generation, with a return to idealism after their middle years, tempered with experience.”

Mr. Freedman has devoted the last decade to coming up with ways to offset some of the problems posed by the rapidly aging population. Policy makers have predicted that huge numbers of elderly people will strain Social Security, Medicaid, and other government aid programs to the breaking point after the turn of the century.

“With so many organizations debating about how bad the aging process will be, no one is talking about the opportunities,” says Mr. Freedman. “Right now there is an enormous crisis in the civic sector, a breakdown in public education, not to mention our ability to provide social services. But at the same time, the fastest-growing portion of our population is looking at three decades in retirement with little to do of substance.”

He adds: “The demographics are changing dramatically, but the non-profit sector is not doing the necessary preparation to understand this age group or take advantage of the opportunities it presents.”

In January, Mr. Freedman will quit his job to do just that. He has founded a new charity called Civic Ventures in Berkeley, Cal., and secured $1.3-million in start-up grants. The organization will concentrate on ways to put baby-boomer retirees to work on community-service efforts aimed at solving the nation’s most-pressing social problems.

Mr. Freedman has already come up with one program for retired people over 54, which he hopes will be a model for efforts to recruit baby boomers as they retire.

The Experience Corps, as it is called, places teams of 10 to 15 retirees in public elementary schools, where they carry out programs — such as tutoring for students who need extra help in reading and math, music lessons, and after-school recreational programs — that have been scrapped because of lack of money and other problems.

The Experience Corps gives retired people many of the same benefits as Dr. McConnell’s free clinic does. Volunteers meet with peers weekly, often in their own lounge. They have regular hours and a chance to take courses that teach them how to become better tutors, how to assess children’s knowledge of basic skills, and many other topics.

Volunteers for the Experience Corps, which operates in troubled inner-city schools, are enthusiastic about the chance to develop new skills and work with other professionals. “I love it because you learn something new after all of these years,” says Anna Caldwell, a retired teaching assistant who now spends four hours daily with other Experience Corps members, tutoring first-graders at P.S. 27 in the Bronx.

“Our training taught us that 90 per cent of the kids who don’t learn how to read in the first grade become drop-outs,” she says. “This program is great because we’re catching kids at this stage.”

Jesse Davidson, a retired postal worker who joined the Experience Corps at P.S. 156, says that he appreciates the weekly meetings with his fellow volunteers. “We swap notes, and that’s very enlightening,” he says. He recalls telling his colleagues about one little boy who had become unresponsive and “belligerent.” After hearing the story, another Experience Corps member offered to work with the child.

“She started seeing him twice a week, and he began to show interest,” says Mr. Davidson. “Now he’s eating out of her hand. This is the benefit of working together.”

Currently available in nine schools, the Experience Corps project was designed with an eye toward building on the successes of programs operated by the Corporation for National Service, a federal agency that has given $3.75-million to the new project.

The Experience Corps was the product of Mr. Freedman’s collaboration with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Corporation for National Service on a pilot project to explore ways to improve three federal programs for retired volunteers: Foster Grandparents, in which elderly people work one-on-one with needy children; Senior Companions, in which older volunteers assist frail elderly people who live alone; and the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, which matches retired executives with assignments using their skills.

The Experience Corps most closely resembles Foster Grandparents — but it offers more flexibility and autonomy for the participating volunteers. Unlike Foster Grandparents, it also offers regular opportunities for volunteers to get together and a work site to go to each day.

Most important, the Experience Corps is open to all retired professionals, not just to those who are poor. Those features have expanded the pool of volunteers — especially by attracting men, who don’t often participate in federal volunteer programs.

“We’ve been operating these programs for two to three decades, and we need to change,” says Tom Endres, director of the National Senior Service Corps, as the three federal programs are collectively known. Officials are now using the Experience Corps model to design a new and improved program for retirees who work with frail elderly people.

“We are beginning to position ourselves differently for baby boomers and the ‘younger’ old person with higher levels of education and more variety in what they’ve done over their careers,” says Mr. Endres.

“They do not just want to walk in the door of a community agency and be shown the Xerox room,” he says. “We are trying to develop new roles with additional responsibility to attract this younger older person.”

To that end, the National Senior Service Corps is proposing that Congress lower the minimum age from 60 to 55 for retired people who participate in its programs. It has also released a new series of print and radio public-service advertisements, featuring volunteers who look younger than the people featured in previous promotions.

While the federal programs currently have 500,000 retired volunteers nationwide, Mr. Endres says that he hopes that the number will grow as the baby boomers seek ways to be productive after they retire. “This age group is American’s only growing natural resource,” he says.

But any effort to expand significantly the federal programs for senior volunteers faces a stiff challenge: persuading Congress to increase the amount it spends to run the programs.

Congress provided $163-million this month to run the programs over the next year, an increase of 13 per cent. That’s enough money to recruit nearly 10,000 new retirees. But many experts say that is a small number compared with the volunteers already available — and not nearly enough to begin to harness the volunteer power of millions of baby boomers.

The federal funds, which must be matched by private sources, are used to provide a modest stipend to some participants. Most volunteers use the money to cover transportation, meals during working hours, and other expenses associated with their volunteer work.

The stipends have been controversial among some lawmakers who believe that volunteers who provide charitable services should not be compensated with federal dollars. But Mr. Endres and other officials say the stipends are necessary.

Many retired people on fixed incomes, they argue, could not otherwise afford to participate in the programs. And stipends insure that volunteers show up consistently — a must in programs designed to use retired people more intensively.

Stipends are not necessarily important to all retiring baby boomers. Some people say what is more important to the boomers is the opportunity to work on a project that solves a concrete problem, according to Tom Benjamin, president of the Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement in Catlett, Va.

Mr. Benjamin’s organization has linked more than 2,000 retired people, mostly men, with local environmental projects such as monitoring water quality for cities, setting up recycling facilities, and overseeing the cleanup of toxic-waste sites. “You have to make them see the work is really needed and a vital part of the community,” he says.

Mr. Benjamin says that, unlike many charities, his organization is well-positioned to tap the time and talents that retired baby boomers can bring to volunteering. “This age group has been inundated about the environment,” he says. “We’re right at the beginning of the curve with boomers starting to retire, and we see incredible interest from this group.”

Other experts say that to recruit retiring baby boomers, non-profit groups should pay more attention to big companies.

Companies can provide access to large numbers of baby boomers right as they are leaving the work force and possibly looking for meaningful ways to fill their time, says Donna Anderson, president of the National Retiree Volunteer Coalition in Minneapolis. The coalition has helped more than 80 companies and other organizations set up volunteer programs for retired employees.

Ms. Anderson points to one new program that has a good chance of attracting baby boomers who are apt to seek an intellectual challenge: a six-month-old effort that her charity helped start at the Prudential Insurance Company in Newark, N.J.

About 50 people who retired from Prudential are now designing a curriculum to be used in a nearby public school in a low-income neighborhood. The courses, however, are not designed for students. They are for their parents, who often need to learn job-seeking strategies, financial-planning techniques, and other skills to improve their family’s circumstances.

But such corporate programs are far from plentiful, Ms. Anderson says. And when they are created, they must be carefully designed and monitored to provide useful, worthwhile experiences for both baby boomers and the people and communities they help.

“We’re seeing 55-year-olds retiring now, and they have different feelings about aging than their parents did,” she says. “Their lives are very different in retirement.”

She adds: “There are really not very many role models for this group.”