May 17, 2007 | Read Time: 6 minutes
As the oldest of the 78 million baby boomers approach retirement, more and more people are promoting ways to get older Americans involved in volunteering with nonprofit and other organizations to help fill unmet community and social needs.
Compared with the apocalyptic scenario, favored by the news media, of a graying America draining resources for future generations, the proponents of “civic engagement” offer a far more positive assessment: With longer life expectancies and more education than their parents, baby boomers will reach traditional retirement age with many productive years still ahead of them. They undoubtedly will constitute an unprecedented resource that can be tapped to tutor poor kids, help frail elderly people, or otherwise promote the public good.
What’s more, research over more than three decades has found a significant (albeit modest) positive relationship between volunteering and better health in later life.
So what’s the problem?
We believe some issues have been neglected in the discussions about such civic involvement. While philanthropic support of civic engagement can play an important role in expanding options for people in later life, we worry that the conversation focuses too much on volunteering at social-service organizations. This raises unsettling questions about the gaps created by cutbacks in federal money for social services, and could devalue older adults who are not choosing to or able to be civically engaged.
We raise these issues from the perspective of loving critics who believe deeply in the value of community involvement. With the generous support of the California Wellness Foundation, we are in the third round of a program that recognizes, honors, and trains diverse groups of “senior leaders,” age 60 and older, in California who are making outstanding volunteer contributions on the local, state, and sometimes national levels. However, our conversations with these leaders — most of them people of color and many from neighborhoods where poverty is abundant — have heightened our sensitivity to the need to think more broadly about civic engagement and older adults.
For example, retrenchment has been a central feature of American political and economic life over the past three decades. Thus it is no accident that the view of older Americans as a vast and largely untapped resource for meeting community needs has emerged with the decline of the welfare state.
The federal government’s diminished support for many social services and public programs places greater responsibilities on already deficit-ridden states and municipalities, which in turn often call upon individuals, families, philanthropic organizations, and volunteerism to take up the slack. The renewed call for older adult volunteers has emerged in part from this devolution: Older adults are called on to be “useful” and to counter budgetary shortfalls through volunteering, even as their own social safety nets are disintegrating.
As federal and state governments are taking away resources that support the community good, is the answer to enlist older people — many of whom have already been negatively and disproportionately affected by these cutbacks — to step in to fill those unmet needs, thereby releasing government of long-term responsibility?
We also must think of ways to broaden our notions of civic engagement. The term traditionally has applied to a wide variety of activities including voting, involvement in political campaigns, participating in paid and unpaid community work, staying up to date on public affairs, and helping one’s neighbor.
But many scholars who write about the civic engagement of older adults focus solely on formal volunteering, ignoring other activities associated with civic life.
We should expand the discussion to include the involvement of older people with groups and community activities that are outside the mainstream. Although proponents of civic engagement frequently (and correctly) point out the value of programs like Foster Grandparents, Experience Corps, and RSVP (the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program), for example, they seldom mention the advocacy organizations through which many older Americans work to foster social change and promote social justice.
Organizations like the Gray Panthers, the Older Women’s League, and Lavender Seniors work to change the systems that foster inequities in society in the first place. The league’s motto, “don’t agonize — organize,” appeals to many midlife and older Americans for whom civic engagement means first and foremost building grass-roots efforts, coalitions, and broad social movements to create a more just nation and world.
As Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers, asserted, “The old, having the benefit of life experience, the time to get things done, and the least to lose by sticking their necks out, [are] in a perfect position to serve as advocates for the larger public good.”
All too often, such efforts are left out of the discourse on civic engagement, whose political roots have favored social-betterment efforts focused on individuals over broader moves to change institutions and policies.
Philanthropic organizations could play a valuable role in fostering a national dialogue about how the burgeoning civic-engagement movement will affect our views of aging and later life. On the one hand, as numerous proponents have argued, it can provide an important contrast to the earlier “decline and loss” and “greedy geezer” images of aging and older Americans, and thereby counter negative stereotypes. On the other hand, the heavy emphasis on civic engagement may unwittingly diminish those older adults for whom such activity is either not possible or not chosen.
For the older woman who is an around-the-clock caregiver to her elderly parent or disabled spouse or partner, or who has suddenly found herself the primary caregiver to her grandchildren, such daily engagement, in the most personal sense, may render impossible the more visible (and socially valued) forms of civic engagement to which she might aspire.
And for the poorly educated older man, a lifetime of working the night shift in a low-paying and often menial job may simply leave him, in late life, craving the luxury of time without commitments, including volunteer work.
In sum, the growing movement to institutionalize volunteering and civic engagement among older Americans must be approached with thoughtfulness and a critical eye. American foundations could be catalysts to help further the discussion of these challenging, important questions. For only by asking these questions — and caring about the answers — can we expand and improve the options for those who take a civic-engagement path in later life, while also supporting those who do not.
Meredith Minkler is a professor of health and social behavior in the School of Public Health, and Marty Martinson is director of the California Senior Leaders Program, both at the University of California at Berkeley. This essay was adapted from an article in The Gerontologist with permission from the Gerontological Society of America.
