Faces of Aging, Faces of Charity

By Cassie J. Moore

The array of personalities that the photographer Ed Kashi and the writer Julie Winokur captured while documenting America’s aging society defies categorization. In their book, Aging in America: The Years Ahead, the couple use striking black-and-white photographs to show war veterans, athletes, newlyweds, prison inmates, grandparents, great-grandparents, and many other people who range in age from late 50s to 104.

But many of the men and women photographed and interviewed for the book have something in common besides their age: Nonprofit groups play a major role in their lives. Some elderly people were delivering (or receiving) food from Meals on Wheels programs. Others were pole-vaulting at the National Senior Games or pedaling stationary bicycles as part of the physical therapy they receive at nonprofit care facilities.

Ms. Winokur and Mr. Kashi, who are married, had worked together before, most recently on Denied: The Crisis of America’s Uninsured for Talking Eyes Media, a nonprofit group the couple created in 2002. They decided to chronicle the lives of the growing number of elderly men and women in America, and won grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Open Society Institute’s Project on Death in America, and the California Endowment to pursue the project.

The couple hadn’t intended to examine charity involvement. Their goal was to document the “social impact of longevity,” but they found that nonprofit groups kept appearing as they set out to find subjects for the book.

“In everything from day-care centers to volunteer opportunities, from recreation to the answering of basic needs [for the elderly], you see nonprofit groups. I think that’s indicative of the incredible hole the nonprofit sector fills in our society,” says Ms. Winokur.

People 55 and older will begin to outnumber the population of people under 18 as early as 2009, according to U.S. Census projections. The implications of the demographic increase are especially important for social-service and health-related nonprofit groups, because Medicare and Social Security will be inundated with new beneficiaries just as the percentage of workers who pay taxes to support those programs begins to decrease. Ms. Winokur predicts that as this happens, nonprofit groups will increasingly be expected to step up efforts to help the elderly.

The other implication for charities is a potential wealth of new volunteers, since more and more people are expected to live three or four decades after they retire from their jobs. Mr. Kashi and Ms. Winokur encountered men and women who simply got bored when they retired, and took up volunteering — or a second paying career — to stay engaged in society.

“People will increasingly realize that they have to stay active and involved,” says Mr. Kashi. “Otherwise, those extra 30 years are going to be miserable for them, even if they have decent health. People are willing to give quite a lot, the ones who remain active and involved and engaged in life and society, and helping people is a way to do that. There’s a tremendous reservoir of energy and expertise and caring and concern that needs to be tapped into.”