Pairing the Generations

Photograph by Alex Harris

A few days each week, a group of retired people file into a trailer behind an elementary school in a low-income North Philadelphia neighborhood and get to work. Their mission: helping struggling students improve reading and writing skills, as well as offering a constant source of one-on-one attention, an element that might be missing from the students’ home lives because of overworked or troubled caregivers.

The Philadelphia retirees are among the 1,000 national members of Experience Corps, a seven-year-old program that seeks to maximize the skills of the country’s aging population by pairing them with needy youths in their own neighborhoods. Experience Corps is the primary program of Civic Ventures, a San Francisco nonprofit group. “With Experience Corps, we are trying to tap into the assets of the older population and bring those to bear for young people in educational ways,” says Cathy Maupin, a vice president at Civic Ventures. “If we don’t do this, we are missing a huge resource in our own community.”

Three-fourths of Experience Corps members, whose average age is 70, receive literacy and child-development training as well as information on conflict resolution before committing to spend at least 15 hours a week with the youths either at a public school or at an after-school program such as a Boys & Girls Club. Members who make the 15-hour time commitment also receive a $100 to $200 monthly stipend, which helps defray travel costs. The remaining volunteers participate in the program for fewer hours on an as-needed basis, and do not receive the same amount of training or a stipend.

While Civic Ventures helps raise money from foundation and government sources and publicizes the program, a local nonprofit organization in each of the 14 cities with an Experience Corps raises the majority of the corps’ budget, which amounts to about $300,000 a year, on average.

Here, a Philadelphia Experience Corps member talks with a third-grade student, who is learning English, before she begins reading a book.