Skilled Older Volunteers Help Charities Stretch Resources, Study Finds

When Kim Pavlock retired from her job running programs at Mather Lifeways, an Evanston, Ill., nonprofit organization that serves older people, she had no intention of retiring from the active role she had played in the life of her community.

She saw retirement as a chance to, in her words, “do what I want to do.” And what she wanted to do was help charities. Not just by stuffing envelopes or answering the front-desk telephone, but by offering organizations a chance to take advantage of her skills.

Ms. Pavlock received her chance when she committed to spend a year doing consulting work with several nonprofit groups as part of RespectAbility, a nationwide effort by the National Council on Aging. The three-year project placed highly skilled people like Ms. Pavlock at 22 organizations across the country and then tracked the difference they made in hopes of showing just how powerful a volunteer resource the growing pool of baby-boomer retirees can be.

She worked as a coordinator of volunteers, and helped two nonprofits recruit a total of more than 20 retired people whose work backgrounds—like hers—left them with high-level skills that made them good candidates for volunteer leadership roles.

“It was a really satisfying situation,” says Ms. Pavlock, 58. “Nonprofits are always looking for resources, and one thing they have an opportunity to do better at is using older adult volunteers in a more meaningful way.”

To measure the impact of retired people, RespectAbility used an online benchmarking and return-on-investment tool. The tool, which combined U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics marketplace-wage data and data entered by the charities, found that organizations reaped an average return of nearly 800 percent on their investment of money and staff time when they matched high-skill volunteers to tasks that fit their expertise.

“We were very surprised and pleased,” says Tom Endres, vice president of civic engagement at the council. “We knew there would be a return on investment, but no one had ever set out in a systematic way to really determine what it was.”

‘Supply and Demand’

Anne Diaz, an official at the Taproot Foundation, a group with headquarters in San Francisco that promotes skilled volunteerism and has also studied boomer retirees’ potential as volunteers, says the findings were consistent with Taproot’s research.

“The key is really having nonprofits who are ready to utilize this type of highly skilled support,” says Ms. Diaz, a program manager at Taproot. “It’s a classic supply-and-demand issue.”

Research suggests baby boomers, the generation of about 77 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964, will form a new pool of retirees and potential volunteers in coming years. The number of volunteers age 65 and older is expected to rise by 50 percent by 2020, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Mr. Endres says capitalizing on this potential resource requires big changes in the way nonprofits recruit and manage volunteers. If baby boomers really are the best-educated, highest-skilled group of retirees ever, he adds, “then it doesn’t make sense that organizations should think about volunteers in the way they have in the past.”

‘Almost Like Staff’

The National Council on Aging began the study because it believed nonprofits weren’t prepared or even thinking about how they could use this growing pool of potential volunteers to meet increasing demand for their services, Mr. Endres says.

The study’s authors, seeking new ways to involve and manage older volunteers, found that when baby boomers retire they look for missions to carry out in their volunteering life—not tasks to perform. In the study, organizations that gave them the freedom to work independently and in leadership roles enjoyed the greatest benefit.

Some study participants were placed in supervised teams. Some worked on their own. Others worked in self-directed teams, tackling projects without supervision from staff members. This last method showed so much promise, Mr. Endres says, that the council has begun to develop a certification tool for team trainers.

“What we saw is that the organizations that worked with these skilled volunteers in a give-and-take sort of way and let them decide their role, that was the best approach,” says Sabrina Reilly, director of the RespectAbility project. “They treated them almost like staff—like they were important and they mattered to the organization.”

Gary Eckroth, retired from a career as a marketing manager for the Hewlett-Packard and Compaq corporations, says he jumped at the chance to be a part of the RespectAbility project.

He wound up at the Southern Maine Agency on Aging Meals on Wheels program, in Scarborough, where he quickly became the marketing director the program would have hired if it could have.

Mr. Eckroth studied the program’s enrollment numbers and discovered that not as many older people were using the program as were eligible. He interviewed social workers, nurses, hospital staff members—anyone with the power to refer potential clients. Many older people, he learned, believed that the program had a long waiting list. Others said they had heard the food tasted bad. He corrected the misinformation and had the charity bring in a new food vendor, offering samples of the new food to the nurses.

His wife’s illness forced him to drop out of the RespectAbility project prematurely, but the Meals on Wheels enrollment figures “were clearly starting to track upward,” he says. He got a kick out of using his old skills again.

“We feel very lucky to have secured Gary’s volunteer consultancy,” says Edward Trainer, director of healthy aging at the Southern Maine Agency on Aging. “It was manna from heaven for me as the program director.”