Story that appeared in the Winter 2007 Issue of
New Horizons Magazine in New York City

 

Harry may only be in the first grade, but he walks into a room like he owns it. His hands are buried deep in the pockets of his khaki pants, his yellow shirt is buttoned all the way up through the top button, and he has a high, smooth forehead of a mature man.

A few seconds after he saunters into the classroom and surveys the lay of today’s land, Margaret Howell comes in, bent over her cane.

“I’m the grandma of the group,” she says, meaning she’s the oldest of the group of women who volunteer to spend four hours a day, Monday through Thursday, in the classroom, helping first graders learn to read and write at a their grade level.

Older adults and retirees are among the mainstays in the volunteer world, bringing a lifetime full of experiences and knowledge to places and organizations desperately in need of a helping hands from persons who care.

At this school, four days a week, four hours a day, Mrs. Howell and ten other senior women in the classroom volunteer their time to help catch the most vulnerable children before they slip through the holes in the public school system. They, and the organization they’re volunteering for, Experience Corps, believe that by working with kids when they first fall behind—in the first and second grades—there is an opportunity bring them up to speed and get them back on track before they fall too far behind. The fear is that once they fall too far behind, they may never catch up. And once that happens, their futures start to dim quickly.

On this day, 18 desks are arranged in side-by-side pairs to create nine workstations, each with an alphabet taped to the top. Two tables sit at the back of the room to create a couple more. At each station, a senior woman is working with a child on reading drills.

Mrs. Howell sits at the empty station front and center while Harry goes over to a table beneath the windows to find his personal work folder. From each of the stations the women are exclaiming their admiration for their pupils and astonishment at how good they are progressing.

At one of the tables in the back of the room, Esther Bowie is working with Lenona. “Oh, I love you! I love you!,” Mrs. Bowie exclaims, beaming at her student. “You are so smart! Your teacher is going to be so impressed! You are going to go to the first grade!” Lenona raises her hands in victory.

As young Harry reads through books such as “The Big Cat,” “Quack” and “Goodbye Zoo,” struggling with sentences like “The lizard was still. The cat was in the jungle,” Mrs. Howell peppers him with corrections and words of encouragement: “Good.” “What’s that word? Good.” “Great.” And after they finish the last book, “Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! That was very, very good!”

The same pattern holds as Mrs. Howell and Harry move onto his writing skills. As Mrs. Howell reads a sentence Harry writes the words. “The...book...is...in...the...I don’t know if you can write this word, desk.” As Harry writes the ‘D’ Mrs. Howell says, “Good. Okay, what else?” and repeats slowly “DeeessssK.” And as he keeps writing, “Good. Desk. Good. What’s at the end? Desk.”

“T?” Harry asks.

“DesK,” Mrs. Howell responds, really emphasizing the “K” and repeats the sound one more time.

Harry writes the correct letter, and Mrs. Howell responds with, “Wonderful! Well, you really surprised me. That was a tough one. And what goes at the end of the sentence? Good. Alright, this next one is going to be another hard one, but knowing you, you’ll get it.”

Harry gets every word right on the first try. “This is really a pleasure,” Mrs. Howell tells him mildly, like someone saying something obvious that didn’t need to be said. “You are such a pleasure.” Harry beams.

At the end of the 45-minute lesson Harry gets to choose a sticker for a job well done. He picks a sticker of an apple, out of which emerge two smiling worms who share a book. He and Mrs. Howell leave the room together to take Harry back to his regular classroom. Mrs. Howell will be back soon with another child to perform similar drills, to give the same encouragement.

Experience Corps’s mission is to get this help to those kids in the most vulnerable city neighborhoods and to use a ready-made resource to do it.
“We started in South Bronx,” says Kemba Tamar, Experience Corps’s project director. “We went into Bed-Stuy, we went into Harlem, Jamaica Queens, and we wanted to shed light on the fact that there are people out there who want to give back, who live right in the neighborhood that know about the schools, that had children who went to the schools.”

Experience Corps’s 164 volunteers are spread out over 16 schools across the city. What makes the program different from most other child-literacy programs is that it uses only volunteers who are 55 years old or older.

“The philosophy is that seniors are a great “untapped” resource across the country,” Tamar says. “The program was created to change the view and perception of retirees and promote volunteerism in an effort to keep them active and involved in the community. Conversely there is a missing “intergenerational link” in many communities and seniors tutoring elementary school students in their neighborhood helps to bridge that gap.”

Turning to older volunteers as a resource for nonprofits is a national trend some say may change the nature of volunteering. With more than 79 million baby boomers starting to hit retirement age in five years, the need for nonprofits to pay attention to them as a main resource may seem obvious. But nonprofits may have to tweak their practices a bit to accommodate the most highly educated population to ever hit retirement.

One organization that specializes in connecting people over 55 with volunteer opportunities is the Retired & Senior Volunteer Program in New York City. Basically working as a clearing house, RSVP matches interested seniors, who go through an interview process so RSVP can find out about skills, interests and availability, with a nonprofit looking for help. After the interview process, the senior is given two or three options.

RSVP’s project director, Gajtana Simonovski, says that attracting the aging boomer generation to volunteer programs and maintaining them presents some unique challenges because, just as boomers didn’t settle for traditional roles in earlier stages of life, they aren’t going to settle for traditional volunteering roles.

“People find out they can do a lot more than the thought they could. If they’re good listeners, if they’re patient, whatever their different skills, we find those assignments that require those kind of skills. You may be thinking of just one thing like mentoring, but there may be other opportunities that fit within what your skill set is that you hadn’t thought about before,” Simonovski said.

“They don’t want to be stuffing envelopes,” she said. “And they don’t necessarily want to be working in a soup kitchen. There is that segment that wants, and demands, they be offered those volunteer opportunities—whether it’s marketing, public relations or financial systems—because that’s what will make them feel fulfilled, not the more general opportunities that had been done by the generation proceeding them.”

Of course she’s speaking in general terms and says there will always be those people who are perfectly happy to work in soup kitchens, but to truly tap into the boomers’ full potential, organizations will need to adapt.

“Because of the baby boomers’ different interests from the preceding generation, and because so many are coming in, volunteering opportunities have to be more specialized. Boomers are just not going to volunteer anywhere. The non-profits that are smart will create and offer opportunities that are thinking outside the usual volunteer assignment box and come up with ways to utilize these very savvy, professional volunteers,” Simonovski said.

She says one small way RSVP has already adapted to the changes is in it’s terminology. Though the word “senior” is part of the agency’s name, it’s being downplayed these days because for the boomer generation may not like the sound of that moniker. “Seniors are their parents, not them,” Simonovski said.

Another program that is taking advantage of the older generation’s increasingly educated and specialized backgrounds is the National Executive Service Corps. Made up of about 400 volunteers, NESC structures itself as a consulting firm that serves only nonprofits, helping them with strategic and marketing planning, human resources and personnel-searches.

And, according to NESC president Elizabeth J. Weber, it is an organization that offers the unique experience some older volunteers are demanding.

“We say that you spend the first third of your life learning,” Weber said. “The second third of your life earning. And the third part, if you’re lucky in the first two, returning, giving back to your community. And we offer an opportunity to individuals that is meaningful and it’s stimulating intellectually. It’s rewarding. It allows for a passion you might have for a particular sector or type of an organization, and allows you to make a difference. You can make a big difference. And it’s not routine or mundane kind of work. Doing it for a non-profit, it’s meaningful. You’re really contributing.”

She says one of the reasons consulting for nonprofits is interesting compared to for-profit consulting, is that NESC doesn’t just assign people to their areas of expertise. To get the most out of a volunteer, NESC conducts initial interviews to see what a person’s strengths and weaknesses are and uses the resulting information to assign projects.

Weber said that sometimes a potential volunteer comes with a particular set of skills and thinks that their abilities relate to a particular area, but in talking with NESC staff they “realize that there really is another area where they would be better able to contribute.

“We talk to them about that or they find out we have a program that is really exciting to them. They have never thought about that before, but they can see how that would be of interest to them. So we really try and do that rather than just have someone who’s been a, say, V.P. of marketing come in and say ‘I’m really an advertising guy.’ Well, maybe that’s not really what he is. Maybe he’s a problem solver.”

One person who agrees with her is NESC volunteer Sergio Sedita.

“I have to say, it’s been a great learning experience because I’ve been exposed to areas that I’ve never had known before,” he said.

Sedita, who consults for NESC as well as putting in two days a week at their office, came to NESC after six months of retirement. After working 40 years in a bank, his experience is fairly typical of retirees. “I took [an early retirement] package. I asked for it, you know. I thought I was prepared.

But the biggest shock is that you get up the next morning and say, ‘Now wait a minute. Is this the rest of my life?’”

He says he was unprepared for the lack of routine and purpose. When asked how he felt during those first six months after retiring, Sedita answers before the question is finished. “Bad. They were really soul searching months. I was pretty young still,” he chuckles. “It was a good time to do things and I look back on those months with no regret, but that six-month gap was tough. I didn’t have structure. I didn’t have focus.”

He believes a lot of people are caught off guard by retirement.

“Many people plan retirement on the financial side, but they don’t plan it on the emotional side.”

Esther Bowie, one of the Experience Corps volunteers helping children in the Bronx to read, echoes Sedita.

After a lifetime in retail management, Bowie retired in 1997. It was great at first, but then she had a nagging feeling that she should be doing something more important. After traveling various parts of the world for three years, she began to feel a need to give back and heard about Experience Corps from a woman at her church. “I want to get up every morning, have my breakfast, get out and do something,” she said.

With a laugh, she continued, “And dealing with these children—they’re learning their ABCs and I’m remembering my ABC’s. They’re learning how to count to one hundred. I’m remembering how to count to one hundred. And talking to them keeps my mind young and I know what’s happening. We help each other. They help me and I help them. They keep me young.”

It’s believed that seniors who volunteer enjoy healthier bodies and healthier minds as a result. One Johns Hopkins study found that 63 percent of seniors who volunteer, particularly in more intensive pastimes, are more physically active as a result of their participation in the program.

Jody Steinhardt, director of another such concentrated volunteer program, Senior Companions, says she’s seen these benefits with her volunteers.

Hosted in New York City by Henry Street Settlement, the Senior Companion Program is a volunteer program open only to people 60 years old or older who are at or below 135 percent of poverty. (In 2006, that meant a volunteer could make no more than $13,230 for the year.) Senior Companions provide services to the frail and homebound senior such as friendly visiting, recreation, escort to medical appointments or other places in the community as well as respite for caregivers. Additionally, volunteers alert family, caregivers, case managers and medical personnel to potential problems with the clients before they become major health issues. Volunteers receive $2.65 per hour for their time—money that can’t be taxed or used against any entitlements—as well as sick days, bereavement days and holidays.

In an effort to “prevent social isolation and encourage independent living at home,” the program is designed for older people who want to help frail seniors and serves elderly clients around NYC. There are no income limits for clients of Senior Companions.

Steinhardt says that besides the usual volunteering benefits of getting out of the house and working the mind, there are also the emotional benefits of knowing someone was helped directly by a volunteer’s actions. She says that because of the age relativity, the volunteers really bond with the clients.

“The uniqueness of our program,” Steinhardt says. “is that this is an intra-generational program. There are a dime-a-dozen friendly visiting programs out there these days but the bulk of them are intergenerational. We are the only program with exclusively seniors serving seniors. And we’re the only program of its kind in New York City. The uniqueness of that, and really what makes it so special, is that it’s a peer-to-peer relationship. Don’t get me wrong, I think intergenerational programs are fabulous. But the fact of the matter is that a 20-year-old college students isn’t always going to understand emotionally and physically where the 80 year old is when they are lonely and depressed because they’ve been living in their apartment for 50 years and they don’t know anyone on their floor anymore because everyone that they moved in with either moved away or died. Now they are still there, but they don’t have any idea who their neighbors are. A younger person isn’t going to understand the emotional aspect of being annoyed, of feeling you lost something because you have difficulty getting up out of the chair or you can’t cook Thanksgiving dinner for your family like you used to because you just don’t have the energy or that your arthritis is so bad that you just can’t do it anymore and that now you need to be the guest instead of the host. The Senior Companion, being in the same place of the life cycle, absolutely understands what that’s all about.”

Volunteers become so emotionally attached to the people they are helping, in fact, that Senior Companions has a policy requiring that each volunteer have at least two clients. This helps the volunteers confront the reality that the people they are helping are often frail and that “things happen,” Steinhardt says. The client may pass away, be moved to a long-term care facility or the family may live at a distance and move the person closer in order to be more involved in caregiving.

”If the volunteer has only one client, and something happens to the one client, what happens to the volunteer?” ask Steinhardt. The volunteer in turn may be troubled by the separation and have feelings of depression, loneliness or depression. Steinhardt said she learned this lesson the hard way. “We had a volunteer that we lost, and I saw it coming. I saw it coming. Her client passed away, and I said, ‘Watch her. Watch her. Watch her.’ and we never saw her again. I saw it coming because she only had the one client.”

Back in the elementary school, Esther Bowie says she, too, becomes extremely attached to the people she works with and that helping people is really what it’s all about. She said she likes to see the children progress and sees them in the hallways, asking how they are doing and reminding them of their days with her.

“I love it. I love it.” Bowie said. “I do it for pure love, just to be able to help those children realize that somebody’s concerned about them, that somebody really, really loves them. You have to be able to do something for someone else. Don’t just sit in a rocking chair and rock yourself to death.”

She says there is no way she could just sit home and do nothing. Besides helping children learn to read, she also volunteers for her church on the weekends. When asked why she chose to do something as intensive as teaching when she could have just as easily volunteered as an envelope stuffer somewhere, she responds with a grin, “I like a challenge.”

It’s a pleasurable challenge because she’s doing everything she can to make a difference in a young child’s life.

”Helping people, a little child. I don’t care if it’s a kindergartner or an eighth grader -- I just want to be able to help young people in this neighborhood to one day be something and to know they don’t have to stay where they are, that they can be somebody someday, and I just want to get it in their heads.”