Millions of elderly Canadians find that volunteering is a way to good health and a rewarding life
Douglas Todd
Sun
CREDIT: Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun Bea Blackford, 81, leads (from left) Duff, 75, and Peggy, 66, Graham, and Bert Merrett, 86, in a round of the good old songs popularized during the Second World War.
CREDIT: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun John Kennedy (headset) and (from left) staff Pat Brown, Carol Graham, Ray Wagner and Roger Allford put their 30-minute Co-op Radio show together at the 411 Seniors’ Centre on Dunsmuir.
‘We solve the problems of the world and have a few laughs.”
That’s what John Kennedy says he and a couple of other seniors feel like they’re accomplishing each week during their 30-minute radio show for Greater Vancouver seniors.
For a decade, the broadcasters — front-line soldiers in a growing army of Canadian seniors who volunteer — have been covering subjects such as the history of Vancouver theatre; how to take advantage of the expert knowledge of pharmacists; stopping “identity theft” against the elderly and how government cutbacks have left some older B.C. women in abject poverty.
Kennedy, 67, a former CBC executive with the rich voice of a life-long radio man, says gathering each week at downtown Vancouver’s 411 Seniors Centre Society and putting together the program, which airs every Thursday at 2:30 p.m. on Co-op Radio (102.7 FM), is just one of many volunteer activities he has dived into since retiring in the late 1990s.
That’s when he suddenly noticed how so many people began looking at him differently.
“When I retired, all of sudden I became stupid. I’ve got over being ticked off about it. But it was as if people looked beyond you.”
Roughly 45 per cent of the 3.5 million Canadians over age 65 are now volunteering. They’re bypassing wages to follow their interests, presumably in a way that might also keep them appearing interesting to the many people who write off retired folks as a burden.
An average senior, according to Statistics Canada, now donates roughly 269 hours a year of volunteer service to non-profit organizations, an hourly figure that’s been gradually growing since 1997.
In addition to helping out, many seniors find volunteering an ideal way to avoid the sudden inactivity, isolation and even depression that can emotionally blindside people upon retirement.
Books have been written about the many seniors who expected to slip comfortably into accepting the “reward” of retirement after decades of hard wage slavery, only to find ennui.
Some studies show seniors’ emotional vacuum can be worse in so-called Sun Belts (which in Canada includes Greater Vancouver and Victoria), where many well-off seniors move to retire, but leave behind their friends, family and community network.
Millions of Canadian seniors are finding that volunteering, even just a few hours a week, is a way to connect to the larger world.
It’s a path to being useful, giving back to the community, building friendships, helping people in need, support the next generation and maintain meaning in the last third of one’s life.
A number of new medical studies are showing that such active altruism also has health benefits — seniors who volunteer are much more likely to live longer and feel happier.
Greater Vancouver seniors, like their national counterparts, are volunteering to serve in a myriad of roles: Providing palliative care to the dying, serving food, answering phones, guiding visitors through aquariums and museums, working with children in daycare and schools, peer-counselling other seniors and serving on a host of committees and boards.
Millions of Canadian seniors also volunteer through their religious institutions to support people both within their faith and in the wider community. Studies show religiously active Canadians are at least 35 per cent more likely to volunteer than the general population.
Kennedy, who not coincidentally is a lay reader at Holy Trinity Catholic Church near Lonsdale in North Vancouver, said he grew “panicky” when the potentially long years of retirement suddenly loomed before him.
To make sure he’d be occupied, he created a long to-do list. It included organizing the family photos, getting rid of the moss in the back yard and golfing.
He still hasn’t got around to the household chores.
Instead, Kennedy keeps himself engaged by voice-recording textbooks for sight-impaired University of B.C. students, making short promotional pitches for the United Way, co-organizing the recent Seniors Summit conference, sitting on a CBC pensions board and serving on a committee arranging the future of North Vancouver‘s Centennial Theatre.
As for golf, Kennedy only gets around to it about five times a year. He doesn’t like how a golf game can eat up almost an entire day. His friends bug him to play more, but for him there are too many other more challenging things to do.
The cluttered, busy interior of the seniors centre at 411 Dunsmuir won’t win any award for interior decorating. But it’s bustling with people and activity on any given day, with 250 volunteers, mostly Caucasian and Asian seniors, assisting at everything from Filipino dance classes and the thrift store to making sandwiches in the low-cost cafeteria.
As well, many older volunteers at the 411 Seniors Centre Society provide what turns out to be an enormously useful service each year for hundreds of often-low-income elderly who are struggling with their income tax, old age pension and other government forms.
“One serious problem we have is that the older you get the more you’re expected to fill out complicated forms,” says Charmaine Spencer, an adjunct professor in Simon Fraser University‘s Gerontology Research Centre.
“Fortunately, there are many retired people around who are able to help others work through bureaucracy. It’s just one of thousands of ways they pitch in. There is a public perception that seniors don’t contribute to society. It’s unfortunate and highly inaccurate.”
Spencer says Canadians would be a lot worse off if almost half of the country’s seniors weren’t volunteering their time, energy and skills. In some ways, people in their late 50s, 60s and 70s are taking up the slack left by younger generations, where both members of family couples are now forced to work, leading to a decline in volunteerism among middle-aged people.
That doesn’t mean the baby-boom generation doesn’t have good intentions for their retirement years. A recent Investors Group survey showed 70 per cent of Canadian boomers plan to spend some or a lot of their time volunteering in retirement.
The image of seniors helping seniors fill out complex government forms illustrates one of the big challenges when it comes to volunteerism among the elderly:
Aging men and women who are well-off and educated tend to volunteer much more than those on low incomes with less education. Among seniors with university degrees, Statistics Canada figures show 75 per cent are volunteering, compared to only one in three with incomes less than $20,000.
There are many practical reasons low-income people aren’t able to volunteer. In addition to many believing they don’t have valuable skills, they often can’t afford transportation. That’s one of the many reasons, Spencer says, she opposed the B.C. Liberal government’s attempt, aborted in the past few years, to cut seniors bus passes.
She also disagreed with the B.C. government reducing funding to scores of non-profit service organizations.
Spencer believes it had a two-pronged effect.
On one level, she thinks the cuts were in part responsible for the rising numbers of volunteering seniors who tried to make up for reduced government programs.
On the other hand, she believes the cuts hurt specific charity organizations, many of which lost their volunteer coordinators, the staff members who recruit and train volunteer seniors.
Spencer urges all elderly people — particularly those who live on low incomes, struggle with health problems, or don’t think they’re capable of taking on big responsibilities — to recognize there is almost always something to which they can give support.
Many organizations are looking for people who can serve food, answer phones, direct people or help clean up. And some non-profits will help volunteers pay the transportation costs required to get them to their chosen duties.
Whatever it is that motivates seniors to stand up and become involved as volunteers, studies make it clear those who do so often open the door to a more contented life. Separate studies conducted at Harvard and Cornell universities, for instance, found that seniors who volunteered were happier than those who did not. They maintained a higher level of personal satisfaction and purpose in life.
“Volunteering significantly reduces the levels of toxic stress in our lives, thus offering protection from depression and perhaps even from some physical illnesses,” says Faith in the Future: Healthcare, Aging and the Role of Religion, by Duke University‘s Dr. Harold Koenig.
Some health-care researchers have worried that many older people, suddenly released from the responsibilities of earning money and raising children, can literally become bored to death.
But long-term studies of hundreds of seniors by different teams at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan found that seniors who regularly volunteered lived longer.
The researchers concluded there was a direct health benefit to such altruism — and that included people who volunteered outside the bounds of formal organizations, such as caring for ailing family members or friends.
In some ways, such studies show that we’re hard-wired to cooperate and be in helping relationship with others, says Koenig.
“The sense of purpose and joy enjoyed by older volunteers combats stress on a daily basis and helps prevent stress-related negative physical and emotional health effects.”
“Seniors run virtually every aspect of the 411 Seniors Centre Society,” says executive director Carol Lloyd.
Their volunteer activities at the downtown United Way agency range from serving on the centre’s 15-member board to chatting up people at the reception desk, where a rotating crew of friendly volunteers spend four hours each week greeting the organization’s multi-ethnic visitors.
The community feel of the 411 Centre is revealed in the scenes of elderly folks laughing over a game of Scrabble, eating in the dining room, cyber-surfing on the building’s free computers, teaching Spanish or organizing the centre’s annual Aging With Pride event for homosexual, bisexual or transgendered seniors.
But while the 411 Seniors Centre is a particularly vibrant volunteer-shaped operation (which receives only 15 per cent of its funding from governments), many similar seniors organizations provide equally satisfying opportunities to volunteer.
They include agencies such as the highly active North Vancouver’s Seniors Hub, which has a troop of seniors volunteering to drive around other seniors, pick up their groceries, serve as “telefriends” to shut-ins, organize social activities and walks for people with dementia, lead discussion programs for the elderly and take care of their grocery shopping.
B.C. seniors are also volunteering through some uniquely targeted programs.
They include Volunteer Grandparents, which matches seniors with children. The replacement “grandparents” take children to movies and parks and often attend their birthday parties, graduations and school concerts. Many of these fill-in grandparents also share their wisdom by mentoring in classrooms.
As well, the B.C. Coalition to Eliminate Abuse Against Seniors is one of many volunteer-run organizations providing peer counselling. It’s staff include women in their late 70s providing gentle support over the phone for often-lonely people in crisis.
Some senior volunteers, meanwhile, prefer to sign up for social activism.
As well as high-profile Raging Granny musical protest groups, other organizations devoted to advocacy and political education include The Seniors Network BC and The Women Elders in Action.
“A lot of seniors, in addition to wanting to stay mentally active and involved in their community, want to help build a better future for their grandchildren,” says Spencer.
“They’re concerned about protecting the environment and ensuring decent-paying jobs. Their activism is not only a way to avoid isolation, but to build on things that have been important to them all their lives.”
Of course, many seniors perform volunteer work that doesn’t get measured by Statistics Canada, since it’s not associated with a formal non-profit organization. They’re the battalions of seniors directly involved in raising their grandchildren.
“With so many dual-income households,” says Spencer, “I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve been at with seniors serving on various boards, who say they have to leave promptly to take care of their grandkids.”
The opportunities for seniors to volunteer seem almost limitless. While there are B.C. seniors volunteering to take care of stray animals, visit people in hospitals, deliver Meals on Wheels and serve as docents, or guides, at railway museums, others do their bit through music.
For more than 30 years, Bee Blackford, an 81-year-old pianist, has been joining with friends from Kitsilano’s Billy Bishop Legion to regularly sing Second World War-era tunes at the Bamford extended care unit at Vancouver General Hospital.
For nothing more than a few potato chips and the satisfaction of realizing they’re appreciated, the volunteers will croon through the hits of Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra and the war.
“The seniors in the hospital can’t come to us, so we go to them,” Blackford says. “It’s amazing the looks they’ll get on their faces when they hear some of the old songs like You Must Remember This. It gives you a wonderful feeling.”
FINDING FULFILLING VOLUNTEER WORK:
– Think about the kind of work you like and do well. Honestly assess your skills. Some people thrive on organizing offices or doing repair work, while others get more out of face-to-face interactions. Some volunteers might blossom doing construction work while others will find it meaningful to spend time with the terminally ill.
– Take a realistic look at how much you can do and when. Most senior volunteers only work a few hours a week. Are mornings or afternoons best? Would you like, for instance, to volunteer on weekends to avoid spending too much time watching TV?
– Don’t hang back because you think you have no talent. Spending time with lonely seniors in acute-care facilities simply requires patience and compassion.
– Don’t knowingly volunteer with an organization or people with whom you might not be comfortable.
– Pace yourself. Many volunteer seniors burn out early because they take on too much of a burden, a mistake which negates the stress-reduction benefits of altruism.
– If transportation problems stop you from volunteering, see if the organization you’d like to help can assist with your travel;
– There are tens of thousands of volunteer-seeking service organizations in Canada, many of which are listed with the United Way.
Source: Give to Live: How Giving Can Change Your Life, by Douglas Lawson (ALTI Publishing, San Diego).
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
