with cognitive or visual impairments should not be driving. The point is not the age, it’s the condition that counts.
Volunteering
Huge numbers of volunteers, in all sorts of sectors of society, are in fact ‘older people’. About a third of us in Britain volunteer regularly, though some of that may be extremely infrequently. Many organizations rely heavily on older people to make their activities work, whether it is helping schools with reading or helping in care homes – in some care homes the average age of the volunteers is higher than that of the residents. Large numbers of older people volunteer at the National Trust – I met a National Trust volunteer in her eighties who had become one of the country’s leading experts in eighteenth-century furniture polishing. There are older volunteers in hospitals, working on anything from shopping trolleys to libraries, from showing people around to helping people who have mobility difficulties.
There has been a range of government schemes to encourage older people into volunteering, from the Experience Corps, which has sadly gone into abeyance, more or less, and was perceived to be unsuccessful by government, to Volunteering in the Third Age (VITA), and enormously effective operations run by charities like Help the Aged, Age Concern and CSV. But government has been obsessed with younger people volunteering – perhaps understandably – and has therefore mistakenly failed to keep a focus on older people becoming volunteers. The government can’t tell anyone, young or old, what to do, but financial support for older people volunteering – and organizing volunteering doesn’t come free – makes a huge difference to how older people feel, and to what they provide for the wider population. It also means they require less healthcare and general support if they are being active and feel useful.
The major focus of the government agenda on volunteering is on younger people, and particular groups of socially excluded people, those without educational qualifications, or with disabilities and long-term life-limiting illnesses, and members of black and minority ethnic communities, so older people do not always figure. Yet their contribution is vast: the VITA project’s final report in 2007 looked at 477 organizations, involving a total of 1.3 million volunteers, two thirds of them over 50.16 Older people are also disproportionately involved in the delivery of care to other older people.
One of the reasons they do it is to give them a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. The other benefits to the volunteers are obvious: enjoyment, health, a structure for the day, active participation in local communities, increased confidence and new experiences. The organizations that use them also gain, and so does society, from their long experience and skills, the ability to make connections between services and their users.
Take Roger Withers, for example.17 He spends his time as a befriender at a local day centre at the age of 81 and eleven years after the death of his wife. Or Peggy Crudace, 85, who lives in a high rise block in Newcastle, which has within it a community flat jointly owned by social services and Community Service Volunteers. Peggy’s ‘commitment to involving people is one of the reasons the community flat is so successful. When she is not acting as treasurer, and taking care of the book-keeping, she is helping with the lunches, baking cakes, buns and tarts, organizing raffles, going to art classes, making decorated birthday and Christmas cards and even abseiling when she has the chance.’18
Or Ted Howell, 80, who was told by his wife who was already volunteering as a befriender ‘not to be a slouch’. He takes people to hospital in wheelchairs, takes them shopping or to the hairdresser, and does anything else with them they want. Like so many, Ted is downbeat about what he does: ‘It drives me out of bed … it can be a pain in the backside,’ he says. ‘But it gets me to meet some very nice people.’
WRVS, well known for its work with older people, has suggested that we designate Christmas Day as ‘Independence Day’ for older people, in their honour, and, second, that we use the 3.5 million years of experience WRVS’s own volunteers have between them to help others have a stress-free Christmas. To do that, they set up WiseLine at Christmas 2007, by both phone and email, to advise on everything from keeping the peace in families to present buying, cooking for a variety of different diets to solving the mysteries of fairy lights that do not function.
In their press pack, they highlighted a Liverpool volunteer called Maria who suggested having diversions at hand when tempers look as if they might get heated, and Shirley from Devon, 72, who has volunteered for 18 years and has just stopped running the lunch club which feeds up to 100 people each week – including people whom the local GPs beg them to take on because of loneliness, depression and simply a lack of things to do. And they do Christmas lunch as well.
But her most important point was about how you can still function as you get older:
When it comes to ageing, I think some people think that the brain stops when the legs don’t work so well, but if people get out and stay active, it keeps them engaged. People in their eighties can use email. One of our ladies was given a laptop by her grandson for her 90th. She went to computer classes and used it to email him in Australia, and to tell me when she could not attend or start her car!19
These are not isolated stories. The truth is that, both in formal volunteering and in the enormous effort that individual volunteers make to help neighbours on a regular basis, old people are keeping the wheels of the community running. They are doing so even when they are frail and disabled themselves.
Barriers to volunteering
In some ways, the situation with older volunteers is the mirror image of older people in employment. They volunteer in overwhelming numbers and their contribution to society is huge and irreplaceable. But there are still barriers nonetheless, certainly according to 2006 research for VITA and Volunteering England by Colin Rochester and Brian Thomas.20 Some are about the sometimes forbidding image of volunteering, and having the confidence to put yourself forward. Some are practical barriers, such as transport, particularly for poorer or disabled people. There are bureaucratic barriers related to the prevailing risk-averse official culture. There are barriers because of jargon and technology.
Insurance is one area which simply has to be tackled. Where formal volunteer networks turn people away simply because of their age, it is often because this has been stipulated by an insurance company. This is, in itself, a terrible injustice – not just to the individuals who are sent home to moulder, but to all those people they were able and willing to help. If somebody is fit and able to make a contribution, it cannot be beyond the wit of society to insist that they should be allowed to do so.
Inter-generational volunteering
The stories of much older people volunteering are heart-warming, but there may also be opportunities here that are being missed. The first of these is meeting the urgent need for inter-generational volunteering.
Some of this is happening already. Johanna Atkinson, 93, is helping children with reading but also telling them about her wartime experiences.21 Iris Denny, 83, helps 5–6 year olds and 9–10 year olds with their numeracy. Judith Cohen, 80, helps young children to read and says: ‘It makes me learn patience and humour in order to listen to slow readers.’ Inter-generational volunteering works and gives pleasure all round. But, compared to the widespread need, it is still a drop in the ocean. Some children never meet anyone older than their parents; others never meet anyone with any time. Older children badly need the time
