Volunteering the Wisdom of Their Ages

By LYNN SMITH

Aug. 18, 1997 12 AM PT

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

At 81, Don Weir, a former businessman and teacher, was six years into what most would consider a well-deserved retirement--reading, gardening, playing tennis and, he says, chasing his 80-year-old wife--when his daughter challenged him to do more with his life. “She said, ‘You’re reading too many books. Start mentoring or tutoring.’ She said we had things to offer in spite of our age. She said, ‘Find something. Go do it.’ ”

After a search to see where they were needed, the Beverly Hills couple found the Remedial Reading and Learning Center in the heart of Los Angeles. After three months, Weir said he’s passed on to teenagers little tricks to memorizing American history, fun steps to learning algebra, and has inspired a stutterer to write and read out loud an essay about her future.

“I’m getting a kick out of it,” he said. “And I definitely feel some of these kids have really leaped in their enthusiasm.”

Erica Areyan, a junior at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies magnet school, said Weir helped raise her geometry grade from a C to a B. “He gave me catchy little phrases to memorize the quadratic formula--and it worked. He was very patient.” She said she didn’t believe him at first when he told her that she was smart in math, but now she does. “The capability is definitely there,” she said.

To the architects of the new era of smaller government and bigger citizenship, the Weirs represent the shifting face of retirement. Rather than golfers, card players or candidates for nursing homes, national leaders envision a mobilized corps of vigorous senior citizens, lending time and talent to help solve some of the nation’s most serious social problems.

More than issuing seniors a vague call to “volunteer,” Harris Wofford, chief executive officer for the federally supported Corporation for National Service, said the goal is to inspire and direct seniors into service projects that make use of their talent to help alleviate such problems as illiteracy or the isolation and unnecessary institutionalization of the elderly. As it stands now, finding meaningful projects that welcome volunteers isn’t always easy.

Already, though, Habitat for Humanity is using seniors to drive RVs from site to site for home-building blitzes, Wofford told the National Retired Teachers Assn. meeting last week in San Diego. In some police departments, seniors are serving as management consultants or on citizen patrols, checking on their more frail counterparts.

The corporation has also begun a nine-city “Seniors for Schools” initiative that recruits and trains seniors to work in teams as tutors and reading coaches with teachers and administrators. The program, part of President Clinton’s “America Reads Challenge,” aims to ensure that all children can read well by third grade. Now, 40% of all third-graders are not reading at grade level.

Wofford, 71, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania who helped launch the Peace Corps in the ‘60s and helped conceive April’s President’s Summit on Service, has himself begun tutoring a third-grader in Washington, D.C.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the envelope-stuffing or cap-crocheting projects that many volunteer programs now offer seniors, Wofford said. It’s just that they don’t attract the retired teachers, Army officers, industrial foremen or policemen who could make a significant difference in their communities. “Imagine what a good retired policeman could do organizing after-school programs,” he said.

Concern over how to engage people who are retiring earlier and living longer is mounting now that the over-55 population is expected to nearly double from about 34 million to 64 million by 2030--outnumbering the younger population. Only 5% of the elderly population will require nursing home-type care and less than 20% will have any barriers to fully participating in community activities, said Tom Endres, director of the Corporation’s Senior Service Corps.

The corps runs a network of programs, including the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, which matches 455,000 senior volunteers with needs in their communities, and two programs, Foster Grandparents and Senior Companions, that offer stipends to low-income seniors.

Whether baby boomers will actually have the financial means or will have retained any of their fabled ‘60s idealism is a matter of conjecture. To attract the diverse group of future retirees to volunteer on a scale large enough to make a dent in social problems, Endres said his program is promoting a menu of volunteer options, including offering modest stipends or education awards in return for service.

While the notion of paid volunteers has drawn some controversy in regard to the corporation’s best-known program, Americorps, officials contend a cadre of volunteers committed to 15 to 20 hours a week can provide a structure to leverage more no-cost involvement from others.

John Rother, a director of the mammoth American Assn. of Retired Persons, which has run a volunteer talent bank for years, said that group has never had a problem finding people willing to volunteer. The problem, he said, has been in finding community organizations that can provide meaningful work.

“Many of the locally based community organizations haven’t really incorporated in a serious way volunteers in the main thrust of what they’re trying to accomplish,” he said. When such groups receive a list of 30 willing volunteers, they often take only two or three and direct them mostly to menial activities, he said.

Sometimes “turf” problems prevent paid staff from turning over responsibility to volunteers. “That’s a real challenge for the nonprofit community to do more than give lip service to volunteerism,” he said.

When they do, advocates say the benefits can range from reduced costs for elder care to improving senior voters’ support for school bond issues.

For instance, officials said that two schools in the South Bronx, the nation’s poorest congressional district, saw amazing results after one year of a “Seniors for Schools” pilot program. Teams of 15 neighbors at public schools 154 and 156 created their own projects, teaching hygiene and manners, rewarding attendance, reorganizing an underused library and giving after-school lessons in carpentry and dance.

RSVP project coordinator Becky Haase said children became less disruptive, teachers had more time to teach, and new family-like bonds were formed between the seniors and the youngsters, whose own parents have resisted efforts to get them involved at school.

Teachers, too, who were initially leery of untrained adults on campus were won over the first day once they saw how capable and sophisticated the seniors were, Haase said. “The need is so great, they’re always asking ‘Can you bring in more?’ ”

What’s more, each of the New York neighbors found friends in the volunteer group. “A community isn’t just a geographic base where you live,” Rother said. “It’show people interact. Volunteer programs are a way of getting people to interact face to face.

“You don’t find after getting people involved in this, that they go home and start watching TV again. It builds momentum and a sense of possibility.”

Similarly, in Los Angeles, the Family Friends Project, a Jewish Family Service program that matches seniors with families who have chronically ill or otherwise vulnerable children, has helped lower divorce rates in stressed out families, said project director Terry Shajirat. It has also helped people cross racial and ethnic lines to become friends, and in some cases has provided a family for the senior volunteers.

Retired teacher Cecilia Manzo, 74, was matched with the Figueroas, a family in her Inglewood neighborhood with nine children, one of whom has leukemia. Not only has she helped with the boy’s transportation and homework, Evilia Figueroa said Manzo has helped her talk to doctors and take care of older children when she was overwhelmed with responsibilities.

“We just love Cecilia,” she said. “We can’t live without her.”

Manzo, a single woman without children, said she loves to see them all pour out the door when she arrives and smother her with affection when she leaves. “I feel like they’re my family.”

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How to Get Started

Some Southern California offices of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program:

Burbank: (818) 953-9503

Culver City: (310) 559-5088

Long Beach: (310) 492-6555

Los Angeles, downtown: (213) 621-2242

East Los Angeles: (213) 265-9592

Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley: (818) 908-5070

West Los Angeles: (310) 394-9871

Los Angeles, Hollywood: (213) 461-4363

Palm Desert: (619) 340-4312