Alert! Volunteering Probably Touches Your Life
By Amy Cohen-Callow

Whether you or an older family member volunteers or you are a professional in the human services, you are likely to cross paths with volunteers, and increasingly with those from the baby boomer cohort. At least 25% of adults 55 and older report that they volunteer (Unites States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 2007) with about one-third of baby-boomers indicating they will volunteer in later life (Pirsuta, 2004). In addition, more than 80% of charities (Hager & Brudney, 2004) and 98% of local government-based agencies include volunteers in their operations (Brudney, 1999). This suggests the importance of preparing human service professionals to work alongside of or to supervise older adult volunteers.

As a former practitioner, a researcher in volunteer management, and a social work faculty member teaching program management, I feel it is particularly important to educate leaders in human service agencies to develop, implement, and oversee volunteer programs. Volunteering provides benefits to both the volunteers themselves and the individuals and organizations affected by their services. Older adults are a particularly valuable group of volunteers with life skills, knowledge, and talents that complement the work of agency staff.

However, these benefits only accrue if we are able to effectively engage older adults in meaningful volunteer work. Baby boomers may seek different types of volunteer opportunities than previous older adult cohorts, requiring agencies to redesign their volunteer positions (Harvard/Met Life, 2004). Specifically, organizations need to consider challenging projects for highly skilled volunteers as well as special projects and short-term assignments for those balancing time demands (Eisner, 2005). Promising practices to guide volunteer program development point to the importance of thinking outside of the box when creating volunteer roles for the young and for the old alike (e.g., Campbell & Ellis, 2004). However, there is limited evidence-based information available for practitioners to use to develop their programs to meet the potential influx of newly retiring volunteers.

It is particularly important that our research on volunteerism provide tools that can be used to improve the volunteer experience. From a management perspective, knowing that an individual is disengaging from a volunteer assignment is valuable, because managers can then implement strategies to counteract this behavior before the volunteer terminates his or her relationship with the organization. This can maximize the benefits accrued from the volunteer-agency relationship which when terminated has the potential to be costly for the volunteer, the agency, and those served .

My dissertation study on volunteers 55 and older measures psychological climate (Brown & Leigh, 1996), which is an individual level measure of volunteers’ perceptions of the work environment. I anticipate that psychological climate will be related to the construct of organizational withdrawal, a measure of the degree of disengagement from one’s volunteer work (Laczo & Hansich, 2000). If there is support for this relationship, then managers may be able to identify when to intervene before a volunteer terminates his or her relationship with the organization. Such research may provide concrete, evidence-based tools that would be of particular use to human service practitioners who find themselves working alongside volunteers.

Amy Cohen-Callow, MSSW, is a doctoral candidate from the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Social Work studying volunteer work force development in the human services. After receiving her MSSW from Columbia University, she worked with the Community Service Society of New York’s Retired & Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), overseeing a number of volunteer programs and providing staff development related to managing volunteer programs engaging older adult. Ms. Cohen-Callow is also a Hartford Doctoral Fellow (Cohort VI).

References

Brudney, J.L., & Kellough, J.E. (2000). Volunteers in state government: Involvement, management, and benefits. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 29, 111-118.

Brown, S.P. & Leigh, T.W. (1996). A new looked at psychological climate and its relationship to job involvement, effort, and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81, 353-368.

Campbell, K. N & Ellis, S.J. (1999). The (Help!) I Don’t Have Enough Time Guide to Volunteer Management, Energize Inc.: PA.

Eisner, D. (2005). Engaging baby-boomers in meeting the challenges of the 21 st century: White House Conference on Aging Policy Recommendations. Retrieved November 29, 2007, from www.whcoa.gov/about/policy/meetings/WHCOA-packet_5-17-05.ppt

Hager, M.A., & Brudney, J.L. (2004). Volunteer Management: Practices and Retention of Volunteers. Washington D.C.: The Urban Institute.

Harvard School of Public Health-Met Life Foundation Initiative on Retirement and Civic Engagement (2004). Reinventing Aging: Baby Boomers and Civic Engagement. Cambridge, MA: Center for Health Communication Harvard School of Public Health and MetLife Foundation. Report retrieved June 2005 from http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/reinventingaging/Report.pdf

Laczo, R.M., & Hanisch, K.A. (2000). An examination of behavioral families of organizational withdrawal in volunteer workers and paid employees. Human Resource Management Review, 9, 453-477.

Prisuta, R. (2004). Enhancing volunteerism among aging boomers. In Reinventing Aging: Baby Boomers and Civic Engagement. Boston, MA: Harvard School of Public Healht, Center for Health Communication.

United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistic ( January 10, 2007). Volunteering in the United States, 2006. Retrieved from the Website: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm on December, 2007.