A Call To Service
William D. Novelli
AARP Executive Director and CEO
Joint Conference of NCOA and ASA
Civic Windfall: How We Can Revolutionize Retirement and
Revitalize America
Denver, CO
April 4, 2002 at 8:00 a.m.
We're here this morning to talk about our Civic Windfall-the growing number of vibrant retired men and women, and others not yet retired, whose experience and talents can help revitalize America. I like that phrase, Civic Windfall. A "Windfall" can be one of two things. It can be something blown down by the wind, such as fruit from a tree. Or, it can be an unexpected stroke of luck. It is, of course, a metaphor, though we don't usually think of wind blowing apples off trees when we use the word. Let me suggest that we should. Or let me put it like this: there has to be a wind to make the fruit fall from the trees. And then, there has to be someone-or many people-to harvest the fruit once it has fallen. I think, when we talk about a civic windfall to revolutionize retirement and revitalize America, we have to be both the wind and the harvesters.
This is important because we are looking at two profound facts of American life that are converging at this moment. The first is that there is a greater need than ever for voluntary community service. Many of our fellow citizens, of all ages, need help of one kind or another. Moreover, there are those who want to turn more and more social services over to private organizations. The second fact is that we have a growing population of people with the time and the capacity to serve others. And, I believe, they also have the desire to serve and will serve once they have a focus.
We know that Americans are already great volunteers. Fifty-six percent of us volunteer our time-and I'm rather proud to tell you that 65 percent of AARP members do the same. But even so, older people are still under-utilized in community service. Many do not volunteer at all, and many others volunteer only occasionally and briefly. Providing a focus for voluntary community service, then, is important. Equally important is finding a dedicated and steady supply of volunteers. And we know where to look for that supply. In fact, we have two places
.First, we have retirees. Many are not ready for, or interested in, full-time leisure. Marc underscored that in his book Prime Time. Toward the beginning of the book, he writes about some blue-collar retirees from Boston's North Shore:
"Most of these men…were unprepared psychologically and socially to retire. For decades, the structure, human contact, and purpose in their lives had come, to a significant extent, from work. Now they found themselves in the position the great labor leader Walter Reuther years earlier had characterized as 'too old to work, too young to die.' They didn't consider themselves senior citizens: They weren't ready for the casino trips to Atlantic City. The local senior center had little to offer them. By default, they were spending their days staring at Phil Donahue, doing odd jobs around the house, and driving their spouses crazy."
Perhaps you've known men like these. They often describe themselves as "working stiffs," with the emphasis on "working." In retirement, they just felt stiff, as in "bored stiff." And it's pretty obvious that their feelings had nothing to do with blue collars or white collars. All of us acquire some of our identity and sense of purpose from work. Without work-especially when work ends abruptly-anyone's identity and sense of purpose suffer.
These men fell off the tree and were just lying around. And, as Marc points out, some of them were harvested to do some very valuable community work. Simply, they did good for others and for themselves, not to mention their poor spouses. And they did this multiple good because someone gave them a focus-the job to be done. The focus, as I've said, has nothing to do with class or income. It's all about-really, it's only about-a powerful human desire to work and to serve.
People like these men represent what my predecessor, Horace Deets, used to call "the vitality bonus" we are enjoying in America. It is not just that we have more people living more years. No, it's that we have more people living more years with the strength, will, and determination to keep doing something. What we must do-and this is what I mean by focus-is find ways that will allow people to keep doing… and doing good.
This does not apply only to retired persons. Our second important source of volunteers should be the Baby Boomers, the people born between the end of World War Two and the arrival of the Beatles. They have shown remarkable energy, an unstoppable belief that they can change anything from politics to hairstyles to living arrangements, and a continual adaptation to the new. It will be invaluable to capture-and put to good use-the Boomers' energy, beliefs, and adaptability. I come at this from a marketing background, so I'll put this in marketing terms: you don't turn your back on a segment like this one and hope to succeed. We have to shake the tree-which has nearly 76 million Boomers ripening on it-then harvest the Boomers and convince them that there is something important for them to do. The effort is no less pressing than the efforts we need to harvest retired men and women.
This is how we see it at AARP. We want to market, promote, and sell community service to our members and to all adults 45 and older. I want to stress this last point. We are a membership organization and, naturally, AARP's first concerns are with members. But even those who are not yet old enough to join or have not yet seen the light have a great deal to offer-and we need them. America needs them. Many of our neighbors need them desperately. So we need to bring about the fruitful convergence of community service and growing need.
How are we going to do this? Painstakingly, in a word. In the many words of our AARP Community Service Initiative, like this:
- First we must recognize that there are obstacles to focused voluntary community service. So we must identify them and overcome them.
- Second, we must establish valuable and practical goals.
- Third, we must devise strategies to make the goals work.
Let me take these one at a time.
First, obstacles. Despite the high percentage of volunteerism among Americans, it is not yet high enough and not always well focused. The first obstacle is lack of knowledge about what community service opportunities may be available in any given community. Some people have the ingrained habit of looking around for some volunteer work. Many others - I suspect most - do not. If they volunteer, it is because a friend or relative has roped them in. That's fine, but it would be better if we can find better ways of promoting the need for volunteers-to make the needs and the opportunities to do something about them unavoidable, plain as the nose on your face.
A second obstacle is that there are, in some places, too many competing opportunities. This is not bad, of course, but if the different opportunities are not clearly differentiated-according to need, the talents required, and so forth-many would-be volunteers might find themselves in a bad match and just give up. Winnowing the right opportunity for a particular individual from just any old opportunity may be the difference between a veteran volunteer and one-timer.
The third obstacle is a matter of perception, especially of large organizations. I think AARP provides a good example. AARP was founded by volunteers, has a volunteer Board and volunteer officers in Washington and in all the states. Many of our National Community Service Programs are staffed by volunteers-tens of thousands of them. Our founder, Ethel Percy Andrus, gave us a motto which we still use: "To serve, not to be served." But, AARP is not known for volunteerism and service. We are better known for our advocacy in defending Social Security and Medicare, for insurance, for our magazines and for discounts. I'm glad of that, but it is an incomplete picture, so it is up to us to let our members and others know that community service is just as important to AARP as these other activities.
AARP's Community Service Initiative is still a work in progress. But we believe we have identified three goals which will make the initiative a success-and will play a part in revitalizing America.
First goal, AARP members and adults 45 and older will increase their involvement in community service. This goal, like the others is complex. It includes as its objectives:
- Increasing the numbers of members who volunteer for community service,
- Increasing the satisfaction of members the community from involvement, and
- Increasing the number of members who look to AARP as a resource for information about community service.
I think it would be premature to say by what absolute numbers or percentages we would like to see all these increases. But I look forward to all of them being measurable and substantial. The results-a revitalized America-are of course more important than numbers, but there is strength in numbers, the bigger the better.
Second goal, communities will be improved through the community efforts of AARP and its members. As I said, it's results we're after. The objectives here are that:
- Communities' utilization of AARP's resources will increase,
- Their satisfaction with our community services will increase, and
- There will be more service activities to meet important community needs through the efforts of AARP as an organization and through the efforts of its members. To measure this, we will develop a benchmark for "level of service."
Third goal, AARP and its members will be seen as caring and personally relevant because of AARP community service. Again, the objectives are complex. They are to:
- Increase the number of members and potential members who associate AARP with community service,
- Increase the number of members who cite community service as a reason to begin or renew membership,
- Increase awareness among the public and community leaders of AARP's community service activities,
- Increase public recognition of the value older men and women bring to community service activities, and
- Increase the association of the attributes "caring" and "connected to me" with AARP.
As our Community Service Initiative advances from a work in progress to an operational plan, we will assign values to increases of numbers and percentages, of awareness and recognition and pursue them efficiently and avidly. This is serious business, and we will be serious and businesslike as we put the Initiative into practice.
The strategies we will deploy to make these goals real are, naturally, critical. Goals are good intentions. Strategies are the maps that make sure the good intention pave the road… to a good place, the right destination. In detail, our strategies for AARP's Community Service Initiative have a lot to do with our internal workings. But in larger strokes, they will tell you some important things.
The first strategy is to have a unifying theme. We call it AARP's Call to Service. This serves as our umbrella: it sharpens the focus of our activities and, in a simple phrase, captures what we intend to do.
The second strategy is to have an annual signature event - AARP's National Day of Service. We actually had our first one last December. Staff and many volunteers devoted one full day to volunteering with various community organizations. The headquarters building was very quiet that day. Or so I hear-I was out volunteering with everyone else. We want to expand this event to involve other organizations and individuals. Our experience was that this one-day event demonstrated how much can be done with planning and organization. Instead of scattering efforts here and there, we were able to concentrate resources in the numbers needed in the right places. We also raised our staff's and volunteers' awareness about the opportunities for community service and the payoff in satisfaction that community service delivers. This has led us to develop an employee volunteer program as part of our Community Service Initiative.
Our third strategy is largely internal. We want to integrate volunteerism and community service into our other program areas. For example, we are beginning a new integrated initiative that focuses on issues around independent living, long-term care and end-of-life care and quality. We're calling it Life Choices for now. We've identified 18 outcomes we hope to achieve with regard to:
- Prevention - Prolonging healthy living and independence
- Empowerment - Expanding information, resources and confidence to make decisions
- More and Better Choices - Expanding options in services and care settings, and
- More and Better Financial Tools - Expanding options for financing care and support.
We see this as an opportunity to make a real difference in people's lives and in the nation's well-being. And, we envision this as a collaborative effort that not only engages volunteers, but also incorporates advocacy, community service, information and education and other strategies.
This leads me to our fourth strategy - partnerships. We can't achieve any of our community service goals or implement our Life Choices Initiative without reaching out to - and joining with - other organizations. And, that's what we are doing. If our goal is to revitalize America, there is room for everyone and a place for everyone. We want to cooperate, we want to collaborate, we want to share the work, share the satisfaction, and share the glory. We also don't want to reinvent the wheel.
Let me give you a particularly pertinent example. I talked about empowerment in expanding information, resources and confidence to make decisions. Two of our key outcomes include helping people to navigate through the tons of information that they have to deal with to find answers - understandable answers - and helping to direct lower income adults 50+ to information about benefits to which they may be entitled.
I was talking to Jim Firman about this, and he said that we should consider partnering with NCOA on their Benefits CheckUp. We began discussing this among our staffs and decided that by joining forces we could greatly expand the reach of the program and have a tremendous impact. So, this morning, I'm happy to announce a new partnership that includes AARP, NCOA and AOL for an expanded Benefits CheckUp. There are two versions of this service: one for individuals to use themselves and another for organizations that serve older Americans.
I am excited about the possibilities that this partnership holds. This is a real breakthrough for increasing access to public benefits because if offers several features that will help more low-income people gain access to benefits they need.
- It's web-based, easy to navigate and oriented toward solutions
- One place for centralized, streamlined benefits screening to determine what benefits a person qualifies for
- Information on specific application steps
- Help from community service organizations in making applications and securing benefits
- Connects national and local information sources and people.
This last point is so important. As we develop our Community Service Initiative and our programs such as Life Choices, we want to develop national programs and bring our volunteers into them. But we want to retain flexibility so that the states may develop community service activities and put them into practice. They, after all, can see local needs more clearly than anyone else. What we want is as much wind as possible, from all directions, to shake the tree, and then as many hands as possible to gather up the fruit and put it to good use.
To this end, we must all use the full measure of our brands, our prestige, and our history to put the skills and talents of volunteers to work in community service. If we do, we will make the convergence of great need and available help a success of revitalization, not just an historical trend. We will do this by mobilizing older Americans to be a real force for social change-change for the better-in America. And we will do this by assuring benefits to those who volunteer, to their organizations, and to America. It's going to be a powerful wind; there will be many busy and happy hands; and together, we will all share in the harvest.
