A return to helping one another?
Restoring a more robust life at home
But staying at home (according to the most recent census data, the vast majority of the elderly do — only 1 percent of those aged 65 to 74 lived in a nursing home, while 18 percent of those aged over 85 did) does not necessarily mean that the life being lived at home is fulfilling. Older people, not infrequently, suffer from isolation and depression as they lose contact with other people. Friends and spouses die, and getting out of the house becomes more physically challenging.
“Villages provide a way to bring together older adults who otherwise might be more isolated from one another,” explained Andrew Scharlach, a professor and director of the Center for Advanced Study of Aging Services at the University of California, Berkeley. Villages keep older people “more active, more engaged, more involved — to create more of a sense of community,” he said.
In addition to providing help with chores and errands, Capitol Hill Village is among the subset of Villages that offers a wide array of social activities. It has frequent discussion groups on cinema, literature, and politics (which some younger residents of the neighborhood also attend), outings to theatrical productions and sports events, dinners and potlucks, a walking club, and Qigong (breathing and body movement) classes. Its volunteers and members will even visit other members simply to offer company. According McDonough, almost all of the organization’s social programs and services are provided by member volunteers. The weekly Qigong class, for example, is led by a member who is in her 70s and has multiple sclerosis, and McDonough said, “she has a following of 15 members.”
Giving and getting
As currently constituted, Villages are a self-selecting group: they are populated by those who have decided it’s a good idea to come together to help each other as they age. But even in this context, those in need of help are sometimes reticent.
Some people don’t want to give up the privacy required to let a volunteer they may not know (or even someone they know) into their home to help with cleaning and laundry, for instance. If someone is not accustomed to asking for help from peers and neighbors, then it can be a challenging prospect. It requires trust and allowing others to see vulnerability, and entails a more personal connection than when paying a third party for help.
The intimacy of helping
Giving and getting assistance can entail a significant level of intimacy and trust. For example, an elderly female member at Ashby Village (we’ll call her Mrs. Jones) asked the Village to connect her with a volunteer for a ride to the doctor’s office. Typically the volunteer would simply drive a member to and from, waiting during the appointment.
This time, Mrs. Jones asked the volunteer to write down her recollection of the doctor’s findings and instructions on taking her medication. The volunteer made sure that Mrs. Jones spoke with her doctor once more before leaving to ensure that she understood the details clearly.
Then the volunteer drove Mrs. Jones to the pharmacy, filled her prescription, took her home and went over the medication routine with her once again. This meant that both Mrs. Jones and the volunteer had to trust each other and navigate boundaries that are often avoided by people who aren’t family or paid assistants.
At Ashby Village, in Berkeley, California, Andy Gaines, its executive director, said that when the organization started two-and-a-half years ago, many of its members were people who already understood the culture of mutual aid (if not necessarily its mechanics). But the task of acquainting more people with the idea and experience of mutual aid, a fundamental precept of Ashby Village, and with the trust it requires — over 80 percent of its services are provided by volunteers — is a constant process.
“It’s always coming up in different ways,” Gaines said. “We address it on the pragmatic level by building people’s comfort and confidence that they can ask for something.”
From the outset the organization had challenges soliciting requests from members; only a few calls came in each month. “People just didn’t want to ask,” he said. “Either they didn’t perceive themselves as needing [help], or they didn’t necessarily feel the sense of confidence yet in the safety, the value, the skill they would get,” Gaines explained. To address this, the Village “had a pretty active marketing campaign” to encourage people to request help. As was true from the beginning, Ashby Village has had no shortage of assistance. Today there are 130 volunteers to help its 250 members.
The service most frequently requested and provided by Ashby Village is transportation, which is true at the majority of Villages across the country. But, as was pointed out in an Ashby Village newsletter, there can be a variety of other needs, including some which may not immediately occur to members: “help arranging a veggie platter for wedding centerpiece,” “learning to sew on a sewing machine,” “help studying for driver’s license renewal,” and “taking 14 bags of books to the bookstore.”
A way to organize ad hoc local assistance
Capitol Hill Village has about 370 members and about 275 volunteers (a group comprising, like most other Villages, both members and nonmembers). “It creates something that’s very different from a concierge service,” McDonough said.
There is neither a minimum commitment of volunteer time, nor a cap on the amount of help members can request at any of the Villages with which Remapping Debate spoke. “People come to volunteer because they want to,” not because they have to, said Grannan of Newton at Home, which has 160 members and 85 volunteers. About Ashby Village’s volunteer policies, Gaines said, “We’re not interested in creating an economy of giving, but rather really promoting this idea that at different times in life we’re all going to need [help].”