A return to helping one another?
McDonough said Capitol Hill Village acts as a galvanizing force. “We’re creating a way for people to come together…an entire group of people relying on one another,” she said. “It’s almost like a sense of family.”
McDonough added that using the Village organization to coordinate volunteers with jobs is an effective way of managing mutual aid. “Instead of having to call your neighbor every time you fall down, or having to call your neighbor every time you need something fixed in your house…you can call the Village,” she explained. With the Village serving as the middleman, “the volunteer is empowered to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’…and the member is empowered to ask for help and not feel guilty about it,” McDonough said.
Ashby Village’s Gaines agreed that providing referrals to paid services has its place when connecting members with trusted vendors for bigger jobs, such as a roof replacement. But offering services for free and embracing the model of “members helping members” has been central to making Ashby Village work. “What really makes the Village model particularly powerful is that we’re getting people to engage in mutual giving,” he said.
Is it a movement?
Although they practice it, none of the three Village directors we spoke with, McDonough, Gaines, or Grannan, seemed to see mutual aid as a model for transforming the way our larger society treats the aging.
When Remapping Debate asked Grannan why her organization relied on mutual aid, she simply said, “We live in a community that believes in volunteering.”
One of the founders and a current board member of Newton at Home, Dr. Cynthia Pill, said that their choice to be volunteer-centered “made more sense to us” because it was “a warmer human way.” When Remapping Debate asked whether Newton at Home had a philosophy about how our society should treat older people, Pill offered a generic response: “Respectfully.”
In similarly broad terms, Gaines said Ashby Village’s philosophy is implicit through how its staff, members, and volunteers engage with one another. When asked why not make this more explicit, Gaines said, “It would be interesting to work on creating a statement about that,” adding that maybe the Village would do so.
None of these Villages have had deliberate internal discussions about the potential for their work to lead to a larger movement to transform aging in the U.S. “I don’t think Villages are going to change society,” McDonough said. “I’m really focused on making sure this organization is going to define itself and be able to figure out [what] it is and who it’s going to serve.”
David Spataro is a doctoral candidate at City University of New York who has studied mutual aid as it is expressed both as a response to crisis and as an ongoing component of permanent community. Spataro said that the interdependence that exists in the volunteer-centered Villages sounds like the kind of mutual aid a family would have — in other words, a form of interdependence that is exclusive. These organizations are rejecting the ways older people have been treated in our society, but Spataro said their work doesn’t seem to reflect a grappling with “the larger structural issues.” He said Village members’ practices make growing older meaningful for them but not in a way that transforms American society’s broader notions of aging and how we treat each other.
Spataro categorized what Village members are doing as “smaller-scale projects based in mutual aid and cooperation. But they’re not focused on transforming life.” Their function thus far, he said, has been being “engaged in maximizing cooperation to help their own lives.”
Some limitations in the Village model as it has been implemented
All of the several Villages with which Remapping Debate spoke said that they primarily publicize their organizations through word-of-mouth, therefore most often appealing to a self-selecting group. This is borne out in the data: according to a recent survey, 94 percent of all Village members are white, and two-thirds of Villages are in middle- and upper-income areas.
Rita Kostiuk, program coordinator at the Village-to-Village Network, a nonprofit that promotes Villages across the U.S., said the recruiting practice is more or less the same on the national level. “People hear about it and come to us,” she said. “We do some marketing, but it’s mostly with people who have already contacted us.”
A 2010 article in The Gerontologist, a scholarly journal, assessing the Village model concluded that, “To date, a relatively limited range of older adults have been served, and it remains to be seen whether the Village model can attract and respond to the needs of a more economically and ethnically diverse senior population.”