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Life Cycles and Volunteering

A recent college conference looked at the impact of work, family, and mid-life issues on volunteering. The primary focus was on volunteers in the 40 to 60 age group. These mid-lifers present a challenge to volunteer organizations, which must determine how they can engage and motivate them and put their vast talents to work. Who are today's and tomorrow's volunteers and how can they be recruited by volunteer organizations? These, in a nutshell were the questions underlying the College of Human Ecology's National Forum on Life Cycles and Volunteering, a two-day conference that brought together representatives of volunteer organizations from throughout the United States and Canada on April 30 and May 1. The forum was Cornell's follow-up commitment to the national initiatives of the President's Summit on America's Future, which was held in Philadelphia in 1994. Although many aspects of volunteering were discussed during the two days of lectures and panels, the forum focused on volunteers ages 40 to 60. The rationale for this focus was simple. This age group includes the first wave of baby boomers, who, by virtue of their sheer numbers, represent a bright future for volunteer organizations. Add to that their education, affluence, knowledge, and skills, and their promise as volunteers seems almost limitless. Yet the boomers are an unknown quantity. Over the past 25 years they have dramatically reshaped the American family and the American workforce. They promise to reshape volunteerism as well, but only if volunteer organizations are able to step back and reevaluate their relationships with their volunteers and determine how they can engage this new group of people and put their vast talents to work. To Phyllis Moen, the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies and director of Cornell University's Bzonfenhrenner Life Course Center, accomplishing this task requires an understanding of the intricate relationships between work, family, and community, She studies the way this delicate balance shifts over the course of one's lifetime and how this shift affects the ability and willingness to volunteer. It's a perspective few life course scholars have looked at. "Most life course research focuses on work, on family, or on the interface between the two," she pointed out in her afternoon plenary session address on the first day of the forum. "What has been missing from most scholarly research is a focus on community roles and trajectories. We are finding that people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s are increasingly taking on mid-life as a project. They are creating their own life course and shaping it themselves." Gone, she says, is the lockstep march through life that for many years characterized life in post-World War II America. Her research has found several reasons for this phenomenon. Two of the most important are that people ace living longer, healthier lives and they are retiring earlier than ever before. The result is a brand new and absolutely delightful life stage. Some call it post-retirement. Others jokingly refer to it as pre-geezer. Whatever the name, it's a life stage that combines unprecedented amounts of two precious commodities: good health and unfettered time. For volunteer organizations, this news couldn't be better. First, volunteerism is a deep-seated tradition in the United States; we spend more of our time volunteering than any other nation, and the amount of time we spend volunteering is increasing in every age group except for the very old. Second, most of us say that if we had the choice we'd reduce the amount of time we spend in paid work and increase the hours we spend engaged in volunteer activities. And third, volunteering is a behavior that, if established early, continues throughout life. If, as appears to be the case, the biggest barrier to our volunteer efforts is time, the availability of this new class of Americans bodes well for organizations ranging from the United Way and American Cancer Society to your local community theater group. …