As senior volunteers stay home, it’s up to all of us to step in
Mike Goldsby, formerly of Humboldt County’s Department of Public Health, said it best: “You can get a lot done if you don’t care who takes the credit.” Goldsby, now retired, is one of hundreds of local people who quietly keeps our community rolling by contributing his time as a volunteer. As a volunteer coordinator and as a reporter, I saw the full truth of his words as I worked alongside and interviewed seniors who dedicated their retirement to public service. I often wondered what we would do without their guidance and their unpaid work. Well, now we’re finding out.
Ninety percent of the Area 1 Agency on Aging volunteers are over the age of 65, and they perform essential services such as driving seniors to medical appointments, visiting and advocating for residents in long term care facilities, Medicare health advocacy and leading exercise classes. Those volunteers must now shelter in place for their own safety. Some of those services are being offered over the phone, but it’s not an ideal or permanent solution.
“The impact now is not being felt because our activities have been sharply curtailed,” says A1AA’s executive director Maggie Kraft. “The major impact will be felt if, when we can start up services again, they decide not to return to service.”
Other organizations have had to rapidly adjust to the loss of volunteers and new standards of how to serve their target population.
“We’re definitely feeling the crunch of not having all of our regular volunteers,” says Nick Vogel, interim executive director of the Healy Senior Center in Redway. The Healy is Southern Humboldt’s center for the Meals on Wheels program and it also has a social dining facility where it hosts exercise classes and other activities for local seniors.
“Three out of four of our volunteers are over 60 years old,” says Vogel. “Some of our volunteers have big responsibilities too — some are food servers, some are cashiers at the hot lunch and keep everything organized. In fact, the Healy’s dining hall and kitchen used to be cleaned by volunteers. But now, we’re obliged to hire custodial help during the pandemic to make sure the place is cleaned and sanitized.”
When the shelter-in-place ordinance came into effect, the Healy shifted quickly to offering curbside meal pickup and shopping services for seniors, so that those who normally came in for social dining would still have access to their resources. And they put out the call for volunteers under 65. The response, Vogel says, was heartening. Although the organization still needs help, it now has a robust workforce of younger volunteers who have stepped in to support their elders.
Redwood Coast Village, a nonprofit which helps seniors age in their own home, also raised the alarm on March 15 that they needed younger volunteers to fill the gap. By the following afternoon they were “overwhelmed” with responses.
The willingness of our community to step up and ensure continuation of services, especially when so many of us are facing economic uncertainty, is a testament to the resiliency and grit of the place we call home. This resiliency is something we have learned from the generation we are now trying so hard to protect — the homesteaders, artists, civic leaders and local champions that have created the bedrock of our remarkable community. They are again leading by example by staying home and staying safe. In the meantime, the thrift stores that support so many nonprofits are shuttered. The blood bank, whose core base of donors also skews older (look at the wall where multi-gallon donors are immortalized sometime), has had to cancel drives. Our local community centers, food banks and homeless shelters are not only scrambling to replace volunteers, but competing for protective gear, toilet paper, disinfectant and funding. This crisis will make the cracks in our current system even wider and some of the most vulnerable among us — the rural, the homeless, the lonely — will certainly fall through.
We are in the great inhale of waiting to see how the most formative event of our young millennium will impact our community. Soon, very soon, we will know if what we have done so far — shutting down schools, businesses and stores, wearing masks and washing hands — was enough to avoid a catastrophic surge on our medical infrastructure. Someday we will be able to exhale and assess the damage. When that day comes there will be mourning, and parties and the strange, dumbstruck gratitude one only feels when you get back all of the things you once took for granted. And there will be work to do.