Don't underestimate the baby boomer volunteers

The long summer of the baby boomer will inevitably include volunteering, and perhaps once and for all the stereotype of Lady Bountiful - that elderly woman dispensing her largesse and good deeds - will be permanently laid to rest. With 25 per cent of the Australian population over the age of 65 by 2040, the way baby boomers “do” volunteering will be quite different. Better health outcomes, the “social dimensions of ageing”, and with baby boomers refusing to retire gracefully, volunteering will become a key issue. Governments and the non-profit sector need to be prepared.

The assumption today that volunteering is the “workplace” or “playground” for older members of our society is a relatively recent phenomenon. As I outlined in my new book Volunteering. Why we can’t survive without it (UNSW Press, 2008) it was only in the late 1980s and 1990s when both organisations and governments began to see older people as a “lucrative” cohort of volunteers.

An Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Family Survey published in 1992 confirmed the substantial contribution older Australians made to the community through their informal assistance to family members including childcare, crisis support and home maintenance.

The challenges brought by the “greying” of Australia and the supposed economic and social burden that this would place on future generations became an increased focus of interest.

In 1995, the Consultative Committee on Ageing (CCOA), a group advising the New South Wales government, ran a series of workshops to look at the contribution of older people.

The report, Volunteering and Older People, concluded that despite assumptions to the contrary more older Australians volunteered or gave care than received it; and that volunteering enhanced the ageing process through providing social interaction, a sense of achievement and belonging, and by keeping active. However the report also concluded that better government support and infrastructure was required, as well as better communication and networking between governments and the voluntary sector itself.

The West Australian government and Judy Esmond conducted a research project “to identify the “motivators and barriers” to volunteering and strategies to encourage Baby Boomers to volunteer”. Under the acronym “Boomnet” (Boomers Organised Openness Meaningful Needs Education and Time) the report concluded that the size of the baby boomers alone meant that the non-profit sector would experience a surge in volunteer numbers in years to come.

However, importantly, the baby boomers’ expectations, needs and views in regard to volunteering were different to previous generations. Baby boomers may not volunteer as their forebears did. That’s not to say they will not volunteer but that they will volunteer differently. Baby boomers are generally more likely to be looking for fulfilling roles related to their skills or interests when they volunteer their labour.

They want flexibility and more project volunteering rather than a commitment with no end in sight. They want less regulation and few impediments to volunteer, less red-tape and bureaucracy. They also want better volunteer management and better jobs, more challenges in their volunteering rather than simple service delivery or stuffing envelopes.

Baby boomers may also have other priorities such as travel, and research on the impact of volunteering and grey nomads (people aged over 50 caravanning around Australia) is underway. They may also have other family commitments such as grand parenting and caring for elderly parents. Tellingly, in terms of ethnic diversity, the Boomnet report found, among other things, that Indigenous and ethnic communities were involved in volunteering but often it went unrecorded because of its informal nature.

Over the past ten years, there has been a huge debate about the costs of an ageing population. As a result, some researchers attempted to give an economic value to the caring and volunteering activities of older people. A recent study by de Vaus revealed that Australians aged over 65 years contribute almost $39 billion per year in unpaid caring and volunteer work. If one includes those aged between 55-64, the contribution increases to $74.5 billion per annum.

Jeni Warburton argued that older volunteers are an important resource and there is increasing research to suggest that volunteering can help with healthy and productive ageing. Indeed older Australians who volunteer tend to have better psychological health, higher life satisfaction and even longer lives. This will appeal to baby boomers who are looking for personal and spiritual fulfilment through their volunteering.

However, there are still widely held negative assumptions and stereotypical attitudes towards older Australians. For example, in April 2005, the Productivity Commission released a report, Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia, to examine the labour supply, productivity and fiscal implications of Australia’s ageing population trends over the next 40 years. The report found that the “profound ageing” of Australia would reduce economic growth at the same time as intensifying demands for public services, such as health, aged care and the aged pension.

In other words, older Australians would seriously imbalance the economy and suck the country dry. This population imbalance, the report concluded, could not be made up through immigration or fertility increases. The report was based purely on economic terms and economic indices - it was all about measuring and predicting Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the future “burden” of ageing. But it hit a nerve and the media, politicians, and commentators were all breast beating over the “ageing” problem in a particularly negative way.

The Productivity Commission’s extensive 300-plus page report devoted only three pages to volunteering, and basically said that volunteering would not make any difference, presumably because volunteering is not part of the GDP. If volunteer work were included as part of the GDP, given a dollar value and placed within national accounts, the contribution of ageing Australians would be seen very differently.

The most recent ABS Voluntary Work report from 2007 indicates a drop in the volunteer rate of 55 to 64-year-olds (the older baby boomers) between 2002 and 2006. Although women only dropped marginally (from 39.5 per cent to 38.2 per cent) men’s participation fell from 36.5 per cent to 29 per cent. The younger boomers (45-54 age group) were stable at 40 per cent (still busy with children a large focus of volunteering).

Volunteering will be an important component of the baby boomers’ retirement and our society will benefit from their unpaid labour. But there is some work to do in order to get the most out of it, in terms of visibility and value.