Service Starts at Home
For more than 25 years Deborah Herman has pulled up a chair at
Barbara McCoy’s kitchen table in Columbia, Maryland, and helped the
retired teacher fill out her IRS tax returns. Herman methodically sorts
medical and banking receipts, all the while chatting it up with McCoy,
The friendship began serendipitously when Herman volunteered for AARP Tax-Aide—a program
that gives free tax-return assistance to more than
2. 5 million low- and middle-income people each year. But the bond
quickly blossomed: when McCoy’s vision began to fail, Herman began
handling her bills. Then ten years ago Herman helped McCoy, a widow,
move into a senior residence. More recently, Herman hung pictures
and arranged furniture for McCoy
after her apartment got a new
coat of paint and fresh carpet.
The evolution was natural for
Herman, a “good listener” and
tireless booster for giving back—
she even enticed her 21-year-old
daughter, Rachel, to become a
Tax-Aide volunteer.
The enthusiasm of people like
Herman is, in many ways, at the
core of Create The Good®, AARP’s
initiative to inspire Americans to
make a difference in their communities. The philosophy is simple: everyone can do something,
whether for five minutes or five
hours. And Create The Good’s
website,
createthegood.org, makes “doing” easy, especially if you
don’t know where to begin. Just enter a zip code and discover thousands of service opportunities, from starting a walking group to helping your neighbors fight fraud. Visitors can even post their own ideas.
And each month there’s a new, easy-to-use “tool kit” that shows, step
by step, how to organize prescription drugs, for example, or weatherize
a home to save energy. Those kits, in turn, can be used to help others.
Already more than 9 million Americans give back through AARP
every year—from volunteers who help promote driver safety through
the CarFit program AARP cosponsors; to “e-advocates,” such as
Susan Klaessy, 65, of Marshalltown, Iowa, who lobby legislators online for critical consumer reforms; to the thousands of people like
Herman, who help out during the tax season and beyond. Herman
says one do-good experience is all it takes to get hooked. “Once you
get caught up in the spirit of volunteerism,” she says, “the rewards just
keep you going for life.” —Michelle Diament
42 AARP SEPTEMBER&OCTOBER 2009
in national service jobs has skyrocketed: between November 2008 and May
2009, applications to the AmeriCorps
program soared 226 percent over the
same period a year before.
No doubt the urgency of these re-
cessionary times has played a role.
But it’s probably too easy to cast the
sudden attraction to the public sphere
as merely one big desperate job hunt
in a tough economy. “People are look-
ing for something of meaning beyond
themselves,” notes Marc Freedman,
founder and CEO of Civic Ventures
and author of Encore: Finding Work
That Matters in the Second Half of
Life (Public Affairs, 2007). Especially
among those 50 and older, “there’s a
practical idealism at work—a desire
to leave the world better off than we
found it, but a recognition that we’re
not going to live forever, so we’d better
make an impact now.”
This yearning to make a difference
is perhaps why Thomas Weller, a
61-year-old mechanic near San Diego,
patrols the local highways in his sta-
tion wagon, helping people stranded
on the road, then slips them a card
that reads: “Assisting you has been my
pleasure.” Or why Mary Kay Gehring,
52, a former Portland, Oregon, chef,
spends hours each week teaching
struggling young women how to cook
nutritiously for their families. “We’re
not talking about their drug use,” she
says. “We’re talking about the car-
rots.” Or why in January an estimated
one million volunteers showed up at
13,000 projects across the country for
the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day
of Service—the largest turnout ever.
Public officials are taking the cues:
last spring, with the enthusiastic urging of AARP and scores of other volunteer organizations, Congress passed,
and President Obama signed, the
Edward M. Kennedy Serve America
Act, a $5.7 billion bill that significantly
expands volunteer opportunities for
Americans of all ages and helps nonprofit groups marshal and manage the
thousands eager to do the work—from
feeding the hungry and helping students achieve, (CONTINUED ON PAGE 65)
