The Health Benefits of Volunteering in Later Life
When Virginia Sturwold retired from her job with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and moved back to San Francisco from Atlanta in the late 1990s, she decided she wanted to do something to help children. So she began looking for volunteer opportunities in the city, and soon found a position with Experience Corps, a non-profit program that brings volunteers aged 55 and up into urban public schools to serve as mentors and tutors.

For the past six years, Sturwold, 82, has volunteered twice a week, for three hours each session, at Francis Scott Key Elementary School in the Sunset District. She spends her time there mentoring third and fourth graders on a one-on-one basis, helping them with reading and teaching them how to knit. Her students are "a great source of fantastic thinking," she says. "I get a great deal of satisfaction from working with these children."

Sturwold, who has also been a longtime volunteer for the American Cancer Society and shelters for battered women, says these activities provide a social outlet and help ward off loneliness and depression. "I was very depressed and even tried suicide" after leaving her marriage to an abusive husband, she says. "But now I feel needed. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself."

In recent decades it has become widely understood that certain behaviors promote healthy aging. Experts generally agree, for example, that regular exercise, good diets and maintaining social connections with friends and family can help older people lead healthier, and perhaps longer, lives. It now appears this checklist should also include volunteering and other forms of what has come to be called "civic involvement."

A growing body of research, including both longitudinal and randomized controlled studies, suggests that older people who engage in community service activities - either as volunteers or paid employees - are not only happier, but also physically and psychologically healthier than those who don't, regardless of social status, race or gender.

"There is mounting evidence that participation in volunteer work and socially productive jobs improves the health of older adults," says Adam Hirschfelder, a principal investigator at the Public Health Institute in Oakland. "What's interesting is that this voluntarism not only benefits the people and organizations to which they are giving their time, but it also improves the health and well-being of the volunteers themselves."

Hirschfelder recently led a workshop at the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center on Geary Boulevard, part of Kaiser's Senior Health Series 2006, highlighting the health benefits associated with volunteer work. It was the first time that Kaiser included volunteerism in its Senior Health Series.

In her 2003 study titled "Effects of Volunteering on the Well-Being of Older Adults," Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor at Washington University's George Warren Brown School of Social Work in St. Louis, found that participation in what she terms "productive activity" is associated with lower depression rates, higher life satisfaction and improved functional and cognitive ability among people 60 or older.

Morrow-Howell explains that volunteering and other forms of civic engagement may promote health in older adults because it increases their social network. "We also find that people who volunteer gain self-esteem and self-efficacy when they see that their efforts are making a difference," she adds. "This makes them more likely to confront any health problems they may have, and there is some thought that it may boost their immune systems."

According to Linda Fried, director of the Center on Aging and Health at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, community involvement also contributes to good health because it tends to increase cognitive and physical activity, which is associated with decreased hypertension, diabetes, depression, falls and cardiovascular disease in older adults.

Fried led a randomized pilot study that followed 128 people ages 60 to 86 who spend at least 15 hours a week volunteering at Baltimore schools through Experience Corps. The 2004 report found that, four to eight months after starting this work, the school volunteers were stronger and more physically, cognitively and socially active than members of a similarly aged but non-working control group.

Like Sturwold, Dorris Chives credits volunteer work with improving her psychological well-being. An 84-year-old Colma resident, Chives spends much of her time volunteering at Kaiser hospitals in San Francisco and South San Francisco, and she helps coordinate a meals program in South San Francisco for low-income seniors.

"I've always believed that volunteerism is the rent you pay for the space you inhabit on earth," explains Chives, a former computer systems worker for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. "And the funny thing is, volunteers often receive more benefits than the people they're helping."

Chives, who has recently had a hernia and other health problems, says her work at Kaiser - where she volunteers in a gift shop in San Francisco and at a reception desk in South San Francisco - "keeps me alert and keeps me going. I don't have time to think about my aches and pains."

For information about volunteer opportunities, and the connections between civic involvement and positive health outcomes, see Civic Ventures' guide for journalists at www.civicventures.org/jguide.cfm. Nancy Morrow-Howell's 2003 study "Effects of Volunteering on the Well-Being of Older Adults" is available here.

Information about Linda Fried's Experience Corps study is available here. For more information about Experience Corps, see "Service to Schoolchildren Boosts Learning, Volunteers' Health" from this newsletter's Summer 2004 issue.

(This article originally appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Bay Area Summit)

< Back to "Giving Back"