Providing volunteer opportunities for homebound seniors
Abstract
Seniors who are restricted to home because of health, transportation or other reasons still seek meaningful community service opportunities. Volunteer ideas for homebound seniors include craft projects, social outreach, and other activities. This effective practice shares ideas collected from the NSSCTalk e-mail discussion list in October 2001 and again in February 2007.Issue
RSVP program directors are often looking for new ideas for their homebound senior volunteers to stay active and contribute to their commmunity.Action
Some good ideas for senior volunteers restricted to home include:
Craft Service Projects
- Knit or crochet lap robes for hospital patients, nursing home patients, geriatric centers, the Red Cross, or Meals on Wheels.
- Knit "footie" slippers with non-skid pads for Meals on Wheels, hospitals, or nursing homes.
- Create "new" greeting cards by recycling used birthday and get well cards. Cut pictures from the front and glue them onto folded paper, rubber stamp messages inside, and place in new envelopes. A set of cards could be provided as a holiday gift to veterans in a local veterans hospital, who could send them to friends and family.
[Ideas shared by Linda Millison, lindam.rsvp.libertynet.org]
Social Outreach Projects
- Start a telephone reassurance program matching seniors with other seniors.
- Work with a school to establish a phone friend program with children.
- Start a pen pal program with a class in a local school.
[Ideas shared by Brenda Greenberg, Rockland County New York RSVP, bgreenbe@sunyrockland.edu] - Encourage a partnership with a local school for daily or weekly contacts for reading stories, story telling, tutoring, coaching, mentoring, crafts, music, or chess games.
- Establish an on-site current events club, book club, or recycling club.
- Start a reminiscence club where each senior records one page of memories a week, written or tape recorded, for their families.
[Ideas shared by Norma K. Koenig, nkoenig@helpinghandshawaii.org]
Other Projects
- Assist a major nonprofit with a regular bulk mailing. Some organizations will deliver the boxes to be sorted and labeled and then collect them later.
- Assist in researching the history of a given neighborhood.
- Conduct a needs assessment to find a genuine need within their community and then develop a project.
[Idea shared by Joan L. Liptrot, National Service Learning Exchange, liptrotj@philau.edu]
Following are several examples of activities that RSVP Southside, Inc. in Petersburg, VA offers to residents of senior housing:
RSVP volunteers
- Play music to entertain the seniors.
- Recruit and schedule health education speakers on arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, and other health topics to speak at senior housing facilties in the area.
- Facilitate a support group for fibromyalgia and another group for family members affected by Alzheimer's.
- Support the Military Kids Project of Virginia which provides activities for children who have a deployed parent. A homebound senior can volunteer to call local members to remind them of an event.
- Collect children's books about to be discarded from the local libraries, apply a "TAKE THIS BOOK HOME!" label and drop them off at participating laundramats so parents can read to their children while waiting for the wash, or take them home. Often labels are applied by disabled or very elderly volunteers and delivered by younger seniors.
- Send birthday greetings to volunteers. A senior resident who enjoys writing, addresses envelopes and signs "Thanks for volunteering! RSVP."
- Neighborhood children can improve their reading and math skills by"Showing Off for their Senior Buddies" once a week. (You may be able to get a business to sponsor such an event with refreshments.)
[Ideas shared by Pat Hale, Program Director, RSVP, Southside, Inc., Petersburg, VA, phale@cdaaa.org]
Note: For many of these activities, RSVP volunteers will need to be available to deliver and pick up projects to homebound volunteers.
Context
These are ideas that RSVP program directors have used in their own programs for seniors who wish to volunteer, but are restricted to their homes. Names and e-mail addresses are provided for some of those directors who shared ideas, as collected from the Senior Corps e-mail discussion list.Posted On
November 1, 2001Resources
NSSCTalk is an e-mail discussion group, created primarily for the participants in the National Senior Service Corps, a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Anyone with related concerns, however, is invited to join in.
To subscribe by e-mail, send a blank message to join-nssctalk@lists.etr.org
Or subscribe via the Lyris Listmanager web page at http://lists.etr.org/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=nssctalk/.