Older adults in the United States are far more likely to live alone with only a spouse or a partner, according to a March 2020 report from Pew Research Center's FacTank.
While living arrangements for older people in the U.S. differ substantially from those in many other countries, they are consistent with those in wealthy nations, the report said. In most countries in the world older women are considerably more likely than older men (20% vs. 11%) to live in solo households. Partly because women tend to live a few years longer and partner with men who are older.
Danielle Holly is CEO of Common Impact, a nonprofit that works to strengthen the local communities in which we live and work. Below are excerpts from an email interview with Career Communications Group on how Common Impact is finding new ways to engage senior volunteers virtually.
When COVID-19 began shutting down offices and workplaces earlier this year, companies and nonprofits quickly embraced or expanded upon existing virtual skills-based volunteering programs. Common Impact was at the forefront of this complete transition to virtual volunteering, developing new remote models, and scaling access to online tools we’ve used for years.
Our virtual day of service (2-8 hours) and virtual team consulting (1 week to several months) connect volunteers with nonprofits via video conferencing, screen share, and collaborative tools like virtual whiteboards to solve acute operations and capacity challenges across financial management, program delivery optimization, strategic planning, and crisis communications. Our hotline model provides nonprofit executives with rapid response coaching and strategic guidance on these same topics but in a quick-hit one-hour phone call.
Now the better part of a year into the pandemic, virtual volunteering has triumphed as one of the most inclusive and high-impact corporate service programs for the remote work environment. Skills-based volunteers can support nonprofits and communities from the safety of their homes, which is especially critical for older generations and other groups at higher risk for contracting COVID-19.
Virtual volunteers also enable volunteers to work with teams and nonprofits not in their immediate geographic area, meaning distributed staff can build closer relationships and projects can be designed for specific demographics, like a group of all senior-level leaders or pairings of young professionals with more experienced executives for a mentorship element.
At Common Impact, we’ve been eager to share our virtual volunteering learnings with our nonprofit sector colleagues so they can better understand how to set up remote projects for success, the technical and logistical challenges they should prepare for, and the new opportunities for inclusion and team building that virtual volunteering allows for.
Our recent “COVID-19 Nonprofit Impact Report: A Guide for Providing Philanthropic and Skilled Volunteer Support” outlines some of the many projects that can be executed virtually and target nonprofits’ most urgent needs as they continue to adapt and respond to the ongoing pandemic.
What are your top recommendations for organizations that rely on volunteers to design purposeful, meaningful volunteer opportunities?
Volunteers’ time is valuable and when they share it with a nonprofit, they want to know that it made a real difference for that organization and the community it serves.
One of the best ways to ensure volunteers feel fulfilled in working with your nonprofit is to match them up with a project that uses their most valuable assets – their professional talents – to address your organization’s corresponding operations and capacity challenges.
This is one of the biggest value adds of skills-based volunteering for the volunteers: they’ll appreciate that you took advantage of the unique skills they have to offer and that they did something for your organization that not any volunteer could do.
They’ll also find purpose and motivation in the fact that their work made a difference, not just that day, but for months or years to come.
