At Beatitudes Center DOAR (Developing Older Adult Resources) in Phoenix

PROJECT SUMMARY

Beatitudes Center DOAR spent the past two years attracting a new type of volunteer and found 20 highly skilled professional people who expanded the group’s outreach in the community and energized the organization.

Center DOAR was created by the faith community in 1981 to provide supportive services to help seniors stay in their own homes longer. It expanded over the years to serve disabled adults and grandparents raising young grandchildren. Volunteers traditionally were church members and people who enjoyed visiting elders in their home or doing shopping for them.

The new layer of leadership volunteers includes strategizers who are suggesting changes that will have long-term impact. They are new to Center DOAR, and so are their projects.

One volunteer is creating workshops to attract underserved gay and lesbian couples. Another revamped the bi-annual forum so it appealed to the general public, not just the social service crowd.  A few volunteers are taking on assignments once relegated to staff only.  As Sue Reckinger, a program director for the Beatitudes, said: “They are putting a new face on volunteering.”

PROFILES

Jerry Svendsen, Volunteer Program Coordinator

A marketing man’s new product: Mortality

Center DOAR’s bi-annual forum had grown predictable and insular--attended only by social service insiders. That is, until leadership volunteer Jerry Svendsen took it over.

The retired, longtime marketing executive for the Del Webb Company, developer of nearby Sun City communities, wanted to attract a newer and wider community audience. Looking to his own recent needs, he decided to create a program at the forum to bring older adults and their adult children together to talk about end-of-life decisions. It would have appeal to the general public, he said.

He had felt clueless when trying to help his fading mother with those decisions and didn’t want his adult kids to have to go through the same thing. He knew others would feel the same way.

Sue Reckinger, a program director for Center DOAR, said the forum was a big success. “We wouldn’t have been open to this idea before the leadership volunteer program,” she said.

Svendsen took over responsibility for the forum--normally a staff role. He outlined it, then located and invited the speakers and community participants. Evaluation comments included: “Do it again, I needed this forum,” and a simple “Thanks.”

The program introduced many people to Center DOAR’s programs, and lifted staff expectations of the forum’s outreach and recruitment possibilities.

Francesca Wolfe, Volunteer Outreach Worker

Inviting love out into the open

Francesca Wolfe, a retired medical social worker who had specialized in helping aging clients, noticed during her career that gay and lesbian adults who were providing care for their partners were often not plugged into Phoenix’s available caregiver supports. She thought she might fix that, now that she had time and Center DOAR’s firepower.

As a leadership volunteer, she is crafting programs and outreach workshops for the gay and lesbian community.

“I like to do things that aren’t necessarily easy, and this hasn’t been an easy project. We are forging new ground,” she said.

“Many elderly people in the gay community don’t really want to be identified,” she said, “but those in their 60s or younger are interested in looking at their own long-term care options.”

Adero Allison, Volunteer Event Manager

Asking busy people is always the best bet

Adero Allison’s company, Transitional Adults Plus, helps older adults relocate, often to downsized or care-linked housing. She often has been frustrated when clients cannot afford what they really need.

“When there is nothing I can do for them, I can ask if they might want to talk to people at the Beatitudes Center DOAR.”

She knows about the program because she volunteers there. She met Center DOAR’s Outreach Coordinator, Nancy Splain, at a Chamber of Commerce event and accepted an invitation to get involved. 

Allison uses her strong planning and organizing skills now to chair Center DOAR’s Jazz Cabaret, one of its major fundraising events.  

She also has extended the Center DOAR’s reach into the business community through her Chamber and other business networks. She recruited her business partner to help. He, in turn, has brought in younger career people as new volunteers.

Her biggest frustration is that there are so many people who need help and don’t know it’s available--and so many people who would be willing to help if they would just be asked. She is doing her best to end those disconnects.

Nancy Splain, Outreach Coordinator, Beatitudes Center DOAR
   
Fate is often the best recruiter

Just as Nancy Splain was closing her law office to launch her dream of doing pro bono law in the Ukraine and the Czech Republic, her husband was in an accident. She became his caregiver in Phoenix.

Her friends encouraged her to do something that would keep the old Nancy shining through. She saw a notice in her church bulletin that Center DOAR was looking for someone to help with community relations, and the hours could be flexible. She took it.

After her husband died, she again felt the itch to volunteer overseas. Fate again intervened: Center DOAR became part of the National Council on Aging’s national project to expand the use of volunteers in leadership ways. She wanted to be part of it. She only had to look in the mirror to see the type of people they were seeking.  And she knew it would attract the kind of volunteers Center DOAR needed.

Sue Reckinger, who works with Splain on the leadership volunteer program, says every time they hear about a possible new recruit or meet someone new, Splain’s first comment is, “Wonder what skills they can bring to us?” Then Splain sets up a meeting and reels them in.

Splain recalls her father telling her decades ago, when she was a young globetrotting Foreign Service worker, that he hoped she would be able to live at least three years in one place to face all the issues and the challenges that don’t go away--to be in a community deeper.

“He would be pleased,” she said. “That is what I have done. But it took me a while to get to this place.”

Prague, the Ukraine and other communities may still be in her future, she says, when she can find just the right leadership volunteer to take her place at Center DOAR. 

WHAT PARTICIPANTS HAVE TO SAY

• “I don’t see volunteering as a way to just fill time--it has to have real meaning and impact.”
  --Francesca Wolfe, Volunteer outreach worker

• “Having a history of successes has changed staff expectations of what volunteers can do. Our volunteers have the expertise, they are willing …they have strengthened our programs.”
  --Sue Reckinger, program director

• “The leadership program attracts a different type of volunteer. It attracts people who might not be the warm fuzzy types who think sitting with a grandma is the greatest thing that could ever happen to them, but who really care about the community, who understand the needs and want to do something about them. It can bring people who have the skills to help strengthen a charity in all the bigger picture, longer-term ways that it hasn’t had the extra time and talent to address before.”
  --Nancy Splain, Outreach Coordinator

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