ShareCare

Volunteers pay it forward
Some eventually end up on receiving end

A movie made the concept of “paying it forward” a household word. In real life, it happens all the time – especially when it comes to volunteering. Older adult volunteers often find that the people they are serving were once volunteers helping other seniors just like themselves.

Retired and Senior Volunteer Program members, who are 55 and older, often donate their time to help senior citizens. RSVP’s Tuesday Toolmen do home repairs and install safety devices like ramps and shower grab bars for older adults who can’t afford to pay for the work to be done themselves. Sometimes, the toolmen find that the clients they serve were at one time RSVP volunteers.

ShareCare of Leelanau, which provides services to help the elderly remain in their own homes, has about 100 volunteers, most of them 55 and older. It’s common for those who once provided the assistance to eventually end up on the receiving end. “It isn’t unusual to have somebody who starts out volunteering and then end up needing help,” said Deb Wetherbee, ShareCare office manager. “They probably started with us when they were younger and have stayed with us into their older age.”

ShareCare was started 15 years ago by a group of Leelanau County couples who recognized that with their children scattered across the United States, they wouldn’t have family to depend on if it got to the point that they needed help to continue living independently. A 76-year-old woman named Jo who asked that only her first name be used here can identify with that, having relocated to Leelanau County with her husband 11 years ago from Indiana. “A lot of people up here have lived here all their lives for multiple generations and they have 47 nieces and nephews, and children,” Jo said. “Then there are the perma-fudgies, like us, who, while we have fantastic neighbors, they go south for the winter, have their own lives and their own problems.”

When Jo and her husband moved to northern Lower Michigan, she decided to volunteer as a driver for ShareCare, taking an older man who couldn’t drive in the winter to a couple of doctors’ appointments. Then Jo’s husband was seriously injured falling off a ladder five years ago. She had to stop volunteering to care for him through multiple surgeries. He now uses a walker and his mobility is limited.

Along the way, Jo had a meltdown -- she calls it her “sinking spell” -- trying to do it all. Enter ShareCare, the organization she had joined to help – now helping her and her husband. “While I didn’t need anything but basically bed rest, we both needed to continue eating and my husband needed to get to doctors’ appointments,” she said. “They came up with immediate help for seeing we had food, we had somebody to help clean, somebody to help my husband if I wasn’t up to doing that, seeing that somebody could take him to someplace that I ordinarily would have done. “It seemed so reassuring to know that yes, you don’t have to call your children that are six and seven hours away and have extremely busy lives, with their children, and work, and say, ‘We need your help.’ While, bless their bones, they both came up for a few days, they can’t stay. That’s where ShareCare is just so important.”

Jo is hoping that her husband will progress to the point that by this fall, she will be able to throw her name “back in the pot” to be a volunteer driver. She wants to be able to start helping others again, saying, “It’s sort of like that ‘It takes a village’ thing.”