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Editorial: "Involved Seniors"/It's Time for Boomers to Plan
July 5, 2004, Minnesota Star Tribune

Can the people who brought America the "designated driver" concept sell the nation on the "involved senior"?

They've announced that they plan to try. For the sake of a society that will be swamped with 60-somethings in only a few more years, they should get lots of encouragement.

The Center for Health Communication of the Harvard School of Public Health and MetLife Foundation announced on June 15 that they are collaborating on a national media campaign aimed at today's senior citizens and the baby boomers who will join their ranks in only a few years. They plan to promote the idea that service to society, through either paid or volunteer work, is the American way to spend one's senior years.

The MetLife and Harvard folks are plotting such a campaign now, for good reasons: The first wave of the giant baby boom generation is just four years away from age 62, the age after which retirement from full-time employment becomes commonplace.

In surveys, many of those early boomers have said they plan to become community volunteers when they leave full-time work. But research has found that people tend to be less likely, not more, to volunteer after retirement than at midlife. What's more, on average, baby boomers have shown less propensity than their parents did at every stage of life to vote, join community groups, give time and money to charity, and otherwise serve their communities.

The boomers' retirement has the potential to unleash "a social resource of unprecedented proportions," the MetLife-Harvard project says -- but only if boomers get hooked on civic involvement. If they don't, society stands to be burdened by retired boomers, not enriched.

Minnesota state demographer Tom Gillaspy said as much when he addressed a Citizens League audience last month: "In part, our future will depend on our ability to break the link between age and dependency. How can we keep senior citizens involved, actively participating in the paid workforce, actively participating in the volunteer workforce? How can we make sure that we will not see a major expansion of dependent populations, but rather of people who are still actively involved, actively participating in our economy?"

The Harvard-MetLife project says part of the answer lies in changing the image of seniors conveyed in the medium the boomers know best -- television. Susan Moses, the project's codirector, said last week that her group will work with the Hollywood creative community to foster positive images of involved seniors in a variety of TV program settings.

The project also encourages organizations that want to put seniors to work in their communities to gear up now to recruit and engage the larger pool that's coming. The project's report, "Reinventing Aging: Baby Boomers and Civic Engagement," offers helpful suggestions, as does Minnesota's own Vital Aging Network. Those resources are available at www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/ and www.van.umn.edu.