Nikita Aronov - about volunteers of retirement age

In Russia, for some reason, volunteering is considered the work of young people, although abroad more than a third of volunteers are aged. However, the first domestic volunteer center for the elderly in St. Petersburg showed: we also benefit from active pensioners no less

Volunteers of the “Silver Age”. From left to right: Lidiya Gaponova, Nina Panteleeva, Tamara Tolstopyatenko, Irina Rogova, Irina Ivanova, Anna Sharakhina, Emilia Chaplinskaya and Tamara Dolgushevskaya at the First National Conference on Aging
Photo: Yulia Lisnyak, Kommersant

Nikita Aronov

Having heard about the flood in Krymsk, elderly St. Petersburg resident Nina Panteleeva, without further hesitation, went online and began looking for how to help. The first collection point for things had barely opened in the city on the Neva, but the active pensioner was already inviting her friends to collect parcels for the victims. And already on July 16, a bus with St. Petersburg volunteers was taking a woman to the disaster zone. In addition to her backpack, she grabbed another one filled with things for flood victims.

“We ended up in the village of Nizhnebakanskaya, not far from Krymsk, which was also badly damaged,” recalls the volunteer. “There was no one there except volunteers and three Emches soldiers.” A lot of old people, completely lost. But there were also those who were spared by the flood, but who were stealing humanitarian aid with all their might. Therefore, we ourselves walked around the affected streets and made lists of who needed what.

At first they looked askance at the pensioner. Then it turned out that she does her work, which does not require physical effort, no worse than young girls. The little athletic grandmother with a sly look became something of a landmark in the squad. And a week and a half later, the volunteers gave her a gift: they brought a TV to the camp - the pensioner was very worried that she would miss the opening of the London Olympics...

Sports start

Nina Georgievna is one of those who is seriously interested in Olympic events. Which is understandable: the development of volunteerism among the elderly in general and the life of Nina Panteleeva herself in particular were most directly influenced by the Sochi Games. Here's the thing. When Russia won the right to host the Olympics, sports officials were in for many surprises. Among other things, it turned out that according to IOC rules, it is not enough to simply provide the Games with volunteers - some of them must be aged.

Although the volunteer movement itself existed in the country at the very least at that time, no one had heard of retired volunteers. The movement began to hastily develop from above, and the main base was the Silver Age University for the Elderly, a St. Petersburg educational center for those over 55.

“We teach older people languages, how to use a computer and other useful skills,” says director of “Silver Age” Marina Yalysheva. “But pensioners with an active lifestyle did not want to say goodbye even after graduation. They met, shared experiences, arranged excursions and master classes for each other. An alumni association was formed. And then representatives of the Sochi organizing committee met us.

Then four grandmothers were hastily included in the volunteer squad that was going to gain experience at the Olympics in Vancouver. Then there were more pensioners, they went to London, worked at test competitions in Sochi, at events with the Olympic torch. As a result, dozens of grandparents from St. Petersburg prepared to work at the Sochi Games.

Soon, volunteer activities went beyond the Olympic framework: for the last two years, pensioners from the “Silver Age” can be seen at all major St. Petersburg competitions. Then active grandparents began to be attracted to work not related to sports. They met guests of the G8 summit at the airport, cleaned up trash in the Botanical Garden, and tested the new terminal in Pulkovo as test passengers. Grandmothers were in great demand.

“We have five areas of work: sports, social, environmental, virtual and intellectual,” lists Marina Yalysheva.

Everything is clear with the first three, but I’ll explain the other two. Internet access and the ability to type and print text are now available in every St. Petersburg library. But there is no one to explain to the elderly how to use all this. So “Silver Age” volunteers periodically go to libraries to help other pensioners with computer skills - this is called virtual volunteering.

"Intellectual Direction" is assistance to the Russian State Pedagogical University named after. Herzen. There is a rather clever system for evaluating student work. They are read not only by specialists, but also by ordinary people in order to evaluate the understandability of the material. And active pensioners are ideally suited to the role of such readers.

The exchange for voluntary assignments is a community closed to outsiders on the VKontakte website. Every now and then there appear topics like this: “Dear volunteers! Do you love the ZOO as much as the children love it? If so, if you want to participate in the holidays, conduct games with the children on the territory of the zoo, conduct excursions (after training), that’s it, who wants to work, sign up below."

New world

Yes, elderly St. Petersburg volunteers are computer literate. And in terms of time spent on the Internet, some of them will give a head start to teenagers with all their Internet addiction. Thus, Nina Panteleeva, throughout her Crimean epic, wrote 10-15 messages daily on social networks: the latest news from the volunteer camp, photographs of volunteers, landscapes, children and old people affected by the flood. She has almost 700 friends on VKontakte and 370 on Facebook. Volunteering began with computer literacy training at Silver Age.

In general, learning is an important motive. For example, Tamara Dolgushevskaya, a former French teacher, went to study so as not to lose face in front of her grandchildren:

“I have two of them, and I have always been an authority for them,” explains the pensioner. “The son says: the wife is in charge of health, and you, mother, are in education.” But my grandchildren now have a bunch of gadgets, and I see they are already looking down on me. So I went to study.

From the London Olympics, a grandmother who became involved in volunteering brought herself an iPhone and iPads for her grandchildren. However, she still didn’t go completely into virtual reality. She spent all her free time in London in museums.

In general, the lives of older volunteers change radically. “A whole new world has opened,” different grandmothers repeat one after another. There was virtual communication, many new friends, a busy schedule. The grandchildren start to respect me again, and the children for once are starting to wonder if the elderly mother has free time to help around the house. Frequent travel, finally.

— For me, volunteering is an opportunity to travel. “I visited Kazan for the first time, flew beyond the Urals,” says Irina Ivanova, a fit pensioner and former civil engineer.

By the way, your correspondent appreciated this side of volunteerism when trying to catch ten pensioners who came to Moscow for the First National Conference on Aging. It was impossible to find these ladies at the hotel during the day. Instead of lying down after the night train, the frisky grandmothers went for a walk on the Arbat.

If it’s not interesting at the dacha

When we met, the pensioners turned out to be different. Some are only 60, some are over 70. Some have a brood of grandchildren, some have only distant relatives. But in some ways these women are very similar. Every single one of them are representatives of intellectual professions: former engineers, a couple of teachers, a doctor, a librarian, a journalist.

“We have a lot of educated people, and they are always on the move, ready to communicate. By the way, our youth was also similar: volleyball, tourism, construction teams,” says former software engineer Antonina Butusova, who once introduced computing technologies into civil aviation.

Her personal youth can be seen on the “VKontakte” page in digitized old photographs. There, a cheerful Antonina emerges from an orange helicopter with the inscription “USSR” with a guitar and a shabby backpack.

Every year there is a new intake at the university for seniors. Especially big - on the eve of the Olympics. But after 3-4 months of study, out of 100 students, no more than 30 remain. And only 5-7 people join the volunteer movement. The most active and, as practice shows, intelligent.

“We, of course, don’t have an educational qualification,” says Irina Rogova, “but simple grannies come and quickly leave.” You ask them: why did you come? They answer: go to Sochi.

Irina Rogova is a serious lady of 62 years old. At first I was a film engineer. In the 90s, she got a job as a translator in a hunting company, accompanying foreigners who came to Russia to hunt. Then she worked in a publishing house and retired as general director. I wandered around the world for a year, and then I returned home and realized: there are no grandchildren, and growing vegetables in the country is boring.

“I’ve been teaching conversational English courses at the university for seniors for a year now,” says Irina. “This job is a lifesaver: it’s interesting, there are a lot of ideas.” I have three lessons a week, in addition, I lead our press club. In general, I think I’ll finish the course, go to the Olympics and look for work again.

Emilia Chaplinskaya, a former librarian of the department of scientific and technical information at a design institute, is in a similar situation. I retired, renovated my apartment within a year, sorted out the pressing matters and wondered: what’s next? Here we were lucky: they announced on the radio that they were recruiting older volunteers.

“People are different both when they are young and when they are old,” reflects former dentist Lidia Gaponova. “Some people babysit their grandchildren, knit scarves.” Or a grandmother sits on a bench and looks out who went to whom. We are simply not interested.

But there are almost no older men as volunteers. They work while they can. And they retire when there is no health left for active aging. That's why there are almost no grandfathers in the Silver Age. Of the main assets, only one is Stanislav Arkhipov, who combines volunteering with work as a massage therapist. However, he is also a candidate of science.

Not all work is good

“Mom raised four of us on her own and taught us to work. So I've always worked hard. And after retiring, I realized that I was obliged to selflessly help others,” explains Lydia Gaponova. “Faith obliges me. And it doesn’t matter what kind of work. I can advise as a doctor, I can work in a monastery, I can clean up garbage.

However, many older volunteers are much more picky about their work. They honestly say that they don’t like to “follow others and pick up trash.”

— If a person takes care, for example, of children in a hospital, this does not mean that he can be entrusted with any work. Here we like to organize volunteer events, such as potato harvesting trips. Go, have fun and paint the fence at the same time,” says Galina Aleksandrovskaya, coordinator of the Moscow fund “Volunteers to Help Orphans”.

The fund is large, there are many mature people in it, and quite a few pensioners. Therefore, Galina Aleksandrovskaya is very annoyed by constant invitations to all sorts of youth events.

“Unfortunately, in the minds of many, volunteers and youth are almost synonymous,” she shakes her head. “We don’t divide people by age, but volunteers themselves are divided into teams.” Young people go to orphanages. There are more older people working in hospitals. And in the area related to helping families in crisis, very young people have nothing to do.

There are simply jobs that young people can do better, and there are jobs where older people are more useful.

“Young people are better with a foreign language, but there are things where we are stronger,” Nina Panteleeva is sure. “At the same airport, during testing, we better see the situation as a whole.” Or here's another example. When a whole truckload of sportswear was brought to the volunteer center in Kazan at the second Eurasian Games, everyone was confused. And Ira Ivanova and I took this matter into our own hands and sorted everything out within 24 hours.

Marina Yalysheva notes that pensioners are often more resilient and usually better able to navigate difficult situations. It is no coincidence that, according to the organizers, 750 volunteers aged 55 years and older were involved in the XXII Olympic Winter Games and XI Paralympic Winter Games 2014 in Sochi. Not so much with a total number of 25 thousand volunteers, but this is rather a question of how the training system works.

“In Sochi, at first, out of 150 volunteers, there were only six of us (now there are more than a dozen from St. Petersburg alone . - “O” ), and they treated us condescendingly,” recalls Irina Rogova. “But there is only such a concept as a “team leader” - this both a leader and a manager at the same time, the one who can assign jobs. So, I have never met such people among young volunteers.

Of course, older people have their own problems. My health does not allow me to carry heavy things. On average, foreign language and computer skills are worse. Although at the same “Silver Age” all grandmothers learn English, most at the intermediate level. Finally, sometimes older people require special attention.

“Many of them expect that people will call them and offer them a job. But our organization is volunteer, and a person must do a lot himself,” explains Galina Aleksandrovskaya.

Wait 20 years

In the West, an active volunteer movement began after the Second World War, when it was necessary to restore the destroyed life. Therefore, there is no need to involve pensioners in it - many of them were volunteers as children.

“The main contingent of volunteers in the West are students and retirees,” says Vladimir Khromov, head of the Union of Volunteer Organizations and Movements. “In the USA, up to 40 percent are elderly. These are active people, they have worked for 20-30 years and have already provided for themselves. But there is still a lot of energy. In my experience, our elderly rarely turn to volunteering. This is probably some kind of Soviet legacy - they expect the state to decide everything for them.

But before going somewhere, a pensioner needs to know where. In St. Petersburg, older volunteers are invited to attend the annual forum of older people in Lenexpo. But besides St. Petersburg, there are special centers for retired volunteers only in a few cities: Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Anapa, and also in the Belgorod, Voronezh and Kursk regions. In Moscow, for example, no.

“This is all a matter of competent administration,” says Vladimir Khromov. “The Sochi organizing committee found the money to hire coordinators, psychologists and work with the elderly. And non-profit organizations are poor; they do not have the funds to involve pensioners in volunteering. Especially if you can attract younger people with less effort. I think that our generation of active pensioners will grow up in twenty years.

Of course, there is another option - you can wait until the current young volunteers grow old. But today’s elderly people, as you can see, are ready to help other people for free. All that remains is to create the conditions.

Grandmothers of Goodwill