NeighborImpact volunteer Donna Huycke, of Bend, helps teach kids about numbers and counting at the Head Start Center at Summit High School in Bend.

Donna Huycke looked back on the 20 years she spent working for a Southern California home building business as she helped a group of 3- to 5-year-olds at Summit High School’s Head Start Center practice counting to five. “I should have been a teacher,” the 64-year-old retired marketing and advertising executive said. “I just want to make sure I’ve done the best I can to make sure these kids have a leg up when they go to kindergarten.”

Thanks to a series of grants totalling $75,000 over the past three years, NeighborImpact has been able to recruit and train 20 baby boomers like Huycke to work as classroom volunteers for its nine Head Start programs in Central Oregon. The community organization has also recruited an army of 15 to 20 volunteers who work outside the classroom assembling supplies for their activities.

This money came from the Oregon Community Foundation’s Boomers and Babies Project — an initiative it started five years ago with financial help from The Atlantic Philanthropies, Portland General Electric Foundation and other foundations — which has given more than $250,000 to early childhood education programs in seven Oregon communities to help them develop new ways they can engage older volunteers.

It’s part a national effort known as the Community Experience Partnership that in 2006 set out to prove that members of the country’s largest generation — the baby boomers — could still prove to be viable volunteers after they retired. So far, this effort has yielded some substantial results.

“(Baby boomers) want to be engaged in their communities,” said Diana Doyle, the partnership’s national program director. “And if they are engaged, they can make quite a difference.”

The project

Doyle said there was a growing concern among philanthropists in 2006 that the country’s 79 million baby boomers — the oldest of whom turned 60 that year — would choose a life of leisure when they retired and abandon any volunteer work they did in their communities.

“The fear was these people would stop volunteering when they stopped working,” she said, adding losing these volunteers would have a devastating impact on the nonprofits and community groups that depended on them for help.

Philanthropists also worried these groups would miss out on the decades of experience baby boomers had from their lives in the community and the workforce if they didn’t have a way to engage members of this generation as they retired and had more time to volunteer.

Armed with a multi-year grant it received from The Atlantic Philanthropies, a private foundation, the Community Experience Partnership has worked with nine community foundations in eight states to launch new programs like the Boomers and Babies Project that are designed to help nonprofit groups recruit baby boomer volunteers and put them to the best use possible.

The program has taught baby boomers how to run farmers markets and community gardens in some of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, created mentoring programs to benefit at-risk youth on Indian reservations in Northern Minnesota and taught older Maine residents basic leadership and community organizing skills so they could launch a series of local conservation projects in their home communities.

“We found with the Oregon project that baby boomers are especially appropriate (in the early childhood setting) because they are calmer and more patient,” Doyle said as she talked about the Boomers and Babies Project. Many of the project’s volunteers have raised children and sometimes grandchildren of their own, she added, which makes them an even better fit for the Head Start classroom.

But one of project’s most interesting qualities is that it challenged an assumption that baby boomers were not welcome as volunteers in Head Start classrooms or other early childhood education environment, said Abby Bush, the Oregon Community Foundation’s early childhood administrative officer.

“The project sought to open up the idea that older adults are welcome to volunteer in child care settings,” she said. Before this program, she added, many baby boomers thought they had to be related to a child who was enrolled in one of these programs before they could help out in the classroom.

Bush said that once this door was open, the baby boomers flooded in.

The volunteers

Sally Morton, 66, has a simple saying to describe the volunteer work she does at the Becky Johnson Center’s Head Start program: “I’m an extra pair of eyes, ears, hands to hold and arms to hug,” she said.

Morton started volunteering with NeighborImpact’s Head Start programs in Redmond almost four years ago. She’s a member of its advisory committee and thanks to the Boomers and Babies Project has a forum she can use to recruit volunteers who are just as committed to Head Start as she is.

“When they started this program, I was delighted, because I saw so much need for classroom volunteers,” said Morton, who has recruited two of her friends to volunteer with Head Start this year alone. One of them was recently hired by a Head Start Center to work as a part-time substitute.

NeighborImpact spokesman Chris Quaka said his organization has achieved this recruitment success by using the Boomers and Babies Project’s grant money to organize a series of monthly work parties where volunteers or people who are interested in volunteering assemble supplies Head Start teachers can use in their classrooms.

He said these work parties benefit the Head Start programs because the volunteers can do a considerable amount of work – for instance they may spend an afternoon cutting out felt shapes Head Start students use in their lessons – that the teachers would otherwise have to do themselves. The parties also benefit the volunteers because they create an atmosphere where people and their friends can come together and socialize, Quaka said.

“We are seeing the cost (of these activities) returned to us tenfold,” he said, adding NeighborImpact has also boosted the program’s social aspects by hosting a volunteer appreciation dinner for the past two years. “It’s really helped us think about how we interact with our volunteers as a whole.”

The fact baby boomers often have a built-in network of friends, family members and acquaintances makes them a very valuable target for volunteer recruitment efforts, said Doyle with the Community Experience Partnership, because the organizations they work with can draw upon these networks for added community support and volunteers.

She said boomers also have better problem solving skills than other groups of volunteers and are less likely to stop working on a project if they run into an obstacle or a barrier.

More importantly, Bush said, they also are very dependable and don’t need follow-up phone calls to make sure they’ll be at a certain place at a certain time. It also makes them a perfect fit for the early childhood education environment where many of the students may be lacking the presence of a positive, dependable adult in their lives.

“Having an extra positive role model and positive adult influence (in the classroom) can have a significant impact on these kids,” said Kathy Pawleski, the volunteer coordinator for NeighborImpact’s early care and education programs.