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RSVP | Lead with Experience

By Dave Layton
Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of Eastern Iowa and Western Illnois

National Service in our Community

A while back we explained what The Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of E. IA & W. IL (RSVP) staff do to help seniors find meaningful volunteer opportunities. We talked about a woman who recently moved to the Quad Cities and was feeling isolated, until we found volunteer opportunities for her. Now she sounds excited every time she learns it’s RSVP on the phone with another fun activity for her to help with. Likewise, we have many stories about widows and widowers who have been able to finally end their grieving by turning to RSVP and having our staff match their skills and interests with the right opportunities out of hundreds of volunteer jobs in our data base. There are also the calls from agencies where our volunteers serve saying a certain volunteer’s health is changing and we are asked to reassign that volunteer. Although it takes more of staff’s time to find an appropriate opportunity for that volunteer, we do so because we understand how important it is both to the success of the agency where the volunteer served and to the health of the volunteer to find something right for everyone. RSVP staff also train volunteers, recognize senior volunteers, and document the impact those volunteers make.

Paid RSVP staff can do these things because we receive funding and guidance from The Corporation for National and Community Service. RSVP is one face of National Service in the Quad Cities. Our 900+ senior volunteers contribute nearly 120,000 hours of volunteer service every year. Over 100,000 Quad Citians benefit from that service in one way or another. The independent sector values an average volunteer hour in our region at a little over $20. This means that every taxpayer dollar invested in this RSVP program generates nearly $20 worth of volunteer service – an outstanding return on investment! Of course, it’s hard to ascribe a dollar value on lives saved by RSVP volunteers trained in disaster preparedness and/or response, or children succeeding in school because RSVP trained tutors and mentors work with them.

RSVP is not the only National Service program in the Quad Cities, however. Right now, there are over 60 AmeriCorps members serving in both Iowa and Illinois, with opportunities for over 100 members in the upcoming year. Nearly all of these AmeriCorps members work with at-risk preschool and elementary school-age children, helping them to learn and build positive social skills. Currently 320 children are being served by AmeriCorps members on the Illinois side and over 1,400 children are being served on the Iowa side. AmeriCorps members cost the agencies where they serve only a fraction of what it would cost to staff their sites with fully paid staff. Again, the success of hundreds, if not thousands, of children in the Quad Cities is directly related to Americorps being in our community.

On top of our local AmeriCorps, there is the AmeriCorps St. Louis Emergency Response Team that is highly trained in disaster response and deploys throughout the region. Their most recent deployment was to respond to the tornados that struck Ottawa, Illinois. In addition, there is also AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), based in Vinton, Iowa, which does special projects, such as helping Living Lands and Waters—an organization that aids in the protection and preservation of the natural environment– plant one million oak trees. They also are trained in disaster response and deploy regionally. Both of these teams have a history of working with local RSVP volunteers when responding.

Just as important as the cost savings is the service ethic and sense of accomplishment that AmeriCorps service can engender in it’s members. I saw this first hand from my own son who, upon graduating from college, wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He did two terms of National Service– first with the National Service related Lutheran Corps in Washington, D.C., and then with Green Iowa AmeriCorps in Dubuque, Iowa. In both terms, he helped the environment, as well as many people who were struggling to stay warm in the winter. He came out of AmeriCorps with a sense of achievement, purpose, and a calling. This summer he will complete his studies at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque and become a Lutheran pastor. He’s also getting married – though I probably can’t attribute that to his AmeriCorps service.

There is one final thing I need to say about National Service. Services like I described above are replicated all over America by hundreds of thousands of National Service members– all on a total current Federal budget of a little over a billion dollars. The proposed 2018 Federal Budget has eliminated all funding for it.