The New Aging Enterprise - aarp

engaging older adults. While the AmeriCorps linkage has been important, more than half of the
budget for Experience Corps now comes from diversified sources including foundations, the
private sector, and other public resources.
One of the most pessimistic appraisals of American life was given by Harvard political
scientist Robert Putnam in his influential book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community. 82 His book is a reflection on the fate of “social capital” in the
contemporary world, a theme developed by Pierre Bourdieu. 83 Putnam argues that America is
currently depleting its traditional social capital, that is, the collective value of social networks
and habits that dispose people to do things with each other and for each other. In Putnam’s
words, “For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever
deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago—silently, without
warning—that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first
noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last
third of the century.” Putnam attributes the cause of declining social capital to several causes,
e.g., longer commuting times, TV, changes in family structure, and so on. The decline also
coincides with the passing of an older generation, specifically, the waning of the so-called
“Greatest Generation,” the cohort now in their seventies and eighties. As Boomers approach old
age, Putnam fears, they will lack adequate habits to sustain our social capital. This trend is an
ominous sign for the future.
But Putnam is not entirely without hope, and Experience Corps is a ray of hope, one of a
dozen “success stories” cited in Better Together: Restoring the American Community, written by
Putnam and Lewis Feldstein. 84 The authors write: “The reading scores of 75 percent of
Experience Corps students in Philadelphia have increased one grade level. Attendance among
the students tutored has improved. Surveys of volunteers taken at the beginning of their
participation in the pilot program and at the end of the two-year pilot show a significant increase
in their sense of purpose and energy and a significant decrease in loneliness.” Other studies of
Experience Corps volunteers revealed impressive gains in health status, as well. 85
Experience Corps is a program intentionally designed to tap into the generativity and
altruism of older adults, to create an intergenerational program that helps strengthen public
education at the same time that it gives purpose and meaning to the volunteers who give of
themselves to others. A major part of the success of Experience Corps comes from the fact that
the volunteers do not act alone; they work as members of a team and gain big benefits from the
camaraderie flowing from the experience itself. But, volunteering is not the only way to find
such camaraderie, as we will see in the following example of a New Aging Enterprise.
The Red Hat Society. The opening lines of a now-famous poem by Jenny Joseph run as
follows, “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t go.” 86 In
1998, Sue Ellen Cooper, 87 a California graphic artist, read those lines and was inspired to found a
28