Aging Well: Spotlight on Intergenerational Volunteering

Volunteering from Generation to Generation

Doris Brott spent her career teaching first graders, but when it came time to retire, she couldn’t imagine spending her days away from young learners. So about 20 years ago, she joined the late Austin Heyman’s Dialogues Across the Ages program. That program is now part of the Jewish Council for the Aging’s Heyman Interages Center. Senior volunteers and young people meet to talk, learn, and build relationships.

For the next 18 years, Doris went to Kennedy High School weekly and worked with first-generation students. “They were so anxious to learn,” she recalled. “Most of the time, we just talked. We talked about everything.” The students were learning English while caring for their siblings, assisting their parents who didn’t know the language, and working at a job. They participated in Kennedy’s Leadership Program and did charity work. Yet they acted like none of that was a burden at all, Doris said.

While youth and schools have changed over the past 20 years, these students have not. They always come eager to learn and get it right. Now, the 91-year-old volunteer tutors a second-grade student at Wheaton Woods Elementary School, and she has absolutely no intention of slowing down. The Rockville resident feels like she is the students’ grandmother, and they respect her.

She also reads with children at the Gaithersburg Library for two hours a week, through a partnership between Interages and Montgomery County Public Libraries. “They choose a book and either they read it, or you read to them,” she said, adding that sometimes she uses puppets to animate the story. “I feel that reading is the most important thing in the world.”

Volunteering has been so important to Doris that when her daughter recently retired, she quickly signed up to volunteer with JCA’s Interages Center as well. After all, she knew how enthusiastically her mom talked about the children she had worked with. “It was an easy switch,” said Stacy Fleischman, who also worked with children during her career as a speech pathologist. “Mom had always said good things.”

Like her mother, Stacy joined the Grandreaders program, a one-on-one reading program with second graders. Stacy, who is 67, volunteers at Fox Chapel Elementary School in Germantown. “I love the interaction with the children and the connections. I love the stories they tell me,” she said. “I’ve only done it four times, but I am already in love with the little girl [I assist].”  “It is a thrill helping someone,” Stacy said. “When they learn something, no one can ever take it away. Then they go and expound on it.” She added, “The connections we make with the kids, it’s just wonderful.”

When Doris thinks about all her volunteering, she admits, “I feel in a way it’s all for myself. It’s the thrill of helping. The first time they read something, and you helped them, it’s the greatest feeling.” But obviously, it is more than just for herself. She recalls a student with whom she had worked about three years ago. They saw each other in the school hallway recently, and the student looked at her friend and said, “She helped me to read.”

That, said Doris, is about as big a thank you as anyone can receive.

Together, Interages senior volunteers spent 4,296 hours last year in a variety of programs that included helping almost 1,400 students at 23 schools.

For more information on how you can make a difference, please complete the Interages Interest Form or email Interages@AccessJCA.org.

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