22 • Philantiiropy Journal of North Carolina
April 1994
Careers
Older volunteers
Retired executives find new life in nonprofits
Business leaders often have man
agement experience that can
benefit a nonprofit. When volun
teering to help a nonprofit orga
nization, retirees must remem
ber they’re not the boss any
more.
By Kyle Marshall
f ach working day in
Aubrey Fletcher’s career
brought some pretty
weighty responsibilities,
like overseeing 500 employees at his
international trading firm in New
York.
Now that he’s retired, Fietcher
doesn’t have those daiiy worries. But
that doesn’t mean he’s stopped
putting his considerable business
experience into practice.
He’s one of a growing munber of
retired executives in North Carolina
who have tound iife after the busi
ness world by volunteering to heip
nonprofit organizations. Fletcher,
who lives in Durham, is an officer in
the Executive Service Corps of the
Carolinas, which offers consuiting
services to nonprofits at nominal
tees.
“It gives you a sense of satisfac
tion, more so than just retiring and
sitting around looking at your navei
tor 24 hours,” says Fietcher, who re
tired to the Triangle after selling his
company to agricultural and indus
trial giant Cargill Inc.
Even though they might never
have pursued career opportunities
outside the corporate world, Fletcher
and other former business owners
and managers are deriving satisfac
tion by volunteering their time, expe
rience and business know-how to a
variety of nonprofit organizations.
Business executives represent
just one small segment of the sizeable
numbers of retired people getting
involved in nonprofit volunteer work.
According to a 1992 survey by the
Independent Sector, a Washington
professional organization for non
profits, volunteers in the 65-74 age
group donated an average of 4.3
hours a week, up from an average of
4 hours a week in the Independent
Sector’s 1990 report.
Many charitable organizations,
community groups. United Way agen
cies, churches and hospitals make
great use of older volunteers. The
Retired Seniors Volunteer Program,
tor example, which is funded by the
City of Ralei^, matches nonprofits’
needs with volunteers’ skills and
experience, and the volunteers sup
ply the labor to get the tasks complet
ed.
A program by the United Way of
Asheville and Buncombe County
makes use of retired business people
in its area. 'The Management Assist
ance Committee conducts seminars
and provides counseling to nonprofits
in such business functions as person
nel, long-range planning and
fundraising.
This year, the Asheville United
Way has gone a step further by ask
ing a retired executive to chair its
annual campaign.
Rayburn Dean, who retired at the
end of 1992 as a senior vice president
at BASF Corp., which has a manufac
turing plant and offices in Asheville,
is adding the campaign to his list of
United Way activities that have
spanned 15 years.
“Like a business or anything else,
it needs to be fully accountable,”
Dean says of nonprofit organizations.
“I am equally busy as before [retir
ing], but the only thing different is
that I have more time to personally
give to some institutions in the com
munity.”
Retired business leaders who
assist nonprofits often do so by tak
ing on a consulting job — how to
develop a strategic plan, how to insti
tute better financial controls, how to
hire and train the right employees.
Sometimes the volunteers help the
nonprofit’s paid staff communicate
with its board of directors.
In other words, it’s the functions
they were accustomed to overseeing
every day in the business world.
Bill Werner, a retired General
Motors Corp. international executive
who has homes in Ralei^ and Pine
Knoll Shores, says older volunteers
often have to overcome such feelings
as “I don’t want to have to make
another commitment” before plung
ing into nonprofit duties.
Once they do, they find they enjoy
it — and typically don’t face the same
kinds of pressures they did in the
working world, says Werner, presi
dent of the 30-member Executive
Service Corps chapter. It is affiliated
with the international Executive
Service Corps organization.
A typical job taken on by the
corps was for a Triangle day care
center. The church-affiliated center
wasn’t getting all the income it need
ed for its special purpose of keeping a
third of its available slots open to
preschoolers with physical or mental
disabilities.
Consultants from the corps devel
oped a plan that involved corporate
sponsorship of scholarships so that
financially struggling parents could
send their disabled children to the
center. The center reported back to
the corps that it was pleased with the
consulting services it received.
Whenever someone from the
I
t gives you a sense
of satisfaction, more so
than just retiring and
sitting around looking
at your navel
for 24 hours.
AUBREY FLETCHER
Executive Service Corps
of the Carolinas
corps helps a nonprofit staff or board,
the volunteers are careful not to over
step their bounds. Retired executives
assigned to the project must remem
ber that their role is to offer advice —
not to jump in and change the way a
nonprofit operates.
“You need to have the ri^t sort of
personality for nonprofits,” Fletcher
says. “You have to be a sympathetic
listener. You don’t go barging in and
say, ‘I have all the answers.’ WE will
not roll up our shirtsleeves and get in
and do the work.”
Hospice
Continued from page 1
that the social and psychological fac
tors are equal with the biomedical
factors in a person’s care,” says
Steinhauser.
Hospice care is usually provided
in a patient’s home, but resident hos
pice programs are beginning to open
across the state to provide care for
people with no one to care for them
at home.
'The most fundamental change to
hospice came in 1983, when
Congress passed legislation allowing
for third-party reimbursement for
hospice care. 'That change led to the
phenomenal growth in hospice orga
nizations in the past decade.
Today, says Person, it’s unusual
for health insurance not to cover hos
pice care. In fact, health insurance
companies often view hospice as a
cost-saving measure.
Cathy Hinson says her family’s
health insurer pressured her to bring
her husband home because costly
hospitalization no longer was med
ically necessary.
Physicians also have changed
their attitude toward hospice in
recent years.
Physicians used to continue
aggressive treatment and refer a
patient to hospice only within 24
hours of death, says Person. Today,
hospice has tremendous support
from physicians.
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To hospice supporters, that
means more terminally iU patients
have a chance to get the most they
possibly can out of their last few
months, weeks and days of life.
Cathy Hinson agrees.
“I could turn Ray’s bed around so
he could look out the window and
watch the girls playing and see his
folks working in the yard,” she says.
“He was so much happier at home.
He even improved for a couple of
weeks.”
Hospice also helped Hinson and
her dau^ters deal with their loss.
“I could call and cry on their
shoulders anytime I wanted to. If I
needed help with anything, all I had
to do was pick up the phone.”
Hinson attended support groups
and went to counseling sessions with
a hospice therapist. Amy and
Jennifer met each week with a hos
pice therapist who heiped them
express themselves throng art.
“I was just hanging on by a sin^e
emotional thread, and it gave me a
great sense of relief that if I was at a
point where I couldn’t talk to the
girls without falling apart, [the thera
pist] was there and she couid talk to
them,” says Hinson.
o
ur goal is that Hospice care should
be available to every North Carolinian
by the end of the year.
JUDI LUND PERSON
Hospice for the Carolinas
The girls also attended Hospice of
Winston-Salem’s Camp Carousel for
children who have lost a parent or
sibling.
Whatever changes health-care
reform brings to hospice. Person
says, the organization always will
focus on care for the dying and their
families.
“Normally, we admit patients for
whom there are weeks and months
rather than years in terms of the life
left to live,” she says.
That doesn’t mean, however, that
hospice simply is a program for the
elderly. In fact, says Person, the
aging of the U.S. population won’t
necessarily mean a similar growth in
the need for hospice care.
‘We are a program for the termi-
r
> ■
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nally ill and they can be any age,”
says Person. “Our youngest patient
was three days old and our oldest
was 105.” About half of hospice
patients are under 65.
While the vast majority of hospice
patients are suffering from terminal
cancer, AIDS has had an increasing
presence tu hospice care. In 1993, 5
percent of hospice patients had
AIDS.
But Person doesn’t expect that
figure to increase much.
“For a lot of AIDS patients, our
philosophies don’t necessarily go
hand-in-hand,” she says.
An AIDS patient, for example, is
more likely to try aggressive, experi
mental treatments near the end of
life. But on many issues, such as
grief counseling, hospices and AIDS
organizations work together.
The hospice movement also has
seen the development of for-profit
hospices, including two that have
opened recently in North Carolina.
Person says there isn’t much dif
ference between for-profit and non
profit hospices, at least not in the
important measure of the care they
provide to patients and their fami
lies.
People like Cathy Hinson simply
are grateful for the service. As her
husband died, she sat by him, hold
ing his arm.
“I just kept talking to Ray, telling
him, ‘It’s okay to let go, we’U always
love you and we’re never going to for
get you.’”
If he’d been at the hospital, she
says, he might have died alone or she
mi^t not have been there.
“I just can’t thank hospice enou^
for having this option available to
me,” she says. “I really can’t.”