Volunteering for Health

In 1974, when Louise Jackson was in her late 50s, her knees had become so painful that doctors prescribed a cane to help her walk. But as Jackson became more and more involved with the foster-grandparent program of the national Senior Service Corps, she found her days getting busier and busier.

One day, she lost the cane-and never bothered getting another one. Today, at the age of 84, Louise Jackson puts in full days teaching troubled parents-many of them drug addicts-how to parent their children, escorting them from the grocery store, to their children's schools, to the laundromat and back home. "It's like the whole family's my children," she says.

And those bad knees? Oh, they still bother her from time to time. "Sometimes I get up and my knee's hurting me and I think, 'I don't want to get out of here.' But I get up and go and a little while later, I don't think about my knees any more," she says. "I know my health is better. If people would just get up out of their house and do something for other people, they'd feel better about themselves."

More and more, research is telling us what Louise Jackson and other senior volunteers already know: Volunteering not only makes people feel better about themselves, it actually lengthens their lives and improves their health. A 1999 study from the University of Michigan found that seniors who spent less than an hour a week volunteering were less likely to die over the period of the study (7 1/2 years) than those who didn't volunteer at all.

By carefully controlling for factors like existing health conditions and other physical activities, the researchers also documented that people live longer because they volunteer-rather than people volunteer because they're healthier and thus likelier to live longer. "Quite a few people assume that older volunteers should benefit in terms of better health and well-being," says Marc Musick, PhD, an author of the study who's now affiliated with the University of Texas. "This study is one of the first to document that is true in a nationally representative sample of older Americans."