Racial Differences in Volunteer Engagement by Older Adults: An Empowerment Perspective

Older Americans are increasingly engaged in volunteering to organizations. The volunteering rates for adults ages 65 and over showed a upward trend in the past three decades, rising from 14.3% in 1974 to 24.6% in 2008 (Corporation for National and Community Service, 2006; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). As the first of the Baby Boomer generation has turned 60, there will be a large pool of potential older adult volunteers owing to the unprecedented size of this generation (Einolf, 2009). The aging Baby Boomers also encompass increased racial and ethnic and cultural diversification. For example, 8.3% of older adults were black in 2008; this proportion increases to 11.6% among Baby Boomers (Administration on Aging, 2009). Volunteering is viewed as an empowerment process whereby older adults are actively engaged in the community and improve their psychosocial and physical well-being (Cheung & Kwan, 2006; Kam, 2002). Moreover, volunteering generates a host of benefits that accrue to the recipients of volunteer services, to the community in which volunteers serve, and to the social service sector that has come to rely increasingly on volunteers. The value of volunteering and the extent of racial and ethnic diversity call for greater scholarly attention to the volunteer behavior of various ethnic groups (Sundeen, Garcia, & Raskoff, 2009). The research on racial and ethnic difference in volunteering is very limited, and the findings are controversial (Fischer & Schaffer, 1993; Hinterlong, 2006; Sundeen et al., 2009). Some data show that white people have substantially higher rates of volunteering than other ethnic groups, whereas others find no difference or even the reverse of the trend (Fischer & Schaffer, 1993). Using the National Survey of Families and Households data, Miner and Tolnay (1998) examined the racial difference and race-related crossover effect on volunteer participation in different types of organizations. Findings showed that young cohorts of black people and white people had similar rates of voluntary organization participation, whereas older black people had lower rates of participation than their white counterparts in social service and job-related organizations, except in neighborhood groups, especially church groups that have historically been open to black people (Miner & Tolnay, 1998). By contrast, Hinterlong (2006) documented that white older adults volunteered to organizations at significantly higher rates than their black peers consistently across three waves of data collection through longitudinal analyses of nationally representative data from the Americans' Changing Lives surveys (see http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/04690). The relevance of race to volunteering may be linked with life quality indicators that make volunteering possible--for example, education and income. Despite recent gains in educational and occupational achievements, black people "are still worse off than [white people] across a broad range of quality-of-life indicators" (Musick, Wilson, & Bynum, 2000, p. 1539). Cumulative disadvantages over the life course, including racial discrimination, have created unequal access to volunteer roles for black people and white people (Dannefer, 2003), which may explain why black people are less likely to volunteer. Racial difference in volunteering rates is even more apparent in the older population (Miner & Tolnay, 1998), probably because older black people have historically experienced more socioeconomic and political marginalization and have restricted access to certain type of volunteer organizations. The inequalities embedded in social structures of race and social class differentiate individuals and their aging experience (Dannefer, 2003), and these dynamics likely are reflected in volunteer engagement. Yet exclusion from volunteering threatens to further marginalize older black people by denying them opportunities of community participation, access to potential benefits of volunteering, and chances of contribution to the society. …