On Sunday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Today, nearly 50 million Americans are retired, a number that has been steadily increasing for decades. So how do retirees keep busy and also find purpose? For some, that is Americorps Seniors. The federal agency for national service and volunteerism offers seniors an opportunity to indulge their passions while giving back to their communities. What kind of an impact might they make? Atalaya Sergi, director of Americorps Seniors, joins The Excerpt to discuss the group’s membership and work.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, December 3rd, 2023.

What's it like to be able to sleep in every day, not have to rush out the door and go to work, be able to take leisurely walks any time of day? Today, nearly 50 million Americans are living that reality every day, a number that's been steadily increasing for decades. So how do retirees keep busy while giving them a good reason to get out of bed each day? For some that is AmeriCorps Seniors. The Federal Agency for National Service and Volunteerism, offer seniors a chance at a third act, an opportunity to indulge their passions while giving back to their communities. What kind of an impact might they make? Atalaya Sergi is the director of AmeriCorps Seniors and joins us now to talk about the group's membership and work. Atalaya, thanks for joining us.

Atalaya Sergi:

Thank you so much for having me today. I'm really excited to be here and share a little bit more about AmeriCorps Seniors.

Dana Taylor:

So how did AmeriCorps Seniors program get started and what kinds of projects are retirees involved with?

Atalaya Sergi:

AmeriCorps Seniors is a grant making office actually in the federal agency of AmeriCorps. Our mission in AmeriCorps is to engage individuals in community service and national service within their communities to really help them to give back and to improve their communities. AmeriCorps Seniors was actually started in 1965, so our agency this year is celebrating the agency's 30th anniversary, but AmeriCorps Seniors is almost twice as old. So in 1965, our first program was called the Foster Grandparent Program, and it was really focused on giving older adults, older persons, the opportunity to mentor, tutor young children who were in need of some additional care and service. That has continued on. Now the AmeriCorps Senior's Office actually has four programs under its umbrella.

Dana Taylor:

Are there educational opportunities to develop new skills? Can retirees actively participate in determining what their program looks like?

Atalaya Sergi:

Like I said, there are four different programs that we have within AmeriCorps Seniors, the Foster Grandparents, which I shared a little bit about. But then we also have a Senior Companion program, and that program is set up to engage older adults in serving other older adults and people with disabilities to help them remain in their homes and to reduce social isolation. Then we have the RSVP program, which in communities, those volunteers can serve in any place that they are needed in order to help their community. Then our fourth program is a little bit of a program where we test out new volunteer opportunities. So we call that the Senior Demonstration Program.

We are in every state in the country and three of our territories, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. So community organizations receive a grant from AmeriCorps Seniors in order to develop a program in their community, to recruit older persons from their community to serve. So in your community, you can look and see what AmeriCorps Seniors programs there are and choose the one that seems most interesting to you or that is close to you in your geographic location.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, Atalaya, what are some of the more unusual projects retirees have been involved with?

Atalaya Sergi:

When I talk about people who are still using their skills, there was a gentleman in our New York City RSVP program, and he was actually using his skills as a financial advisor to help people who were previously unhoused, but now moving into their own housing to understand and learn how to budget and how to set up their funds so that they could be successful in saving and paying for the things that they needed. But we have a veteran to veteran program, and they are very successful in just really engaging and understanding the needs of our veterans. So we really enjoy engaging veterans to help other veterans in our programs. Then I think one of our newest programs, so one of those Senior Demonstration programs is focused on workforce development for older persons. So we are using service, so the opportunity to give service, but while you are giving that service, we are training you on whatever that career path is that you wanted to pursue, helping you get the certifications, and then those grantees will help those individuals to secure employment afterwards.

Dana Taylor:

So how many members do you have and how long do they typically serve for? Is there a typical kind of person that joins?

Atalaya Sergi:

We have about 140,000 volunteers around the country, actually a little over, but if I round the numbers. It's actually a little over when we give the exact numbers. Like I said, they're serving all over the country in our territories. The average years of service is seven years of service. However, we invited a few of our volunteers to come to one of our convenings where we do some training and resourcing of our grantees, and we had volunteers on the stage that had been doing this for three or four years all the way up to 20 years. So we have a variety of volunteers, and they come from every background, every industry or previous work that you can imagine.

Dana Taylor:

Well, in your experience, what's been the impact of doing this work with retirees physically and mentally? Do you have any support structures for folks who want to volunteer, but maybe they have some physical and/or mental handicaps?

Atalaya Sergi:

So we have done some longitudinal studies to understand what is the benefit of volunteering for older adults, and we found that 84% of volunteers who were brand new and then served for two years, 84% reported improved or stable health. 88% said that they had less feelings of being socially isolated. 78% of those volunteers felt less depressed. So we see that volunteering not only helps those that are receiving the service, but also those that are giving the service. We actually are open to volunteers no matter who they are, we will help them. I was able to learn about one of our volunteers who had mobility challenges, and he was going out to his site and they had set it up so that he could serve small business owners.

Dana Taylor:

Well, you mentioned connections, and I'm really interested in the kinds of connections the work can create between retirees and the people they're helping. Is there a story that you can share here?

Atalaya Sergi:

One that comes to mind was actually prior to this role as the Director of AmeriCorps Seniors, I worked for a national nonprofit called Jumpstart for Young Children. In that program, we started to engage older adults, and my purpose for looking for volunteers was how can we serve more and more children in Los Angeles? Densely populated area. We were working with college students. There just weren't enough of them. So we found the older adults. That was my purpose. How can we get more children ready for kindergarten? When we invited the teachers to come to our end of the year celebration, where we just wanted to really just acknowledge all of the hard work that our volunteers did, they started one after another to talk about how having these volunteers in their classroom had really given them more energy, had reinvigorated them for the work that they were doing, and how they felt much more connected to their work, to the children and to the community after having the volunteers in their classroom.

So I feel like we often go into engaging older adults for a specific purpose, but they have such a domino effect in any environment that they are in that becomes positive for everyone. That was an unexpected connection that I had no idea would happen. So I really like to share that to say that they make impacts on all generations that they come in contact with through their service.

Dana Taylor:

Are there other organizations offering these kinds of opportunities for retirees?

Atalaya Sergi:

Yeah, there are. So the one that comes to mind, just jumps to mind right away, is the AARP Foundation. They have a program called Experience Corps, and it is engaging older adults in serving in schools as well. So they're doing that type of work. Then another organization that comes to mind for me is CoGenerate. They are really about intergenerational service in community, and so they really promote and find opportunities where older adults can work with other generations to solve community problems.

Dana Taylor:

Well, and then finally, Atalaya, in your time as director, what stood out to you the most about this program and has anything surprised you?

Atalaya Sergi:

The thing that continues to motivate me for this is what I shared before, is the dual or sometimes triple, quadruple impact that older adults in service can have. When I started, I did not expect either the impact on those teachers, but I also didn't expect just how invigorating and life-giving that service for older adults would be either. So I think that that is one of the things that keeps me just really excited about the work. The thing that surprised me when I came to this role was just the number of areas, topics, issue areas that older adults were impacting with their service. So I've named a few, but it's with children, it's with people who are socially isolated. It's helping veterans. It's helping people who can't get to doctor's appointments, make sure they get to doctor's appointments. Delivering food. Engaging people in just conversation and connection when they come into the centers or in their homes. Helping with disaster preparation and mitigation.

Just so many areas that they are serving in. What it has spoken to me is we need to engage even more older persons in service because we need their experience, their knowledge, their wisdom, to help all of us continue to grow and to create the society that we all want.

Dana Taylor:

Thank you so much for joining me, Atalaya.

Atalaya Sergi:

Thank you.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our Senior Producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our Executive Producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

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