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Articles & Reports

School Buses May Give Older New Yorkers a Lift

Someone in New York City noticed that the city was paying for a lot of school buses and bus drivers to stand around idle part of the day. Under a plan unveiled August, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg would put those resources to work driving old folks to the grocery store. Officials say that the cost of the program would be minimal because the city already purchases a full day's service from the bus drivers.

Of course, New Yorkers being New Yorkers, not everyone was enthralled with the idea, reports the New York Times. Some noted that school buses don't have toilets. Others said the seats don't have enough leg room. One woman said the buses had better have air conditioning. And New York being New York, the city already supports an Access-a-Van program for seniors. Those vans, observed the mayor, can be seen running around the city, often with only one or two passengers in them.

Whatever happens in New York, the idea may be portable to Virginia, where plenty of seniors need rides to the grocery store and local governments have school buses sitting idle for much of the day.

MEOC Wins Senior Transportation Service Award

Mountain Empire Transit, a service of Mountain Empire Older Citizens (MEOC) was selected by the Beverly Foundation as a 2009 national recipient of its STAR Search Senior Transportation Service Awards. Along with the recognition, MEOC received a small cash award.

Mountain Empire Transit serves senior citizens in the rural communities of Virginia's far southwest: the city of Norton and the counties of Wise, Lee and Scott. The recognition follows an award from Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to MEOC for "effective public transit, human services transportation coordination, planning and implementation." MEOC's executive director, Marilyn Pace Maxwell, is a member of the ODP Shared Database Work Group. Read more.

Fix That Leaky Bucket!

More than a third of the 60 million-plus Americans who donate their time and talents to non-profit organizations each year don't sign up the next year, according to a recent edition of Stanford Social Innovation Review. The problem isn't that volunteers had a nightmarish experience, says co-author Robert Grimm, it's that they have "bland" ones.

There are many reasons for the churn -- sometimes called the "leaky bucket" syndrome -- including lack of training for volunteers and their managers, and insufficient recognition for volunteer efforts. But Grimm also identifies a poor match between volunteers' tasks and their skill sets. It makes little sense to put an attorney to work painting a fence when he could be handling an urgent legal matter. Non-profits need to do a better job of aligning volunteers' jobs with their passions.

The original article does not appear to be online, but Rick Warzman discusses key points in a column he wrote recently for BusinessWeek. Virginia non-profits need to consider these issues as they think about mobilizing retired Baby Boomers to provide services to seniors. Read more.