The stereotype that senior citizens are the most-volunteering age group in the U.S. isn’t quite correct — unless you include all volunteers 55 and older. Here’s a (rounded) breakdown of volunteers by age group for the year ending in September.
• 45 to 54 years old: 12.2 million.
• 35 to 44: 11.8 million.
• 65 and up: 10.7 million.
• 55 to 64: 10.3 million.
• 25 to 34: 9.3 million.
• 16 to 24: 8.5 million.
In all, nearly 63 million Americans ages 16 and older volunteered at something during the year. Religious organizations were by far the main venue for volunteerism, and food service was the No. 1 activity.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Gene Scott, spry and wiry at 79, doesn’t plan on slowing down. But he allowed that it may be somewhat inevitable.
Scott has cancer — “but it’s no biggie to me,” he said. “It won’t kill me. I won’t let it.” He heads over from his Fruit Valley home to Rose Village’s Memorial Lutheran Church five days a week to lead a small crew that sets up tables and chairs, sets out soup and sandwiches, and welcomes hungry neighbors inside for a free lunch.
The stereotype that senior citizens are the most-volunteering age group in the U.S. isn't quite correct — unless you include all volunteers 55 and older. Here's a (rounded) breakdown of volunteers by age group for the year ending in September.
• 45 to 54 years old: 12.2 million.
• 35 to 44: 11.8 million.
• 65 and up: 10.7 million.
• 55 to 64: 10.3 million.
• 25 to 34: 9.3 million.
• 16 to 24: 8.5 million.
In all, nearly 63 million Americans ages 16 and older volunteered at something during the year. Religious organizations were by far the main venue for volunteerism, and food service was the No. 1 activity.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
But Scott’s buddy and ministry partner Gary Schonberger, 70, has stepped down from his leadership role here due to health issues. Violet Adams, the legally blind (and almost illegally energetic) head cook profiled several times in this newspaper, has retired from that position at age 80-something, but still pitches in as able. Gary Schneider, who heads the nonprofit Angels of God food program that keeps Memorial Lutheran’s free lunch stocked, and Bud Hayes, who has long made deliveries to hungry neighbors who can’t get out, have both faced health crises recently.
Nobody likes describing their medical problems in the newspaper, and we haven’t insisted on invading their privacy. Let’s leave it at this: The generation of volunteers that’s been feeding the needy in the Rose Village area for years now is graying. New blood is needed, Scott said — or maybe, that is, blood that’s robust and healthy but not quite so new.
“People who are retirement age but in good health who can commit to one day a week,” he said. “What I really need is the commitment.” He’s seen plenty of volunteers with sweet dreams but no follow-through, he said. And he knows younger folks are — or ought to be — busy with work and family.
Meanwhile, he’s also seen plenty of need. Fifty to 60 people per day come here for lunch, he said, and get served by a crew of about eight. “We don’t ask why they’re here. If you’re hungry, we feed you,” Scott said.
Why does he keep at it? “It gives me satisfaction to help others,” he said simply. It also reminds him of his youth alongside the Fruit Valley railroad tracks, he said, and the way his generous mother always set an extra place for the “hoboes” who’d knock politely at the door. (That was a friendlier, more trusting time, he said.)
Jim Wulf, a member of the church’s outreach team, summed up the scene this way: “Real people … with their own real life’s problems, extending themselves as we continue trying to live generously each and every day.”
Moment of eternity
How’d this scene get started? It started with Angels of God lead Gary Schneider, who said he was an alcoholic and drug addict for years, until a near-tragedy shook him out of it.
Years ago, he took his young daughters to swim in the Lewis River. He proceeded to relax and “crack open a beer” while they got into the water, he said. Before he knew it, one of the girls was gone. He ran to the water and dove in — moving fast and feeling like he was taking “an eternity” — pulled the girl out and resuscitated her.
The shock woke him up at last, he said. He cleaned himself up. He used to walk past the Memorial Lutheran Church on Grand Boulevard all the time; now he went in and asked why God had given him a second chance — and what he could do truly to deserve it.
“What can I possibly do with my life? You know what a mess it is,” he told God.
The answer came within months: a job as the church’s outreach director. He started focusing on feeding the neighborhood, and somehow the effort snowballed. Schneider is no longer on church staff, but his Angels of God became a nonprofit that still struggles along despite some major ups and downs — like its 12-year residency up the block at Lord’s Gym, a Christian community center emphasizing night basketball and other recreational activities that keep kids out of trouble.
But what seemed like a match made in heaven came to an end in late 2013.
Lord’s Gym
Angels of God at Lord’s Gym was a mainstay in this neighborhood — until it had to leave because of the crumbling condition of the building where it was situated, the New Life Friends Church, which unhappily decided to shut down the whole operation. But that only happened after a spiffy new commercial kitchen was installed by a deep-pocketed donor specifically for Lord’s Gym’s use.
It was a maddening turn of events, and various folks connected with Memorial Lutheran and Angels of God still seem exasperated about it. Schneider and the Angels of God board have been hunting for a bigger, better location for a permanent soup kitchen ever since, they said, without luck.
Schneider, meanwhile, admitted to being more of a caring-for-people guy than a meetings-and-budgets guy. Angels of God has been a legal nonprofit for years, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been managed professionally, he acknowledged. Schneider is more comfortable driving his pickup truck between this and that food pickup and drop-off sites than he is filling out forms, he said. A repopulated board of directors — including people such as Jason Lamb, a 31-year-old businessman with connections to Flash Love, another growing, grassroots nonprofit — has helped strengthen a faltering operation, he said.
“We have a new board, new rules and regulations. We’re at a turning point,” Lamb said.
Going away party
Wulf said he’s “always worried, always looking for new help” when it comes to feeding the hungry. He’s proud of the effort based at his church — and he’s learned plenty about poverty and homelessness, which are due more to desperate straits like unemployment and displacement than to criminality and drugs, he said. He said Memorial Lutheran has regularly hosted folks from the nearby low-income Courtyard Village Apartments — or Parc Central, as it’s now known — both before and after they were priced out of the renovated complex and had to leave.
“They are not just stereotypical homeless people,” he said. “They are people in trouble.”
And they’re grateful for the help, he added. When Gary Schonberger said he’d be stepping down after leading this food ministry for years, Lamb said, it was the hungry and homeless themselves who volunteered: “We want to do something for Gary.”
They dug into their own empty pockets and managed to come up with a little spare change for a going-away party. They managed to fill up a jar, Lamb said, and celebrate Schonberger properly on April 17.
“It’s so awesome when a group just organizes themselves because they want to,” said Lamb. “It just shows how much Gary touched their lives.”
