The Public's Health: Volunteering for the Health of the Public | Public Health Post

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The world is aging rapidly. There are now more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 5 worldwide. And we all want to age healthy.
Yet how do we do that? We propose one simple potential way to facilitate healthy aging: volunteering. We like to think of volunteering as a public health intervention, as a social model for health promotion.
The literature on the association between volunteering and health outcomes is powerful. Formal volunteering (outside the home, for the good of others) has been associated with reduced mortality and increased self-rated health and physical function. Simply put: volunteering is good for the volunteer’s health.
Recent work suggests that those who have the greatest health vulnerabilities are, in fact, most likely to experience positive health benefits from volunteering.
How does volunteering help? It can increase physical activity, social engagement, and brain stimulation. It may decrease social isolation, as new friendships develop during the shared hours and afterward. Volunteering can promote confidence and self-image and enhance life meaning and purpose. Volunteering might be particularly beneficial to cognitive functioning because it allows older adults to master and engage in complex tasks, many of which might be new to them.
How many hours per week are necessary for these good results? The evidence suggests relatively few, although there may be a dose effect. Maintenance is key, and probably easiest if you can find forms of volunteering that are relevant to your life and experience.
One of the greatest challenges in this era of rapid population aging is to develop public health interventions that effectively decrease the number of years older people spend disabled. The potential for volunteer engagement as an innovative and significant public health disability reduction interventionshould get our attention. The cherry on top is that estimates already place the value of volunteer service at nearly $200 billion per year.
This seems to us an extraordinary opportunity. If we can encourage more volunteering in the growing elderly population we create a social good that also improves the health of the volunteer. As a society we might want to place a premium on providing resources and opportunities that make volunteering a routine part of aging, a way to create a world where we are aging, but doing so for the good of us all.

Michael Stein & Sandro Galea