Volunteer Time Banks for Eldercare
Communities around the world are letting volunteers earn credits for providing senior care and companionship
At 715,000, seniors are the fastest growing age group in Alberta. Estimates suggest their numbers will reach more than one million by 2035. The surge in numbers is quickly putting pressure on public healthcare and caregiving systems, including facility-based care.
This reality and concerns about what lies ahead have many people looking for creative and innovative solutions for eldercare. Earlier this year, the CBC spoke with Richard Gotfried, MLA for Calgary-Fish Creek, to get his insight into the care crisis the province is facing.
In 2021, Gotfried oversaw a review of the continuing care system in the province. He pointed out that one of the most pressing priorities for families and individuals is to remain in their homes as they get older. He also noted that managing the “demograhic bubble” would require shifting funding from facility-based care to home care.
Some of the ideas Gotfried revealed to achieve this include a home-care network run like a hub in each community, and eight-bed neighbourhood facilities. However, in virtually every type of eldercare — home-based or institutional — volunteers play a vital role.
Some countries have already acknowledged how central volunteers are to helping take care of seniors that they have implemented public policies and systems around this very fact.
These policies come in the form of volunteer time banks, which both Japan and Switzerland are using to cope with their growing number of seniors. Singapore also plans to start their time bank called Eldersave to help seniors age in place.
Time banks aren’t new. Teruko Mizushima, a Japanese housewife, inventor and activist, created the first one in 1973 to let participants earn time credits that they could spend at any time in their lives.
The idea was to use a new form of currency, one that all of us have — time — to help people have more control over their lives and to strengthen community relations.
As Elizabeth Jill Miller explains in her doctoral thesis Both Borrowers and Lenders: Time Banks and the Aged in Japan, writes, “Time banks can generate a new form of social capital that fosters traditional Japanese reciprocity and has ikigai or ‘sense of meaning in life’ as one of its main pillars.”
In one model in Japan run by the Nippon Active Life Club, seniors volunteer to help each other. For instance, one senior provides companionship to another one, including someone with dementia. He earns points he can use to get housekeeping or gardening assistance from another volunteer.
In the Zeitvorsorge St. Gallen retirement time bank model in Switzerland, adults aged 50 and older — or “sprightly pensioners” as they call them — provide assistance or companionship to seniors. They in turn receive credits they can use for similar services when they need them.
Some critics of time banks for eldercare say that they promote the wrong moral values, for instance, suggesting that people should be rewarded for altruism. They also question how the quality of care can be measured or assessed in a system such as a time bank.
However, such arguments can be countered if you consider that we are increasingly aware that unpaid caregiving has long been undervalued. It contributes $97 billion to the economy.
Volunteering also contributes significantly to the economy, to the tune of $55.9 billion in 2017, according to a report from the conference board of Canada. Why should that value not be rewarded in credits or points paid forward?
Also, it’s perhaps misleading, if not dangerous, to suggest that volunteers will compromise the quality of care for seniors. This is especially so when you consider the tasks that volunteers can more than adequately provide in time banks. These include companionship, gardening, snow removal, cooking, home repairs, housekeeping, technology assistance, shopping, and rides to appointments.
When it comes to caregiving, we often focus so much on medical or health needs. We forget that day-to-day life includes all these needs, such as companionship, technology assistance and home repairs. Seniors can often feel embarrassed to ask for free help for these tasks so they don’t. Or they end up paying for expensive help that severely stretches their fixed budgets.
Also, the longevity of the Nippon Active Life Club’s model — it was implemented in 1994 — provides insight into how well a time bank can serve the needs of an elderly community and that it can have staying power.
The fact is that new ideas take time to catch on. They require belief, commitment, organization and execution. Time-banking specifically for eldercare might be a new concept in western countries. But it’s not the first innovative idea that can catch on.
Today, most time banks around the world are small-scale and driven by niche community groups. However, they are certainly worth considering as part of a well-funded national or provincial seniors strategy that can be implemented at the local level.
Technology makes time banks for senior caregiving possible. And the only way to find out if they will work is to try them.
