"It's like a job. You have goals. You see results" -Yuriy, Experience Corps Member

John W. Gardner was a consulting professor at Stanford University's School of Education and a member of the Civic Ventures Board of Directors. In 1988 Gardner developed this concept paper that served as the blueprint for the Experience Corps® pilot.

The Experience Corps will be a nationwide volunteer group run by senior citizens and enrolling senior citizens as volunteers. We will undertake to be of assistance in a great variety of areas, working with children, the disabled, older people, volunteering in hospitals and nursing homes, tutoring, providing home care and so on. None of the community and social service activities for which citizens volunteer will be off bounds for the Corps.

We believe, without being immodest, that the large numbers of us over age 65 constitute a rich reservoir of talent, experience and commitment potentially available to society. We intend to place that talent, experience and commitment at the disposal of our fellow Americans. It is no secret that conventional views of aging have tended to push older people aside, but it is partly our fault that we have accepted that approach to the later years.

We have an active feeling of obligation to our society and our communities. We know the conventional view is that society owes its older citizens something, and we would be foolish to quarrel with that. But we owe something too, and this is in one sense our "operation give-back."

It isn't just altruism and a sense of duty however: We believe that this will be a great adventure–good for us physically and in every other way. If one lists the problems of older people, health would perhaps top the list, with economic problems perhaps second. After that, very high on the list is a cluster of problems: loneliness, boredom and need to be needed. We believe that our plan hits directly at that cluster. And current opinion in medical circles is that if one can deal with those problems, many of our problems of physical health will be more easily solved.

The members of the Experience Corps will, for the most part, do their volunteering in their home communities. Great latitude will be given to local units of the Corps to determine the focus of their efforts. We visualize sub-units of the Corps that might wish to focus entirely on the care of the disabled–or childcare–or the terminally ill, or any number of other areas.

The headquarters will not constitute a top-heavy bureaucracy. It will undertake to educate the public concerning the purposes of the Corps. It will set standards for the operation of local and affiliated units. It will disseminate the best practices developed by local units and affiliates. It will offer technical assistance in the setting up of local programs, training of volunteers and quality control.

A word about affiliation: There are already in existence many volunteer programs involving older people, some of them outstanding in quality. In the private sector there is the Volunteer Connection, the various Executive Service Corps Programs, the AARP volunteer activities, and many church-sponsored projects. Government-supported programs include the Foster Grandparent Program, the Senior Companion Program, and the Retired Senior Volunteer Program.

The Experience Corps will hope to develop arrangements for affiliation that will link it to these already-existing groups in a mutually acceptable way. Even for groups that are brought into existence as a result of Experience Corps encouragement, a pattern of affiliation or co-sponsorship might be desirable. For example, a religious denomination might be very pleased to come into the Experience Corps program yet want to carry on the work under its own sponsorship, preserving its own style and values. We believe that such arrangements need not dilute the Experience Corps and might reduce the somewhat impersonal standardization that so often creeps into nationally organized groups. Standards would have to be set, of course, so no group would carry on inappropriate, e.g. political, activities under the banner of the Corps.

One of the problems for those of us beyond the age of 65 is that we are apt to need a certain amount of encouragement to get into activities that we would surely enjoy once in them. Some of us have accepted the conventional but mistaken view that older people are not really needed and should stand out of the way. Some of us would gladly volunteer but don't know of any attractive opportunities to do so. For all of us who fall in those categories, the Experience Corps® will offer a widely publicized opportunity–a program with the cachet and drawing power to pull the more hesitant of us out of our hideaways.