Imagine volunteering for your insurance company
Town &
Country Planning, January 2000
Imagine enthusiastically
volunteering for your insurance company. A strange idea. Yet
that's exactly what an extremely innovative programme has
led to in Brooklyn. And after 12 years of operation, Member
to Member volunteers have put in as much as 100,000 hours
helping their neighbours.
Why mention it now in a topical column? Partly because they have just received an award from President Clinton for volunteer efforts directed at solving critical social problems. And partly because Member to Member, owned and managed by the health insurance company Elderplan, is expanding to cover the whole of New York City.
The programme is one of the most successful time bank in the USA &emdash; one of the fast-growing idea whereby people earn time as a kind of money for helping each other, teaching each other and supporting each other to be independent.
This one was designed to allow older volunteers to earn and pay time credits for giving and receiving non-medical services. Aside from basic chore services for each other, it offers shopping, escorts, friendly visiting, bill-paying, hospital visiting, home repairs, walking clubs, support groups, self-help courses and others, all funded by time dollars earned through the scheme.
Many of the services provided by Member to Member are beyond anything that can normally be offered by a health insurance company. But many are also services which money can't buy anyway. "Often you can't buy what you really need," says Mashi Blech, Elderplan's director of community services. "You can't hire a new best friend. You can't buy somebody you can talk to over the phone when you're worried about surgery."
Many of the connections that they make are continued with regular contact every week - in a few cases since the very beginning of the program in 1987. They also have an ambitious programme of training courses and self-help courses, helping the recently bereaved for example - hoping that they can train the graduates of those courses to teach in their own turn. They also have telephone bingo, regular phone quizzes, walking clubs and peer counselling along the lines of a successful project in California which pioneered the idea.
The statistics are impressive. Since 1987, Elderplan has presided over 41,985 'episodes' of care to date, with nearly 4,500 people receiving care, and a total of almost 500 volunteers going through the basic training - of which 180 are now active.
Originally, the scheme was used by participants as a way of extending the long-term care insurance they were getting through Elderplan, earning so that they could receive visits and lifts if they needed them - and home repairs, which have been the most popular service offered. Participants remained healthy longer than average, which meant Elderplan was able to offer 25 per cent discounts on premiums in return for time dollars.
Elderplan is now zero-premium, and to replace this perk, Member to Member launched CreditShop in 1998, which allows participants to use their time earnings to buy goods and services outside the system. These include healthcare products like blood pressure monitors, movie and theatre tickets, transport vouchers, supermarket and luncheon vouchers &emdash; all of which are provided to the scheme at a discount by local business. Organisers also negotiated fixed price lunches in restaurants in Brooklyn.
Mashi Blech recently organised a focus group to find out what members wanted, and CreditShop will now expand the number of restaurants where time dollars can be spent locally. They will also let members give donations in time dollars to the city's meals on wheels service - which will be backed in cash by Elderplan.
But for most members, the real benefits of Member to Member is that they do something useful and valued by other people. "It is a wonderful feeling," said Pearl Amabile, a senior member of Member to Member, after a ceremony handing over some of the rugs, bags and knitted by other members for those in nursing homes. "When I give something out, I feel the joy in people's faces. That is worth all the money in the world to me."
As the forthcoming government report on an ageing population is expected to point out, time money looks as though it can be a major tool in the forthcoming century for achieving social ends. And if it makes us look at the old kind of money a bit differently &emdash; then all well and good.
David Boyle is an associate
of the New Economics Foundation and the author of Funny
Money
www.funny-money.co.uk
