Senior News April, 2002 Vol. 21. No.  4

 

Published by the Humboldt Senior Resource Center in Eureka, California. HSRC is a non-profit community-based organization offering services for senior citizens, multi-generational families and caregivers.

Elderhostel: April program features familiar "house mother"

Commission on Aging to convene rural meeting in Eureka

CSL Election: Attend a forum and vote for your candidate

Senior News: Ad manager says "so long"

Volunteer outreach: Gail Gai has connected people for 25 years

Why I love to volunteer

Through Friday April 12: Tax preparation assistance

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Volunteer outreach
Gail Gai has connected people for 25 years
by Barbara Clark

In 1977 when Gail Gai first reported to work in the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) office then at HSU, there were some 200 volunteers in service to Humboldt County organizations.

The title has changed in the 25 years she has held the job: she was an outreach worker in 1977. Today she is a placement coordinator, and there are more than 900 RSVP volunteers. The program's management has also shifted from the Humboldt State Foundation to the Area Agency on Aging (AAA). But what hasn't changed are the eager and knowledgeable people who report to work in local groups.

Senior News, in fact, couldn't run without our RSVP and other volunteers-we enjoy the services of 23 volunteers monthly, people who proofread the paper, serve on the editorial advisory board, and those dozen stalwarts who fetch and carry anywhere from two to eight bundles of 100 newspapers around to stores, restaurants and public buildings from Garberville to Crescent City.

Gail Gai and the AAA have been celebrating her 25 years all this year, and they have much to appreciate. Historically, Gai can say that her Orick monthly potluck is still meeting from when she and Gloria Zuber organized it years ago-although Zuber died last year and the group gathering for lunch is completely different from when it began.

"The best thing about this job has been working with all the volunteers over the years," Gai said.

Her primary focus nowadays is the SHARE program-Seniors in Humboldt as Resources in Education. The school-based volunteer program involves some 250 different connections a year, all by volunteers:

* Pen pals in eight schools, in which an older adult and a student exchange one letter each month and then meet one another at a May party. Through the years 200 seniors and students have participated.
* Resource speakers for K-12 classrooms in which 15-18 people each semester come into the classroom to bring their interest or expertise to the students. Topics in social sciences, math, arts and humanities, the natural world, history, foreign travel, disaster preparedness, health and fitness enrich the students' course of study.
* Personal recollection panels bring regular folks into the classroom to talk of growing up in other decades (this Senior News editor is scheduled at Eureka High School May 1) .
* In-class tutors bring about 65 volunteers into the classroom once or twice a week to work with individual students who need extra help.

"The joy in this job is meeting the people and helping make connections, and then I hear six years later that they are still excited about doing this," Gai said.

You can be a volunteer in the schools yourself, or in hundreds of other "job" opportunities in all areas of Humboldt or Del Norte counties by calling Gail Gai at 707-442-3711 or e-mailing to gailgai@A1AA.org.

Barbara Clark is editor of Senior News. We congratulate Gail in her 25 years of such important service to our community.