Giving Back How older Ohioans overcame age—and poverty—to serve their communities: The story of SCSEP
Ohio Story
To many Americans, Ohio is the home of apple-pie virtues and legendary accomplishment.
The first astronaut, John Glenn, grew up on a farm near Columbus. The Wright Brothers built the first successful airplane in Dayton. Only Virginia and New York have produced more presidents.
Ohio State University defines college football success. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has remade the Cleveland waterfront. At the world-famous Cleveland Clinic, doctors repair more hearts than at any other health facility in the world.
Ohio is not entirely Eastern, not entirely Appalachian, not entirely Midwestern—it is all three. It has sophisticated cities, swanky suburbs, ethnic diversity, prosperous farms, craggy mountains, a Great Lake, a historic river.
It is America in miniature.
In the next few years, Ohio will lead the nation in an extraordinary statistic. “All of the growth in the working-age population of Ohio between 2005 and 2015 will be generated by persons 55 and older,” according to a new study conducted by a team from Northeastern University in Boston. The study was commissioned by Senior Service America, a nonprofit organization that helps low-income older adults gain job skills and re-enter the workforce.
Are Ohio’s seniors up to the task of filling the jobs and keeping them? And just as importantly, are the state’s employers, including government agencies, ready for older workers? Statistics suggest they are not, particularly for the neediest residents. Continued funding for the single program that assists those considered hardest to serve is in the hands of Congress and its deliberations over reauthorization of the Older Americans Act.
Nearly one in nine Ohio residents live below the federal poverty level, including many older adults, who already are having trouble—and will almost certainly have more. They are often unfamiliar with computers, short on education and experience, unsure of their skills. They may have been out of the workforce for decades while raising families. They may suddenly need to work because of divorce, relocation or widowhood, and they may have no idea how to begin the search.
For more than 40 years, the federally funded Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) has provided a boost, placing low-income adults age 55 and older in participating nonprofit and public agencies, where they learn marketable skills so they can return to the workforce. They receive minimum wage for 20 hours of work a week.
Senior Service America, based in the Washington, D.C., area, is one of six national nonprofit organizations that operate SCSEP (pronounced SEE-sep) in Ohio. Last year, the six served nearly 3,000 Ohioans, just 1 percent of those eligible. (Only programs in California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas were larger.)
To many people involved with SCSEP—inside Ohio and out— the community service is what sets it apart. Participants work in job-training positions in libraries and after-school reading programs, health-care aide positions, food preparation programs, call-to-check-on-seniors programs, and many more. In 2005, SCSEP participants nationwide provided 46 million hours of community service.
Who are the Ohioans who benefit from SCSEP? What has the program meant to them as individuals? What has it meant to their communities? Three cities in Ohio—all very different from one another, although all three have SCSEP programs administered by Senior Service America—hold some answers.