Bob Rosenberg has a mantra: “You have a lot to offer; we’re asking you to volunteer.”
This mantra is one of the main messages of the book the Bay Area resident co-authored with Guy Lampard, “Giving from Your Heart: A Guide to Volunteering.” Rosenberg says that when asked to volunteer, most people will heed the call.
Rosenberg, 59, ought to know. It was close to four years ago that he heeded the call, so to speak, when he was forced into retirement because of neck pain after nearly 30 years as an endodontist and former chair of endodontics at the UCSF School of Dentistry.
As he phased out of practice, he gave serious thought to what would come next.
“I wanted to do something that was going to be of benefit to the community,” he says. “I wanted to do something different. Volunteering sort of stood out.”
He mentioned his quest to Lampard, his friend of six years, one night when they were out to dinner with their wives. As it happened, Lampard, now 51, was on sabbatical from his investment career and also looking for a meaningful way to fill his time.
After deciding to pursue the project together, the first thing they did was to try to get more information on volunteering. One consultant to nonprofits told them they weren’t alone, that a lot of retired professionals out there were having the same kinds of thoughts.
“He said, ‘You guys ought to write the book about volunteering for guys like you,'” Rosenberg says. “We looked at each other and said, ‘OK!'”
That book, which came out in February 2005 and has been endorsed by former Presidents Bush and Carter, set out to do what Rosenberg and Lampard, who lives with his wife, Suzanne, in Mill Valley, could not find in other books. The two combed bookstores and went online for information about volunteering, only to find that most of the material was targeted to managers of volunteer programs.
“There was nothing specific for volunteers to tell them how to get involved,” Rosenberg says.
In the end, writing the book itself became their volunteer project. They decided any profits the book made would go to Volunteer for Good, an organization they founded at the same time to assist those looking for ways to get involved.
“We wanted [people reading the book] to be able to come to us and ask questions and the answer might be as simple as pointing them to their local volunteer center,” says Rosenberg, who lives in Kentfield with his wife, Susan. “If they’ve got the interest, we don’t want them to fall through the cracks.”
One group they were especially hoping to target was the 77 million baby boomers who will retire over the next 20 or so years. So great are their numbers that some nonprofit professionals told Rosenberg and Lampard they are concerned there may not be enough meaningful activities to engage these potential volunteers.
“If you’ve been successful in your field — whatever that may be — if you have given your gut to that and developed an expertise, you may want to be licking stamps and sealing envelopes. But you may not,” Rosenberg says.
Still, he doesn’t necessarily agree with those in the nonprofit world who are worried about where to put everybody. “There are so many needs out there.”
He points to the approximately 1 million organizations with nonprofit status today, each of which has a board it needs to fill. He also cites the more than 17 million at-risk youths in this country, only a fraction of whom currently have mentors.
One barrier to creating meaningful volunteer opportunities is that many nonprofits don’t have anyone to organize the volunteers. But Rosenberg predicts these retired professionals will help create the volunteer opportunities themselves.
“A lot of the administrators of volunteer programs are going to be volunteers themselves. I think volunteers can transform the volunteer opportunities.”
Even those not close to retirement can find ways to volunteer that fit their lives, Rosenberg says.
“Your life is going to change — different parts of your life are going to have greater and lesser amounts of time,” acknowledges Rosenberg. “So you do what you can, when you can.”
For example, a family with young kids might volunteer together, doing something as simple and informal as cleaning the beach. “When you do something with the family volunteering, that’s such a powerful message to your kids. And you know you might pick up one half a bag of trash if you’ve got some young kids, but what a wonderful way to spend some time and ingrain in them the idea of giving back to the community.”
Rosenberg’s internal pull toward giving back to the community itself was likely generated by his Jewish upbringing.
“The whole notion of tzedakah is something with which you get familiar from a very early age,” says Rosenberg, who was raised in a Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C., and has been a member of Marin’s Congregation Rodef Sholom for almost 30 years. “It’s definitely something that’s helped to shape my view of what our responsibilities are locally and even globally.”
Both men agree that the volunteering gives as much back to the individual as the individual gives to the community. “I think you feel better when you’re doing something for your community, whether it’s within your religion or within your neighborhood or within your city,” says Lampard. “There are tremendous psychic rewards.”
Rosenberg echoes the sentiment: “In order to be fulfilled, in order to be whole, in order to be balanced, that’s something that you’re going to want to have in your life.”