Lyn Wehle is in her second ILVC year, working as a teacher’s aide and library aide at Holy Rosary School in Rochester.

For most people, the word idealism evokes youth —high school or college students or recent grads going to the inner city or rural locales or other places of great human need to change the world.

Think of the Peace Corps or Vista or the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and you immediately think of college students and young adults working selflessly with poor and disadvantaged groups; a good example of how youthful and idealism have become joined in public consciousness.

In the last six years, however, older men and women, old enough to be parents of those young volunteers, have been grabbing some of that idealism for themselves by signing up with the Ignatian Lay Volunteer Corps (ILVC).

ILVC began in 1995 with a handful of volunteers in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and has since spread to New York, Philadelphia, Camden,  Syracuse, Rochester, and other places in upstate New York. It is getting ready to hopscotch across the country, into the Midwest and out to the West Coast this fall (see box story, page 29), bringing retired but active people into soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other places where people need help.

“You’ve heard of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps?” asks Tom O’Sullivan, a former bank vice president who tutors Hispanic students at Nativity Middle School on Manhattan’s lower East Side. “This is the over-the-hill-gang version,” he quips.

ILVC volunteer Elizabeth Steltenpohl (right), a retired professor of education, does some GED tutoring with Rochelle Netterville at Catholic Charities’ Exodus House in the Bronx.

Unlike their younger counterparts in the JVC just starting adult lives, Ignatian Lay Volunteers have spent decades building theirs. After years of work, marriage, and raising children, they are looking for more.

Many reasons

“I’ve led a very successful life,” said Ed McCarthy, a retired army lieutenant colonel, now an ILVC member who volunteers at a job placement program in Syracuse.

“I started looking for some way to help people who were not so successful, people who had things going against them and needed a little boost.”

Barbara Lee, an attorney and a former U.S. magistrate judge, had taken early retirement and planned to travel, write, and lecture.

“For the first few years, retirement was wonderful. But there comes a point when you want to do something more useful,” says Barbara, who now tutors Chinese immigrants at the Cabrini Center in Manhattan.

“I was interested in helping the poor,” says Margaret Dickerson; the death of her husband several years ago brought into focus a desire she had to move out of the suburbs and back into Philadelphia.

Vincent Giallorenzo, of Bergen County, N.J., who retired from the real estate business a few years ago, also reflected on his success and wanted to share it. He does that now by helping out at a foster home operated by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Brooklyn.

Tom Coyne is fixing a garage door at Baltimore’s St. Peter the Apostle; two days a week you’ll find him there or at one of two other parishes taking care of groundskeeping and maintenance tasks.

Retired civil engineer John O’Hagan works at the St. Anthony Housing Aid Center in Baltimore, searching for evidence of “flipping,” predatory purchases and sales.

“I wanted to give back for what God has given me,” was his reason.

Margaret, Vincent, and many others are spurred by a variety of reasons to seek out ILVC and find in it a program that focuses their desires and puts them to work.

The program

Volunteers spend about 20 hours a week in a service. They get guidance from ILVC regional directors, who look for the best ways to put their skills they have developed over the years to good use.

Ed McCarthy found that his army experience helped him match those looking for work with available jobs.

“I’ve had a lot of experience working with employers, and I’m comfortable talking with them.”

His experience helps him direct those looking for work.

“We work with people who suddenly find themselves out of work because a company closed, people who dropped out of high school, people who have a prison record, or people who have some special circumstance that makes it hard for them to find a job,” Ed says.

“Being without a job can make you feel hopeless. Some people don’t know where to turn. Part of what I do is an orientation session for participants. I tell them what we can do for them and what we expect them to do: make a commitment and make an effort to find a job.

“For those who stick to the program, we have a pretty good placement rate, about 60 percent,” says Ed. “And we don’t just place them in any job. We try to find an area that they want to work and will be good at so they will want to stay with it.”

At first, retired ad exec John Trumbore of Philadelphia decided to offer his professional expertise as a volunteer at the Holy Name Alliance, a consortium of parishes that operates a school and other programs to help low-income people.

“They were in danger of closing because of expenses and lack of re­sources,” John says.

He and others organized a major fundraising and development program.

“We’ve gotten to the point of stability, or at least being out of debt,” John reports. Holy Name Alliance is now in a position to provide consultation to other parishes and schools facing similar financial problems.

His involvement there gave him opportunities to meet with students and do some mentoring, which made him desire more-direct contact with people in need. So he began working with a program at his Jesuit parish in Philadelphia, Old St. Joseph’s, which serves meals and distributes clothes to homeless people.

“Sometimes I’m just serving soup,” says John, whose professional background is much less of a factor at Old St. Joseph’s, but the work is the direct service he was looking for.

Measures of success

ILVC volunteer Tom Curran, who also coordinates the program in Elmira, N.Y., puts his years of experience as an oral surgeon to work at a dental clinic that serves those with no insurance.

Like other volunteers, John has had to adjust his perception of what “success” means.

“In the professional life, you’re often looking for results,” he says. Results sometimes come, but often they don’t. “And even when they do come, sometimes you’ll never know.”

“Ignatian Lay Volunteers talk about relationships as opposed to results. You’re not just performing a task but you are doing something for a person,” he comments.

“Sometimes just being there is enough. It’s not easy to sit down next to someone at one of the tables and start a conversation, but it means something when you do.”

Husband and wife Andy and Ann Wagner of Baltimore have had similar experiences of changing their concepts of success with ILVC work.

Ann coordinates an after-school program for the Tri-Parish Catholic Community in Baltimore’s inner city.

“When we started out, I had great ambitions about having the program five days a week at each of the three parishes and increasing their grades.”

Though she hopes for more, Ann is happy to offer individual tutoring even one day a week at each of the parishes, St. Jerome’s, St. Peter’s, and St. Martin’s.

“We’d like to do more, but the problem is getting tutors. Because we work with the kids one-on-one, we need a lot of tutors, but many people don’t want to go into the inner city. Once we get tutors, though, we usually keep them.

“The kids are great. The hardest part is trying to convince them that they can do things they thought they couldn’t. They’re hard working and really respond to the one-on-one.”

Andy, a retired Exxon executive, works with the St. Ambrose Aid Center, which tries to improve the housing situation for inner-city residents. He works with homeowners facing foreclosure.

“Home ownership is very important to the poor, but it can become impossible. Think how much hassle you had when you closed on your first home. And you had some education and maybe an attorney or friends or family to offer guidance.”

Even for Andy, finding the information that people need to deal with their problem is difficult.

“It’s exasperating. You’re calling Plano, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; various cities in California, to speak to different banks involved in the complex process of federal loans for low-income homeowners.”

In one instance, a woman learned last November that she was facing foreclosure. Andy began cranking out the calls, but it was not until February that he got to the bottom of it. The woman was mistakenly being charged $1,300 annually for “ground rent” instead of the actual $96 she owed. Ground rent, Andy explains, is a practice unique to Baltimore, where a person can buy a home but not necessarily the land it sits on.

Andy and the others at St. Am­brose’s foreclosure prevention program cannot solve all of the problems that come their way, but they are able to help maybe 30 percent of the time.

“I’m happy to help those I can. I’ve gained an appreciation for what the poor are up against.”

“You’ve heard of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps?” asks former bank vice president Tom O’Sullivan, an ILVC tutor for Hispanic students at Nativity School on Manhattan’s lower East Side. “This is the over-the-hill-gang version.”

Time to reflect

Though they all work in different ways, ILVC volunteers find the program’s spiritual component essential not only to the work they do but also to their own growth. Each volunteer is assigned a spiritual director and keeps regular journals to help deepen his or her spiritual life and integrate volunteer experiences into it. There are also re­treats several times a year.

Volunteers meet monthly to discuss their experiences and to talk about readings on social justice. Many appreciate the mutual support they receive at these meetings.

“It’s good to share opinions, experiences, and even complaints,” says John Trumbore. “The work is frustrating at times; it helps to know that there are others who are keeping at it.”

Barbara Lee echoes John’s sentiment: “In retirement, I’ve come to understand that the opportunity to meet regularly with colleagues and exchange ideas and experiences is a great benefit. With ILVC, I’ve also learned the value of spiritual community.”

The opportunity to meet with a spiritual director and the practice of formal journaling have helped Ignatian Lay Volunteers see beyond the work they do to what is really at the heart.

“This is what keeps the whole thing going,” Vincent Giallorenzo says. “This is what holds it together.”

“God and the Gospels have become so much more real to me,” John Trumbore says. His reflections on the Beatitudes and Jesus’ revelation that “whatsoever you do to the least of these you do to me” have become more meaningful.

Ann Wagner recalls one day that she had difficulty getting the students to focus on their work and felt frustrated. That night she did one of the suggested readings, where Jesus told his disciples, “Let the little children come to me.”

“This whole experience deepens your perception,” says her husband, Andy, “of what can be called God’s coming to you in the guise of your life.”

Pete Sheehan, senior reporter for the Long Island Catholic and John Carroll University alumnus (1978), wrote “Faith and Work,” a story about retreats for business­men, in our Fall 1998 issue. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Mary, and their sons, Joseph Peter and Michael Anthony.

Your Most Important Work by Barbara Castellano Barbara Castellano, ILVC’s program director, invites you to contact ILVC for more information. Call (888) 831-4686, e-mail to ksnyder@ilvc.org or write to ILVC at 801 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. In January, I was with 26 Ignatian Lay Volunteer Corps (ILVC) volunteers from the Baltimore and Washington area who were meeting for Re-Orientation, a mid-year retreat. The room was filled with people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, enthusiastically shar­­ing volunteer experiences. These were the people who responded to ILVC’s simple idea: match up retirees with social service agencies and other volunteer situations that could use their wisdom and experience in service to the poor and help these retirees grow deeper in their faith. We hold retreats because reflection is an integral part of the ILVC experience; volunteers say it is at the heart of what makes ILVC distinctive and their service meaningful. This year other retreats were held in upstate New York and New Jersey to accommodate the growth of the program in terms of numbers of volunteers and the places where they serve. I look around and am filled with gratitude for these people who chose to give something back. I realize that I’m grinning. Four years ago, when I joined ILVC, expansion was just a dream for founders Jim Conroy, SJ, and Charlie Costello, SJ, and their 26 volunteers. Today there are 85 volunteers. While their commitment to work with the poor is for a year, the vast majority work with ILVC for several years, and a few have been with us for six years. They work in Washington and northern Virginia; Baltimore; Philadelphia and Central New Jersey; New York City and Long Island; Camden and Trenton in New Jersey; and Syracuse, Rochester, and Elmira in upstate New York. A new ILVCgroup started in January in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and programs are scheduled to start this fall in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Diego. Dreams of expansion are reality. Men and women retiring in their 50s and 60s today can look to 20 to 30 more years of life with better health and greater financial security than any previous generation. When God’s Spirit infuses them with the desire to give back, to contribute to the world our grandchildren will inherit, to better understand and live out the Gospel call to love, to find God in all things, then they change what it means to grow older and make a difference and take part in God’s plan to transform the world. We in ILVC have discovered that if you are retired, your most important work is still ahead of you.