Editorial: Volunteers are vital to Southwestern Pennsylvania

The oft-used phrase is “it takes a village to raise a child.”

In updated parlance, it isn’t so much a village as it is a volunteer — or lots of volunteers.

It is hard to calculate everything in our lives that is done by someone who isn’t collecting a paycheck for doing the work. It is hard to imagine what we could go without if all the volunteers disappeared overnight.

Volunteers fight fires. They drive ambulances. They reroute traffic at crash scenes. They help make the complex machinery of twice-a-year elections happen with surprisingly few glitches. They coach soccer and baseball, direct plays and choirs, raise money and clean roadways.

And often, they are the some of our oldest neighbors — the ones who could be relying on volunteer services rather than providing them.

Take Meals on Wheels. For decades, various service agencies around the country and the world have offered the service that delivers a daily meal to home-bound seniors or disabled individuals. It is so much more than a TV dinner.

While it seems as though a disposable tray of meatloaf and mashed potatoes would be enough on its own, the service provides more, even inadvertently. For those who live alone, the daily delivery might be the only time a recipient speaks all day. The person who realizes something is wrong could be the one who shows up with lunch to find a medical emergency.

But a shortage of volunteers is creating problems. In Freeport, Ruth Donnelly, 92, and Betty Smith, 89, have been dishing up dinners for about 50 years. They want to keep helping people. But across the area, fewer people are still on hand to do the work, meaning some programs are closing. The Kinloch program in Lower Burrell and Highlands in Harrison both shut down this year.

That is bad enough. The looming issue on the horizon, however, is that Pennsylvania’s population is aging — and not all of those seniors are as spry as Donnelly and Smith. Many are the people waiting for the day’s chicken and rice.

As with fire companies and ambulance services and other organizations that depend on unpaid participation, the nonprofits operating Meals on Wheels, like Westmoreland County Area Agency on Aging, need volunteers. They need the ones like Donnelly and Smith who will devote half their lives to helping, and they need the more casual ones just looking for a way to give back. Really, they need anyone who can lend a hand in any way they can.

It is important, because you need a village not just to raise a child. You need a village to get the grown-ups through the day, too. It’s scary to think what happens to the village when people stop volunteering to be part of it.