High schooler Areen Hashemi wanted to help senior citizens avoid struggling the way her grandmother did when she was adapting to life in a senior home in Iran. So at age 14 Hashemi started a volunteer organization that has since expanded to several states and two foreign countries.
“[My grandmother] has OCD, which I have as well, and just seeing her battle that as well as loneliness in an elderly home, I was like, ‘She’s battling two things at once,’ and I couldn’t imagine how that would feel,” says Hashemi, a 17-year-old senior at Herndon High School. “I started volunteering [at senior homes] on my own, but I knew I wanted to share the love with everyone else.”
In 2021, Hashemi, along with her friends Emily John and Rachel Noh, both also 17, started Generation Union (GU), a nonprofit that unites generations by providing opportunities for young people to volunteer at senior residences. (The three friends met as freshmen at McLean High School, where John and Noh are now in 12th grade; Hashemi changed schools in 2022.) Their first event was a dining night at Chesterbrook Residences in Falls Church, with 10-15 volunteers acting as servers.
Today, GU has 250 volunteers across 30 chapters in locations ranging from Florida, Maryland and New York to Singapore and South Korea. In Northern Virginia, GU hosts events several times a month at 11 senior homes, including Sunrise Senior Living locations in Arlington and McLean. Each event draws five to seven volunteers to play bingo, do arts and crafts projects, and generally interact with residents, forming unexpected bonds at both ends of the age range.
During one event, Hashemi befriended a woman named Doris at Pacifica Senior Living in Sterling who loves the game Uno. “She told me I reminded her of her sister,” Hashemi says. “I didn’t know playing a simple game with someone could bring back memories of a loved one [and do] something so powerful.”
Dainna Son Park, a 16-year-old GU member who attends Chantilly High School, says she and a resident at one of the events were supposed to make bracelets, but ended up talking the whole time.
“We’re both Korean. She was telling me how she forgot our language, but after an hour, she started speaking Korean to me,” Son Park says. “She was telling me her whole personal life story. After all that, she hugged me and thanked me and said, ‘I’ve never had anyone else who’s Korean to speak to.’”
For Bushra Ehikhamenor, a McLean High senior and GU member, it’s about learning from her elders. “I like talking to the older generation,” Ehikhamenor says. “You get a different type of insight.”
The seniors, in turn, get often much-needed engagement. About 34% of 50- to 80-year-olds report say they feel isolated and almost 40% report feeling a lack of companionship, according to the 2023 University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging.
Utsha Adhikari, 18, a GU supervisor who coordinates events, saw how a little attention can go a long way after she approached a man sitting alone at a recent event she organized. “He just wanted to be listened [to],” says Adhikari, a 12th-grader at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax. “He told me his whole life in one hour. It’s so eye-opening what their life was once and what my life could be. It makes me happy because I see at the end of the day, he’s still happy.”
Research has shown that volunteerism has many benefits for all ages: better mental and physical health, providing a sense of purpose, teaching valuable skills, and nurturing relationships, according to the Mayo Clinic Health System. Although the percentage of Americans who volunteer fell to 23% in 2021 from 30% in 2019, according to an AmeriCorps report, the Washington, D.C., metro area had the second highest rate (29.7%) of volunteerism in the country.
Recognizing the value of volunteering, many school districts encourage it by offering academic incentives. Students at Arlington Public Schools must complete and document at least 50 hours of community service by graduation to earn either the Virginia Board of Education’s Seal for Excellence in Civics Education or in Science and the Environment on their diplomas.
Falls Church City Schools and Fairfax County Public Schools give students who complete at least 40 service hours a Service Learning Cord to wear with their cap and gown, while those who complete 50-plus hours also qualify for the diploma seals.
Additionally, GU is a Presidential Volunteer Service Award-certified nonprofit, meaning that it can recognize volunteers with the award—a nice resume builder or addition to a college application.
Still, recognition was not top of mind when Hashemi, John and Noh launched the organization. They were just worried about their grandparents.
“I had a language barrier with my grandmother, which prevented me from communicating with her,” says John, whose grandmother spoke only Malayalam. “She lived with us, but since my brother and I weren’t able to talk to her, she didn’t really have a lot of support in her life. It was pretty hard to see that.”
Noh’s grandparents have Alzheimer’s, a neurodegenerative disease that affects about 6.7 million Americans. “Seeing how the disease progressed really got me interested in volunteering at senior homes and in the senior care world in general,” Noh says.
Currently, she and John handle outreach, recruiting volunteers mainly through social media and word of mouth, and cold calling potential senior home partners.
“At the beginning, we had a spreadsheet of all the senior homes in our areas, and we would call and email every day,” John says. “We’d make a personal goal of five calls a day or 10 calls a day, and then we just call and tell them about our message and what we’re doing and ask if we could help out in any way. It’s a system we still use today.”
Wade Chilcoat, owner and administrator of Alexandria’s eight-bed Tilden Memory Care, is grateful to have received one of those calls.
“We are so small we don’t have a full-time activities director … so we really rely on a lot of volunteers,” Chilcoat says, adding that young volunteers fill a hole for residents who miss their grandchildren. “Our residents love it. They look forward to it. They ask, ‘When are they coming back?’ As long as they’re still interested in coming to see us, we always have a welcome door for them.”
GU is geared toward high schoolers, but Hashemi says anyone between the ages of 13 and 22 can participate. To become a volunteer, apply online and attend events when you can. Another way to get involved is to become a volunteer supervisor, or event leader.
No chapter where you are? Start one. The founders offer a registration form and support.