Quilting As Real Life: Try It

Part 4 of Six Parts

A Niche for Everybody!

I found Sharon’s next paragraph to be incredibly insightful about “need”.  It is everyplace.  We all tend to look in the same places for those who need help, but in fact opportunities for us older adults to help those in need lie all around us!

NEEDS IN YOUR BACK YARD:  (from Sharon)  If you think you have no homeless in your community so you have no need to make quilts, you are probably wrong.  But in case you are right, there are other people whose days you can brighten with a handmade quilt, starting with nursing homes.  People displaced by fire or flooding, high school graduates starting out on that new journey with a reminder that the church cares for them, or ask your police department if they would like to carry a smaller quilt in their squad cars for times they might have to rescue children from domestic abuse situations.  The list is only as limited as your imagination. “For as much as you have done for the least of these, you have done for me,” is a Bible verse that guides us in this ministry.

I’m not sure how to comment on this next example of approaching leaders in the “right” manner.  In this case, the way Sharon did it worked.  In another case with different leaders or different people doing the asking, another approach might work best.  The lesson, I suppose, is – keep trying, but in new ways – just don’t keep using a bigger and bigger hammer.

ITS HOW YOU ASK!:  When Ginger first asked if we could put the quilts on the pews (my suggestion) the senior pastor said (kindly) “no”, so I said, "Ginger, let me ask him next time." And I gave him the alternative choice of this coming Sunday or next Sunday, not a yes or no choice.

          One of the most important contributions from psychology that enables us to understand the workings of a community has been the work of Dr. Roger Barker many years ago, followed by my own mentor, Dr. Jim Kelly.  They have both identified the critical importance of what was then called “undermanning” situations;  when there were more tasks to be done than there seemed to be people to do them.  Everybody was needed, everybody felt important.  In contrast, their research with schools identified that when a school doubled in size, “overmanning” was the issue.  They found that typically, when a school increased in size by 100%, the number of activities available for students increased only 17%.  The students who were left out of a meaningful role to play were almost always the more “marginal” students – those who were shy, or not comfortable speaking in public, or not quite as good an athlete or musician as others. 

This lesson from this research on schools is true in institutions of all kinds (including churches) where time after time, as a church grows for instance, there are fewer meaningful roles for the more shy people among us.  Importantly, “marginal” is a term that people tell me fits older adults.  In a recent New Yorker article by Donald Hall, he refers to older people as “peripheral”, another sad but often true term.  Thus, based on the research, it appears that we older adults may often fall between the cracks as churches grow – if significant attention is not paid to creating new activities (niches) in which we are included.

FINDING AN IMPORTANT NICHE FOR EVERYBODY:  I told our pastor that many of the quilters in our group are finding a niche (a good thing).  For instance, Iris does the driving to the shelters, Daisy checks the incoming donations and sets up a time to go through that stuff and calls Rose (or me) to help, Lily checks to be sure we have coffee and coffee cups, Lupine and Violet and Pansy keep us supplied with sheets for quilt backings. Our pastor asked what I do, and I said I was the voice of the Happy Day Quilting Ministry, or more accurately "the mouth".  Part of my job is to write humorous (if possible) articles for the church council handout, the bulletins, and the newsletter, as each one reaches a different segment of the congregation. I've always done newsletter writing, so this is easy for me, but it's very important that we keep our group uppermost in the minds of the people who worship at our church.

Sometimes it seems to me that the most important task for a leader is to find niches that fit!  This does not mean that a leader must always find new opportunities for the contributions of older adults, sometimes it means helping older adults notice that they already have the experience needed to participate meaningfully in an existing niche.   Thinking that we can’t “fit any niches” can be a very real problem for us older adults.  The less we use a skill we used to have, the more likely we are to think that we can’t do something, even though we know we used to do “that”, every day perhaps.  It takes a leader who is willing to point out our talents and then walk-with us a bit as we re-enter life as an important contributor to the life of others.

Note:  some leaders are going to read what I just said and think, “That sounds nice, but I just don’t have the time to devote that much attention to helping people one-by-one to regain their sense of meaningful contribution.   I would reply to such an understandable comment, “Aha, the trick is to find others, perhaps older adults, who would be willing to serve in that “walking-with” sort of way.  Such a reciprocity of help and resource contributions is, in fact, the best of all worlds, anyway.”