Youth league launches campaign for the elderly

Shanghai Youth League launched the services of 210 groups of young volunteers who are keen to help the city's senior citizens on Monday.

The volunteers are involved in a campaign called “Golden Afterglow” which encourages volunteers to provide services to elderly people in need.

Besides healthcare, the volunteers also entertain senior citizens with art, teach them handicrafts, impart legal and financial knowledge, and befriend those living alone.

One of the groups is Team Dandelions of the Central Hospital of Putuo District. The hospital’s doctors have been working with elderly people in need since 2013.

Xu Juncai, an 86-year-old man living alone in Caoyang Sicun, a residential complex not far from the hospital, said his life had been saved twice in 2018 thanks to the doctor he was paired with, Wu Xiaojie.

On a day in May that year, when Xu got up at 4am for toilet, he suddenly fell and began to vomit. He managed to reach the phone and called Wu who helped call an ambulance.

“At the same time, she arranged a ‘green channel’ for me at the hospital, so that I got medical intervention in time and recovered very well,” Xu recalled. A similar incident happened in November that year, and thanks to Wu, he was saved again.

“They’re my golden crutch,” Xu said of the volunteers.

Wu, who has been working at the hospital since 2010, said she and her fellow volunteers never turn off their phones, ready to react to calls from the elderly at any time. They also talk to them every week about how they could help themselves. 

At Shanghai Normal University, a group of students who study adult and preschool education, has carved a “niche” in serving the elderly people by consulting with them on how to raise their grandchildren.

In Shanghai, grandparents often have to step in to take care of grandchildren when both parents are working. The students found that the grandparents were often uncertain about how to make the children eat, how to communicate with them and how to teach them basic skills.

By sharing their knowledge acquired from study, the students said they had benefited about 1,200 families since they started to give talks in communities on the topic in 2018. Textbooks they have compiled for the purpose are being considered by the city’s education commission as teaching materials for lifelong education.

There are also volunteers who offer free anniversary photo services to the elderly and who take and compile notes of what they say about their lives to preserve their stories.

Communities which seek such services can contact the Shanghai Youth League on 6169-0175 and 6169-0107. A complete of volunteer groups can be found at http://ylgw.shweilao.cn/cms/cmsDetail?uuid=641d2936-cd67-4431-9286-ebe696bf1a92 and on civil affairs bureau’s WeChat account for elderly care services — Shanghai Yanglao Guwen.