Living Outside her Comfort Zone: Jill White’s Life as a Senior Volunteer

This month UServeUtah celebrates its fifth year of working to serve 16 rural Utah counties through the AmeriCorps Seniors Senior Companion Program. Jill White, a volunteer in Gunnison, has spent the past two-and-a-half years serving as a Senior Companion. Jill is deeply compassionate, very caring, and incredibly thoughtful. She is also willing to try new things and get outside of her comfort zone. Her kindness and her bravery have made her a wonderful volunteer who is helping the lives of her elderly clients in Sevier County.

Jill, a lifelong Utahn, moved to Gunnison in her twenties. She worked for decades for a coal mine energy company. During her time with the company she obtained further education including in computer information services that helped her break into the digital world. In retirement, Jill has enjoyed traveling across the country and world. She spends the majority of her time volunteering in her community, including with the AmeriCorps Seniors Senior Companion Program. With all of her community obligations, she sometimes feels as though she never retired at all.

What does Jill do as an AmeriCorps Seniors Volunteer? She shares, “I just try to be encouraging and upbeat and positive.” She will fill up one client’s bird feeder, water another’s garden, and show an interest in the family history of another client. As she puts it, “oftentimes we are just visiting.” With Jill’s previous experience as a Yoga and steps aerobic instructor, she is willing to do lots of things to get her clients moving like chair yoga. She lends a helping hand, even to the animals of the clients she visits. Some of her clients have small dogs, and when she arrives, “I do this little shoulder doggie massage ” and the dogs love it and await her arrival with anticipation.

When Jill was first introduced to the AmeriCorps Seniors Senior Companion Program, she was hesitant to participate, finally deciding she would give it a try. At first she served one client, and has since come to serve three clients each week. As she has lived much of her life in Gunnison, she was familiar with some of her clients and has really enjoyed getting to know them even better and become a bright spot in their lives. She even shares with them the other ways she serves in the community, including the quilts she creates through Valor Quilts for Veterans. They enjoy getting to be a part of her life, and she enjoys helping them.

Jill knows that being a volunteer is the path less traveled, “sometimes even to myself, I think, it would be so much easier not to do this. But I tell myself, ‘you’re going to be able to do it.’ I work myself through it with my self-talk.” For those considering volunteering, she agrees that there will be uncertainty with moving into something that they are not familiar with, “but, that will go away as you become familiar with what you are doing and why you are doing it.” She notes that even if people think they have given enough in their lives, “we all have so much more that we can give.” She suggests to others that “it is worth volunteering. It opens you up to a whole different world that you didn’t know was there.”

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Want to make a difference through volunteering with the AmeriCorps Seniors program? Visit userve.utah.gov/seniors to learn more and explore opportunities to serve.