Why?
Our society is growing smaller and older. Our population will decrease from around 82 million people today to about 70 million in 2050. In the same period, the proportion of people aged 50 and over will rise from 38% to around 50%. Constantly growing individual life expectancies will mean that someone beginning their retirement in the future will still have nearly a quarter of their life ahead of them.
Older people are thus assuming growing social importance: their experience, their skills and their commitment are needed. Never before have older people been as active, educated, healthy and wealthy as they are today. Surveys on volunteers and the most recent German old age survey (DEAS 2010) show that older people want to participate and become involved upon ending their working lives. To approach them as responsibly acting citizens and to involve them in the shaping of society therefore makes sense socially – and at the same time contributes towards maintaining individual quality of life in old age. For older people, voluntary work, honorary offices, civil engagement and involvement in creative processes lends more meaning to their lives, bringing them acknowledgement, social contacts and a means of preserving and developing competencies. The gerontologist Andreas Kruse goes even further: "If older people do not contribute to the shaping of political life and no longer experience themselves as a part of public life, a central component of life itself is lost."
However, the sharing or participation concept has so far failed to establish itself sufficiently in Germany. There are certainly openings for the civil engagement of older people, but there is a lack of sustainable structures and framework conditions, and there is insufficient professional support. Furthermore, engagement is often provided and expected only in a social/charitable context. However, participation means the responsible shaping of public life. This intrinsically political involvement of older people does, however, have its limitations, otherwise it could be said that politics sees engaged individuals not only as stopgaps, but incorporates their creative resources into social processes of organisation and reform – and is therefore prepared to share power.
The fact that older people increasingly consider themselves capable of more than is offered to them, for example in politically powerless senior advisory boards, is also made clear by their involvement in the new German culture of protest ranging from STUTTGART 21 to anti-nuclear demonstrations. While resistance and a culture of demonstration were mainly the prerogative of youth in recent decades, today more and more older people are going to the barricades. And they are displaying a new self-image: they want to assume responsibility for society and to bequeath a functioning community to coming generations.
A paradox must therefore be solved. More and more older citizens are prepared to help shape society at least on a small scale – but they do not know how, nor do they feel involved in political decision-making and social reform processes. It is therefore important to motivate and empower older people to become involved and to participate – for example through role models, qualification, recognition or networks. At the same time, however, they must also have access to structures which facilitate their participation. This requires above all that local decision-makers create possibilities for the involvement of older people in the community and in the social environment. The social debate must reorientate itself to a model of active ageing and the potentials of older people.
