Young Volunteers: Times Change; Motivation Doesn’t The Symphony works to increase audience diversity by offering moderately priced tickets and making free tickets available to underserved populations. “I wanted to give back to an organization that means a lot to me.” A keen awareness of the needs of the elderly motivates Claire L. McClain ’03, who volunteers at a nursing home in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she once worked full-time as its activities director. (She now heads activities at another nursing home where she also recruits and trains volunteers.) “Nursing homes always need more friendly faces,” she says. “No matter how good the staff is, some residents just don’t get the attention they need.” McClain says single women who never married are most alone. “They never had children, so there’s often no family to visit or look out for them.” In college, McClain volunteered at the Hamilton Learning Center in Holyoke, where she tutored high school students in various subjects. It was good preparation for her other volunteer role as a Big Sister to a thirteen-year-old girl in Boston. “She gets one-to-one attention from a
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Lisa Utzinger Shen ’02 concentrates her volunteer energy where her skills, interests, and community need converge. “I had a great college experience, so after I graduated and moved to Boston, I volunteered for Mount Holyoke,” she says, recalling work as a college admissions volunteer and collegefair rep. “But there wasn’t a great need for alumnae interviewers.” A music and psychology double major, violinist Shen had been the business manager for the Glee Club in college and also cofounded (with classmate Sara Curtin-Lechner) the Mount Holyoke Orchestra while on campus. It was a natural fit for her to work with Cerise Jalelian-Keim ’81 and the rest of the Boston Club, which coordinates the MHC Glee Club’s Christmas vespers appearance at Old South Church. Soon enough she was on the “radar” of the Alumnae Association. “I met these Forty alumnae volunteers women with busy, full lives, which helped me gave professional advice to 190 students at the Alumnae see what I want for my own life.” Shen is now Association’s annual career a mother herself and full-time student again, networking fair. getting a PhD in education at Harvard.
Meanwhile Shen quickly made her mark as a creative force in music management, with From the Top, the widely hailed showcase of young classical musicians on National Public Radio, her work at the New England Conservatory, and with the Civic Symphony of Boston, where she is on the board of directors. “They needed help and I had the skills and knowledge to do recruitment, develop partnerships with other organizations,” and a host of other things the music group needed.
caring adult. What I get is a lot of fun with a youngster.” McClain sees her commitment as a Big Sister as a sanctuary of sorts before she becomes a mom herself. Training is important in volunteering,” McClain says. So is trust. With her Little Sister, “it was hard to gauge in the beginning how far we were going to let each other into our lives,” she explains. “We made a breakthrough recently, though. Just last week we were singing fake show tunes at the top of our lungs.” —S.H.H.
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