America’s Volunteer Driver Center (AVDC) will increase the supply of volunteer drivers through a national public information campaign to change the way Americans think about and support transportation for older adults and people with special mobility needs.
AVDC will be to volunteer recruitment what the Red Cross is to blood donation.
What is the challenge?
People who stop driving outlive their decision by about a decade, and when they do, their lives change. The majority of older Americans live in rural or suburban communities that lack the density for traditional mass transportation. When public transit is available, the same functional changes that make driving difficult make public transit equally challenging. By 2030, there will be 61 million baby boomers ages 68 to 84, for whom transportation costs, accounting for 17 percent of household expenditures, will be second only to housing. Adding the cost of transportation will present an unrealistic burden to the Taxpayer. Private, for-profit transportation solutions such as Uber and Lyft are frequently unavailable in the rural and suburban communities where most older Americans live. It is the non-profit sector that is best positioned to meet the mobility needs of the rapidly growing aging population, and the major source of supply for these affordable services is volunteer drivers.
How does AVDC help solve the problem?
The goal of America’s Volunteer Driver Center (AVDC) is to change the way Americans think about and support, nonprofit community-based transportation for older adults and people with special mobility needs, especially in rural and suburban communities. AVDC will be to volunteer driver recruitment what the Red Cross is to volunteer blood donation—mobilizing a national effort for a national need. With a $1 million Congressionally Directed Spending grant, ITNAmerica is building a national coalition, with participation from industry, government and philanthropy, for a national public information campaign to recruit and train volunteer drivers.
AVDC is a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) project with technical support by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Read Katherine Freund’s Boston Globe op-ed for the MIT AgeLab