Club News: General

Ideas from the Clubs: Focus on Senior Citizens
Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The Association of Collecting Clubs has placed a lot of emphasis during the past year on reaching out to young collectors and involving them in your hobby and your clubs.

We note an interesting observation by Ray Cartier, Executive Director, American Topical Association, on their website at http://www.americantopicalassn.org Topical stamp collecting is the fastest-growing facet of stamp-collecting today. Collectors focus on a particular subject area...no matter whether its birds or ships or cats or railroads...and collect stamps relating to that topic.

Anyway, Ray makes an interesting point in his article on "Topical Stamp Collecting: a Universal Hobby for Seniors"

"Topical stamp collectors are very much like the butterfly. They usually start their collecting of stamps early in their life. In time, they give up their collecting, building a cocoon as they marry and settle down, raise families, and compete for jobs. In time, something rekindles their interest and they emerge from their cocoons, often taking a radical change in their collecting habits. Where they were once stamp collectors, they are now philatelists. By the age of 50, most philatelists have a good idea of what really interets them and are looking for creative outlets to educate themselves in their interests and enjoy doing something that has an inherent, personal appeal. This, then, becomes a lifelong hobby for most. a hobby is defined as an activity which is done in order to find a venue for relaxation. Topical collecting fills that requirement for thousands of seniors. It is often one area in their lives over which they have total control."

Ray hits an interesting point. Many kids growing up in the 40s, 50s, and 60s were collectors. They collected coins, stamps, rocks, shells, pennants, baseball cards, dolls, comics and toys. As they became teenagers, often the collecting fell by the wayside. Eventually their moms threw the collections out or gave them to the community rummage sale (often a very bad decision!).

For many of these people who went on and started families and got involved in careers and other challenges of life, there just wasn't time to think about having a hobby. But once retirement comes, those old interests from childhood should perhaps be rekindled. We're not saying to necessarily go back to collecting the same thing as you did when you were 8 or 10 (although as Ray points out, with stamp collecting this does seem logical). But why not give some attention to attracting senior citizens into our clubs? Instead of worrying about the club's "aging factor" encourage retirees to rekindle the fascination of collecting they had as a kid and join your club. Retired seniors also are prime candidates for club volunteers!

The Association of Collecting Clubs exists to support collecting groups, their leadership and membership, in a variety of areas including club promotion, membership recruitment, reaching new audiences, strengthening conventions, working with young collectors, networking, club insurance and club management. The ACC website is: http://collectors.org

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