Enhancing Social Capital for Elderly Services with Time Banking

To relieve the burden of increasing elderly services, enhancing social capital in the community is a practical and feasible strategy. Social capital is about the shared values that a group of individual working together to achieve a positive outcome. It is essential to actively promote social capital in the community because it allows the individuals, particularly volunteers, to link together by sharing their skills, time and even assets. The outcome of enhancing social capital can be tangible or intangible in elderly services. Participation of volunteers is undoubtedly a key element in the services provided for the ageing population. Volunteers, both the young and older adults, can help facilitate the use of social capital in the community. One of the emerging initiatives in social capital is time banking. Time banking is about the exchange of the time of volunteers to provide services for the elderly and earn personal time credit to exchange for services when necessary, usually at a later stage when the individual’s need arises. It is a virtuous cycle to sustain the service exchange by enhancing social capital. In achieving a holistic and humanistic care to the elderly, time banking in the community has the potential to alleviate the service demand and burden arising from an increasing ageing population as in the case of Hong Kong. The adoption of time banking in different countries will be analysed for better understanding of the operations and effectiveness of time banking.