Best Friends Dementia

To explain my reasoning behind lack of men volunteering “Best Friends” will be used as an example. “Best Friends” is a non-profit Catholic organization dealing with patients having varied ranges of dementia. Dementia is defined by the Alzheimer’s Association as “an overall term that describes a wide range of symptoms associated with a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to reduce a person's ability to perform everyday activities” (Alzheimer’s Association [AA], 2011). The main symptoms of dementia are memory loss, communication troubles, ability to focus, reasoning, and visual perception. This disease is caused by damage to the brain cells and usually occurs with age. It is reported by the Alzheimer’s Association that one in three people die with some form …show more content…
Just like in any non profit organization they have no funds to pay for volunteers, making it hard to gain support. “Best Friends” has 92 volunteers and 34 patients who come several times a week Monday through Friday. At first glance that is not bad numbers because if you divide 92 by five (the number of days a week the organization is open) it comes out to right above 18 volunteers per day giving plenty of people to help out the patients. The issue, however, is that there are not enough male volunteers. The organization consists of 11 male participants and 18 male volunteers. This means that there are three volunteers a day that are males on average at best case, but six of them all volunteer in one day and some males only come monthly to volunteer. Only 13% of volunteers at “Best Friends” are males, but 33% of patients are males. These percentages need to be close to equal for each patient to have male volunteers to relate with more because male patients relate better with male volunteers. The case of “Best Friends” is a perfect example of the lack of male