“The man who dies rich dies disgraced,” said the American steel tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Why cannot the same be said of the man who dies rich not in money, but in experience; who quits this world before sharing the fruits of his learning with those less fortunate?

A radical scheme being piloted by two local councils in Britain is harvesting dramatic results by funnelling volunteers towards families with children who are on the “at risk” register. These are children - commonly neglected, or abused - who are embedded in families so pricked with problems that the most common next stage on their trajectory through life would be for them to be taken into care. Remarkably, the pilot programme has resulted in all the children coming off the “at risk” register; and staying off it. Just as remarkably, the volunteers are not idealistic youths, but mature hands. The methods used by these so-called volunteers in child protection scheme are not tricks you need to join the Magic Circle to perfect. They provide what more stable families take for granted as the architecture of everyday life - working parents, non-truanting children, parental discipline, supervised homework, family meals taken together, reading stories at bedtime. Yet these rituals are as exotic to many families as snow in Saudi Arabia. The volunteers (former teachers, retired insurance brokers, mothers whose own children have outgrown the nest) provide not a personal concierge service but advice on how to navigate medical services, or to find a place at a local school. They forge a template the family can follow: they don't give them a fish, but teach them how to fish.

The scheme, based on a project in California, should not just be trumpeted as a success in itself, but hailed as fresh evidence of how the experience of age can benefit those who could use a helping hand in life. Britain's flourishing history of volunteering fell a little out of favour when the postwar Labour Government grew sniffy about what Aneurin Bevan dubbed “a patchwork of local paternalisms”. It took another six decades for Labour to re-embrace volunteers. Gordon Brown pronounced 2005 the Year of the Volunteer. Alan Milburn, who co-ordinated Labour's election campaign then, declared: “Over the next decade, social enterprise and the wider voluntary sector should become as integral to public service delivery in Britain as either the public or private sectors.” Across the Atlantic, President Bush had already, in his 2002 State of the Union address, urged all Americans to give two years of their lives to voluntary service.

Increasingly such volunteers are older: they are the ones who have time on their hands after early retirement; cash in the bank and no need to work; and the experience to have something useful to offer. The popular image may be of gap- year students painting hospitals in Honduras. But more older people are signing up to such organisations as Voluntary Service Overseas; and VSO, in turn, is keen on volunteers who marry enthusiasm to a skill: accountancy, teaching or bridge-building, maybe. Retired businessmen are mentoring young entrepreneurs. Former teachers are returning to the classroom. A body called Generation Link matches older volunteers to young families craving surrogate grandparents. Who still dares say that the spectrum of life runs from adolescence to obsolescence?