“Silver Resources” Development and Exploration of Rural Mutual Aid Elderly Care Models —Based on the Practice of Time Bank Systems

Against the backdrop of an increasingly aging rural population in China and the dual failure of traditional elderly care models, the “Time Bank”—a mutual aid elderly care model that develops low-income elderly human resources through intergenerational service relay—is regarded as a potential pathway to solve rural elderly care challenges. This paper focuses on the practice of the “Time Bank” mutual aid model in rural areas, aiming to analyze the practical dilemmas it faces and propose optimization pathways. Research indicates that the “Time Bank,” originating in urban areas, encounters five major challenges when being embedded in rural societies: conflicts between the inherent logic of human feelings society and market-oriented operational rules; dual constraints of insufficient publicity coverage and lack of policy support; low professionalization of service teams and inadequate service supply capacity; and lagging information construction with poor digital adaptability. To address these issues, this paper proposes promoting a shift towards “affection points,” constructing a co-governance pattern with multi-stakeholder collaboration and multi-channel financing, establishing a tiered and categorized service supply system, and adopting a hybrid management model combining “online and offline” approaches. The “silver resources” referred to in this paper mainly denote the potential human capital possessed by the younger, healthy elderly population that can be utilized for participating in social services and mutual aid elderly care, specifically including intangible resources such as their idle time, labor capacity, life skills, social experience, and willingness for community participation. Through institutional arrangements like the “Time Bank,” these resources can be activated, stored, exchanged, and transferred intergenerationally, serving both the needs of the advanced elderly or disabled elderly and accumulating service capital for the younger elderly’s own future elderly care needs, thereby achieving the dual goals of “productive aging” and “ensured aging.”