Volunteers Don’t Grow On Trees

I have spent many hours as a volunteer in a wide variety of civic, church and charitable organizations. My experience has shown me that individuals can work together in a structured environment to improve the quality of life for themselves and others in the most astounding ways.

Volunteerism, however, is not a quick fix for resolving poverty issues. It isn’t a fun way to do good when the spirit strikes. Even so, some political types are selling it as an easy way to mend the safety net that welfare reform may leave filled with holes.

Yes, welfare needed reforming. No doubt about it. What I object to is not reform, but the pie-in-the-sky attitude among some folks that no one will fall through the cracks because volunteers will suddenly pop up hither and yon to take up the slack. Effective volunteerism is more complicated than that.

Nice people, acting alone, who can give an hour or two a week to feed children whose mothers no longer qualify for food stamps is not a practical plan. Successful volunteer efforts of any magnitude require an adequately funded organizational structure. Any random volunteer attempts to get food to those women and children would - at best - be hit and miss, regardless of when hunger pangs strike.

Volunteer organizations have to be run very much like businesses with goals and objectives, communication systems, skilled workers and the necessary resources to do the job. Volunteerism - particularly in organizations with clients that are in desperate straits - is more complicated than it looks.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary program Meals on Wheels that helps feed homebound poor, mostly elderly, people. Delivering meals requires that volunteer cooks and drivers be at the delivery site every weekday. Someone needs to keep records, coordinate drivers, buy the groceries and do all the detail work required to have a successful operation.

Funding is required for such things as places for preparing meals and paying for phone service. In other words, the service can’t be left to a couple of good people deciding to drive around town with box lunches every once in a while.

Besides, the needy can easily slip from community view, making it impossible to help them. An elderly immigrant without friends or other resources, a family without heat in the coldest days of winter, or a child in need of medical attention can become non-entities, unnoticed by those around them. They are hidden by their own embarrassment of their plight or their ignorance of where to turn. Readily accessible social service organizations are, therefore, imperative if those who need help are to get it.

Furthermore, the tax money that is supposed to be saved by reform measures doesn’t make charitable programs free. Scores of volunteers cannot succeed in providing necessary services without financial resources backing them up. If not the federal government, then state and local governments are probably going to have to lend a hand. Or businesses will have to chip in more financial support. Citizens can give time, but money is the glue for charitable efforts, especially when those efforts are directed toward helping the profoundly poor.

The focus of volunteerism must center on existing organizations that are willing to cope with whatever the initial fallout of welfare reform may bring. They want people to call up and say, “I’ll help. What can I do. Can I help raise funds? Staff the soup kitchen? Wash and iron used clothes? Drive someone to the doctor? Read to the blind? What can I do to mend the safety net?”

Politicians who glibly pass off volunteerism as an effortless answer to meeting the needs of the nation’s needy aren’t playing fair. Volunteering isn’t some magic elixir. It’s hard work. It takes dedication. It costs money. It requires coordination. And, yes, it is an exceedingly important part of American civic life.

Volunteerism is, in fact, far too important to be treated as a romantic fling at doing good. That view is downright dangerous, because it can doom defenseless people who are hanging by their thumbnails onto one string of a safety net.

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