A Challenge Well Worth Risks, Costs

I could, I suppose, point out that some politicians have been behaving the way reporters are accused of behaving: looking for the dark clouds behind the silver lining of this week’s new birth of volunteerism.

But even Jesse Jackson - although pointing out that volunteers can’t equip classrooms in poor neighborhoods with computers or create decently paid jobs or any of the other things that might help close the gap between rich and poor - praised the Colin Powell-led effort to enlist volunteers in service to America’s 15 million at-risk children.

Mario Cuomo once again cautioned against the temptation to believe that an army of volunteers will relieve government of its duty to help the poor. But this time, he framed it most interestingly. “Private effort should come before we use government to serve a need,” the former New York governor said last Sunday in a New York Times op-ed column. “Government is best used only where private effort is clearly inadequate to do what we have to do to make any real progress in dealing with the vast, complicated, rooted problems associated with poverty.”

Still, he wound up supporting “the extravaganza in Philadelphia” - the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future!

Everybody supports it: President Clinton and former Presidents Bush, Carter and Ford, and Nancy Reagan for her ailing husband; Powell, Bill Bradley, Bob Dole - liberals, conservatives, blacks and whites. What’s not to like about an effort to create on a grand scale the special sort of volunteer effort so many of us see as a proud American tradition?

Here the script calls for a sentence that begins, “However …”

But there is no however, save for the reminder that it would be well to make a place for some of those at-risk youngsters themselves to volunteer. It’s no good seeing yourself entirely as a recipient, never as a giver.

Most of the positive effects of the initiative launched last week are pretty obvious: neighbor-to-neighbor help; a new burst of corporate assistance, including the loan of employees and the delivery of goods and services to people who clearly need them.

Some of the more important possibilities are less obvious. I have long believed that many Americans are prepared to help in all sorts of ways but have held back out of fear or because they have lacked entree. The arrangements that will come out of the summit could provide a mechanism by which those who have help to give can give it.

And a lot of that help will do what governmental assistance cannot do: touch people in ways that not only relieve their physical needs but also change their view of themselves and their prospects. Many of us who are justly worried about the negative effects of welfare “reform” will concede welfare’s shortcomings. Many who believe that welfare exacerbates the very problem it was designed to ease will acknowledge the too-limited reach and the hit-or-miss uncertainty of private charity. But all of us can agree that those mired in ambition-killing, hopelessness-inspiring intergenerational poverty need more than the cash transfers, housing assistance and food stamps the government can provide.

Indeed, a volunteer effort of the sort envisioned by the leaders of the summit could go a long way toward helping us understand just which government programs deliver the most help most efficiently and with the fewest negative consequences.

Besides teaching government how to be most helpful, volunteerism on a vast scale might also drive home the necessity for government to deliver at least some of its assistance through private organizations - including religious organizations.

In other words, volunteerism might prompt us to re-examine some our notions about church-state separation and look for ways to allow faith-based organizations to do the human rescue work they are demonstrably capable of doing but for which they often lack adequate financial resources. We wouldn’t want the government to fund churches or other religious organizations directly, of course. But couldn’t we think of some way - vouchers, perhaps? - of allowing those who need help to choose to purchase it, even from faith-based agencies?

Finally, if the volunteer effort has half the success its sponsors hope, it could go a long way toward building better relations across lines of geography and race and class, thereby helping to make our cities more civil, our politics less conflicted and our children more hopeful about their prospects.

In short - although it may be bad journalistic form to say such a thing - I see nothing but good coming from this extraordinary undertaking.

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