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Community-service volunteers today range from teenagers to retirees, and the projects they work on are just as varied — from assisting in disaster relief and tutoring schoolchildren to manning food banks and visiting nursing-home residents.
Carrie Ann Smith, 25, a graduate of Buffalo State College, worked as a forest ranger before joining AmeriCorps in upstate New York, where she worked with at-risk youths. After Hurricane Katrina, she volunteered to go to Slidell, La., to assist in the cleanup.
“I can still feel that nervousness, those butterflies of excitement and anxiety, buzzing around in the pit of my stomach the night before we left,” she later wrote. “Thirty days of my life was the least I could give, and I would again.”
Smith found a landscape of total devastation. “Homes were nothing but standing wreckage. Clothes, drapes and blankets hung randomly in the trees, weighed down by muck and mud. I felt like I was entering a war zone. I felt the pain and frustration that still loomed in the air, but most of all I felt the need to help, to serve and to make a difference.”
Retiree Naomi Baskin found her "passion" in tutoring youngsters. (Naomi Baskin)
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Like many volunteers who left comfortable existences to help disaster victims, Smith came away enriched by the experience and confident that working for AmeriCorps is the right career path. “Being in Louisiana transformed me,” she says. “I became a more compassionate and understanding person, and that has benefited me not only in my career but in my personal life as well.”
Retiree Naomi Baskin of San Francisco has experienced the same joy of helping others in need.
During her career selling real estate, Baskin envisioned many alluring post-retirement activities, but tutoring underprivileged youths was not one of them. Six years ago, however, she began working with Experience Corps, a nonprofit volunteer program for older Americans.
“I just love it,” she says. “I found my passion late in life, and I get far more reward than I give.”
Baskin tutors Latino and African-American youngsters from second to eighth grade. “My goal, which is an uphill battle for many of the kids, is to get them to discover the joy of reading,” she says. “Those who come from underprivileged homes and whose very struggle is just to survive are the biggest challenge. I want so much to instill in them that the only way to 'break out' is to get an education. My biggest reward is when I get that 'aha' moment. A letter I received from a l0-year-old boy I tutored best illustrates this point. He wrote: 'Ms. Naomi, you make my brain accelerate.' ”
Like Baskin, Wash Gjebre, a newspaper reporter, worried about the prospect of having too much free time on his hands after retirement. At a friend's suggestion, he reluctantly joined the local Salvation Army board, only to find that it sparked what he called a “life-altering change.”
“Clearly, it's been a transition with a purpose,” he said. “I learned later that volunteerism offered a personal fulfillment that would take the ennui out of the empty hours in retirement.”
Bibliography
Books
Buckley, William F., Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country, Random House, 1990.
Buckley contends that young people should be encouraged through various rewards and sanctions to give a year of service out of gratitude for the civil liberties they have inherited.
Byron, William J., Quadrangle Considerations, Loyola University Press, 1989.
A former president of Catholic University presents the pros and cons of national service and discusses its future.
Chapman, Bruce, Wrong Man in Uniform: Our Unfair and Obsolete Draft and How We Can Replace It, Trident Press, 1967.
The co-founder and director of the Discovery Institute opposes both the draft and national service.
Coles, Robert, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism, Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
A Harvard psychiatrist and advocate for civil and children's rights examines volunteerism in literature while recounting the experiences of a lifetime given to volunteering.
Dionne, E.J., Jr., Kayla Meltzer Drogosz, and Robert E. Litan, eds., United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship, Brookings Institution Press, 2003.
Essays from a wide range of scholars, public officials and educators explore the pros and cons of national service.
Danzig, Richard, and Peter Szanton, National Service: What Would It Mean? Lexington, 1986.
Former Carter administration officials contend that national service could instill a sense of civic duty in all Americans.
Moskos, Charles C., A Call to Civic Service, Free Press, 1988.
A military sociologist at Northwestern University argues the nation needs more individual service instead of a government-led national service program.
Olasky, Marvin, The Tragedy of American Compassion, Regnery, 1993.
A professor of history and journalism at the University of Texas argues that care for the poor should be the responsibility of private individuals and organizations.
Wofford, Harris, Of Kennedys and Kings, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
The co-founder of the Peace Corps and the first CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service describes the basis of modern thinking on national service.
Articles
Bandow, Doug, “National Service: The Enduring Panacea,” Cato Policy Analysis No. 130, March 22, 1990.
A long-time opponent of national service argues that we need “service,” not “national service.”
Broder, David, “Hard-Line Hostility for a Volunteer Initiative,” The Washington Post, Sept. 4, 2002, p. A21.
The veteran Washington Post political reporter explains “why it is so stunning that the Citizen Service Act, which would reform and expand the main volunteer-community programs, is being blocked by the House Republican leadership, apparently to spare a minority of hard-core conservatives from having to vote on the measure before Election Day.”
Bumiller, Elizabeth, “Bush Urges Graduates to Volunteer in Community Service,” The New York Times, May 22, 2005, p. 15.
Reports of the protests at Calvin College during a commencement address by President George W. Bush underscored the small but growing voice of the Christian left.
Bush, George W., “Heal The World, Be A Volunteer,” Parade Magazine, April 21, 2002, p. 14.
The president explains why he values volunteer national service and repeats his call to take part.
Just, Richard, “Whatever Happened to National Service? How a Bush Policy Pledge Quietly Disappeared,” The Washington Monthly, March 2003.
Just tries to explain why an issue “championed by a popular wartime president, favored by the vast majority of Americans and supported by both parties has floundered so badly.”
Lawrence, Stratton, “Americut?” Charleston City Paper, March 29, 2006, p. 1.
The author explores what could happen to volunteerism if the Bush administration's cuts in the AmeriCorps budget are not restored, suggesting they “could not come at a worse time.”
Reports and Studies
Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Volunteering the United States,” Dec. 9, 2005; www.bls.gov/cps/.
Contains data on U.S. volunteering — defined as “persons who did unpaid work (except for expenses) through or for an organization.” About 65.4 million people volunteered through or for an organization at least once between September 2004 and September 2005; the proportion of the population that volunteered was 28.8 percent, the same as in each of the prior two years.
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