There Goes the Weasel

You know what? I hate volunteers.

Okay, don’t get me wrong – I’m an utter hypocrite. I started this essay on a bus halfway between the domestic violence shelter where I volunteer eight hours a week and the Michael’s where I was picking up some donations I’d solicited for said shelter. Most of my college weekends were spent answering phones on a crisis hotline; through high school I was elbow-deep in my local animal shelter; before that, I can’t remember a time when my mother wasn’t dragging my larval self to church functions and Salvation Army programs in hopes of beating something like a social consciousness into my lazy brain. (Bully for you, mom). Maybe more than anything else at this point, I am a volunteer. I am SUCH a volunteer.

BUT

My qualms with the whole culture of volunteerism started to fester that summer I spent at a Romanian orphanage (Want to do good? Here’s a hint: Mission Trips. They don’t work). Since I moved back to Texas, the qualms have only gotten queasier. Austin TEEMS with amazing service organizations that need volunteers. It also boasts a huge population of students who, either out of a genuine desire to do good or the need to complete required service hours, are always on the lookout for volunteer opportunities. Still, for every amazing and indispensable volunteer I meet (and there are plenty), there are always three others who just have to be worked around: the volunteer who shows up only to improve his or her own resume; the entitled do-gooder who wants to run the entire organization by himself; the flake who shows up only when she feels like it. Then of course, there’s the Drop Out – the otherwise adequate volunteer who trains, puts in a few hours then suddenly leaves. Your average service organization puts a lot of time and money into volunteer training, every checked-out, counterproductive volunteer is literally robbing the org they set out to help in the first place. I’ve watched it happen OVER AND OVER AND OVER. But WHY?

I may just be exposing my soft earnest underbelly here, but I don’t believe anyone purposely sets out to volunteer with the intention of being bad at it. “I want to help” – the story goes – “I want to do something good.” Who can argue with that?

Well, that bus ride was a long one, and because I just love to help, I spent most of it coming up with four basic guidelines for being an excellent volunteer, based on my own trial and error. The topic is broad and my experience is admittedly not, I’m going to limit myself to advising those working with pre-existing service-based organizations. (Young go-getters looking to start service organizations of their very own would also do well to pay attention.)

1. Know Your Community

It’s impossible to teach drawing without at least some decent pencils, and since the clients specifically requested that I teach a drawing class this semester, I’ve spent the last week calling art stores and begging for donations – I have, I’ve discovered, a natural skill for begging, as long as I’m properly motivated. My spiel, at this point, is cast iron; still, there’s a moment in every call where I stumble and bite my tongue. That moment? The one when I need to describe, in two to three appealing words, the community I’m serving and why they deserve help. This is a problem because possibly the best word for the job – the universal phrase you see bandied around in grant proposals and brochures for volunteer programs from here to Antarctica, is the one word I have sworn myself NEVER to use while describing these kids. That word? Disadvantaged.

The reasoning behind this is a little complex. Before I explain, let’s give a little background. What is volunteering? It’s a broad term covering lots of different activities, but no matter what form it takes volunteering is a political action.

Put simply, every time you volunteer, you’re making a statement about the community in which you live: what kind of values you think it should uphold, what kind of institutions and services are necessary for those who live there, and what kind of people need help. If you think about, volunteering is one of the most effective ways to be politically active: rather than simply spouting opinions to whoever will listen, you’re out there testing these convictions of yours while at the same time making it more likely that they’ll be heard. The experience can fortify your position and provide you with helpful anecdotes for use in later opinion-spouting. Still, without a doubt, it will also challenge your convictions. Why’s that? Because when you walk through the door into your very first volunteer position, that’s all you’re going to have – convictions, hopes, and a vague idea about the kind of people you’ll be working with. The second the door closes behind you, that picture is going to explode into a million chattering pieces because the problem with volunteering is that WITHOUT EXCEPTION, the beneficiaries of volunteer programs are Real People. And Real People are complicated.

So, back to the d-word: why does all this add up to my refusing to call my students disadvantaged? For one thing, it’s a loaded word. What’s an advantage? By using the word, am I conveying that I am more advantaged and therefore of more worth than a bunch of ten year olds living in a domestic violence center? By volunteering, am I suggesting that they can’t help themselves? Those questions are enough in themselves, but my main problem with “disadvantaged” and terms like it are that they don’t MEAN very much about the people they’re meant to describe. What does a disadvantaged person look like? How do they think about themselves? About the chick in the doorway with the do-gooder grin on her face? I don’t know these things and neither will you, at least not in the beginning.

I’m not mentioning all this to preach (at least, not JUST to preach). Of the reasons that good volunteers stop, one of the most common is disillusionment – the feeling that they’re not accomplishing anything with their time. And sometimes they aren’t. More often, they’re doing fine, but since they started their work with a specific picture of what they would be doing and what it would look like, anything less seems like failure. This is avoidable. Learn as much as you can about the issues and the community where you’re volunteering – at first you might try sticking close to home and working with a community you’re already a part of. Then, once you’ve decided what ideals and values are important to you, TALK TO PEOPLE about them: staff members, fellow volunteers, members of your service population, anyone who knows anything about the subject. Be ready to have your assumptions challenged. Not only will this make you more able to provide services that the community actually wants (see #2), but by getting to know and to love your service community as it really is, you’re giving yourself the context necessary to recognize all the good you’ve already done.

2. Ask First

In any fluff piece about the magic of volunteerism in any lifestyle magazine, ever, you will read that there are as many kinds of volunteer opportunities as there are people who want them. And this is true. But here’s another story:

On a hillside in Romania, close behind the orphanage where I volunteered that summer, there is a pile of junk. Broken refrigerators and cars and old televisions and god knows what else are all up there, rusting and probably causing significant environmental damage. Why? Easy. Someone donated them.
When a donation truck rolls up to the orphanage, it’s full of things that the organization needs – furniture, blankets, etcetera It’s also equally full of other junk that the donor just needed to get rid of and write off on their tax returns. The orphanage can’t turn away the junk without turning away the whole truck and they can’t afford to turn down ANYTHING. So, they pick out what they can use and send the rest up the hill. The summer I was there they were trying to sell some of the stuff for scrap, but I’d bet anything that most of it is still up there on that hill. Rusting.

There’s a great discussion in all this about the economy of giving. More to the point, it illustrates a truth I don’t think a lot of people see unless they’re in nonprofit work for a long time: Service organizations NEED help. They need help in a very water-in-the-desert kind of way, a need that (if needs had sounds) would sound very much like nails dragging down a chalkboard. They need so much help that, generally, they’re not going to turn down ANYBODY who offers them ANYTHING. That doesn’t make what’s being offered helpful

Once you’ve found a cause that you feel strongly about, don’t arrive at the doorstep saying “This is what I am going to do for you.” Ask instead, “What do you need?” Most established service organizations have at least a few set volunteer positions. If you have a specific set of skills that you want to share, describe what you do and ask if they could use you someplace. If they can’t, they’ll know other places you can ask. If you really want to offer YOUR service to a specific community, consider working with an established organization in some other function until you’ve learned about the community and made connections enough to start your own program.

3. Go Long

Again, this is one of those bits of magazine fluff: “Volunteering doesn’t have to be a big time commitment!” And this one’s true. Even one or two hours a week can make a huge difference to an organization that runs on donated time. BUT if your goal is to understand the needs of the organization and the community and help create meaningful change….well, showing up for a day to paint a damn mural ain’t gonna cut it. (Great example of this kind of volunteerism? Mission trips.)

If you’re going to volunteer in a direct service position (that is, any position that puts you face to face with the people you’re trying to help: mentoring, tutoring, counseling, hospice work, anything with kids, etc), you need to make a commitment of at least two hours a week for a year. Minimum. Direct service positions DEPEND on a relationship between the volunteer and the individuals that they’re serving, and for the most part it just isn’t possible to develop that relationship with a small or even an irregular time commitment. Also, compared with skill-based volunteer opportunities that, while helpful, don’t have much of a learning curve (filing, dog-kennel cleaning, etc), it takes much longer for a direct service volunteer to get good at service they’re trying to provide. If you’re not in a place where you can make this kind of commitment, then you need to find another area or another organization to offer your services.

If you are the sort of volunteer who is in your last year of school and looking for something impressive to put on your resume (you know who you are), I’m not saying you need to stay away from nonprofits altogether. What you need to do is PLAN A FUNDRAISER. Find a cause you give a damn about, raise money in their name, then check the “Area of Most Need” box on the donation form. This is both harder and more impressive than it sounds; it’s also much more likely to do good, in the long run, than offering a service or program that is going to disappear as soon as the semester is over.

4. It IS All About You

Wait? What?

At this point, it’s probably a good idea for me to explain the subliminal message in all this, the one that’s been so bad at sublimation that by this point it might as well be the subtitle. So…Mission Trips. What are they? Why don’t they work?

I stole the term from the church youth group set, but The Mission Trip is actually widespread concept in the land of Doing Good. In this noble venture, a volunteer or group of volunteers (invariably middle class Westerners) travels to a disadvantaged community, either in a foreign country or simply on the other side of the tracks. This volunteer (or group) works for a week or two, enjoys the exotic locale, snaps some pictures of him or herself with an arm around some sickly looking natives, then buggers off. If you’ve been paying attention to numbers 1-3, you already know exactly how little good this kind of set-up is going to produce. Except…well, it does. It CAN. Just not what you’d expect.

You may recall that I started this essay griping about the time I spent one summer in a Romanian orphanage. Without going into detail, it’s safe for me to say that that experience was a CLASSIC Mission Trip. Entitled white kid? That’s me! Glamorous third world orphanage? Check. Parallel agenda? I was writing a NOVEL for god’s sake, and I’ll freely admit to extensive pre-trip daydreaming about adorable Romanian children and the tragic circumstances from which I would be snatching them (though how I was going to do this and still backpack Europe for two weeks afterwards was not entirely thought through.) Okay, so I learned Romanian beforehand and I stayed for three months instead of five days. I swept some floors and poured some concrete; I learned card games, hung around with the other volunteers. Romania was not much changed by my time there. Me, on the other hand? Four years later, I STILL talk about it at least once a week.

There’s a reason that so many school programs require service hours, and it’s not because they’re afraid civilization will collapse without another 20 hours of literacy tutoring. Volunteering is FANTASTIC for volunteers. Done right or even just done ok it broadens horizons. It provides opportunities to lead and to teach. It develops empathy, self-sufficiency and self-esteem. This is true even of missions like my Romanian trip that don’t particularly help the groups they claim to serve; other programs strike a happier medium where both volunteer and service community provide each other with something that neither could get on their own. But no matter the program, if all the volunteers were to disappear tomorrow, the service community itself would keep going – inconvenienced, maybe, but not helpless. I’m not suggesting for a second that this justifies self-serving, useless volunteerism, or that no volunteer actually cares about what they’re doing. That urge to help is real and it is addictive. But on its own it’s not enough, and that’s why the number one destroyer of volunteers is BURNOUT. You want to help. You are so helpful. Then all of a sudden it’s too many hours on too little sleep, it feels like no one appreciates all the wonderful services you’ve gone out of your way to offer, and the glow is gone. Then you’re gone. And who does that help?

One of the major strategies of crisis work, one that I think every volunteer should have some practice with, is art of Self Care: that is, paying attention to your own emotions and reactions to situations, even in the middle of trying to help someone else. Self Care may look like deciding to skip volunteering after a brutal day at work, or a taking a strategic bubblebath, or remembering to decompress about a tough experience to another volunteer or staff member at a later date. No matter what form it takes, the idea behind Self Care is to start paying attention, not only to the things that are wearing you down but also to what you’re getting out of it. There will be days that are horrible. There will be times you mess up. There will be times no one seems to appreciate you. But if you’re paying attention, when the glow of “Hey, I’m helping!” fades, it can be tempered – and strengthened – by the realization, “Look how much I’m learning!”