Can Volunteering Solve Real Problems?
A couple friends and I have been exchanging emails over the past few days about volunteerism and its ability to solve social problems.
The conversation began when one of my friends sent out an email asking if we had seen the article/excerpt from a book called “The Soul of a Citizen: Volunteering Can’t Solve Our Problems.”
After reading the article, I at first became a little bitter.
I thought – what a very limited view of volunteering! Volunteers can solve problems! In fact, it is our business to solve community problems.
The excerpt focuses on the failure of volunteer efforts to address the causes of social issues and the author suggests that we need to add a layer – “witness” – to our volunteering in order to leverage our good deeds for large scale social change.
Furthermore, the article implies that too often volunteer efforts treat the symptoms and not the root of social issues.
To illustrate this point, the article resurfaces an old story of community impact.
In the story, some friends are having a picnic next to a beautiful river and suddenly a baby floats past them.
They wade into the current and rescue it, but then they notice there are dozens – hundreds – thousands of babies floating down the river.
The question is, should they put all of their resources into saving the floating babies, or should they take some of those resources and put together a re-con team to go up the river and find out where all the babies are coming from?
When they head upriver and find an ogre tossing in babies, should they let it continue to wreak its havoc, or try to stop it?
The book excerpt asks the question, what if the ogre (or root cause of the problem) is our government or the private sector?
As the article states,
“I’ve seen too many compassionate individuals trying to stem rivers of need, while national political and economic leaders have opened the floodgates to widen them.”
It’s a nice story, and one that speaks to splitting our efforts between direct service and advocacy – but, I don’t think we – or the author – can ignore the multitudes of skills-based volunteers and self-organizing innovators who are already addressing issues far beyond direct service.
My friends and I think that volunteers already have a place at the heart of social change.
Many nonprofit ventures are started as all-volunteer operations – imagining and implementing solutions to problems large and small, global and local.
These volunteers already know that they can make a difference and move the needle on issues like poverty, discrimination, hunger, human rights, and other societal issues.
After my friends and I debated on this issue for a while we agreed on the following major ideas:
First, volunteers need to be better advocates.
Advocacy is a big part of being a volunteer leader and teaching others to advocate for themselves is as equally important.
We also need to embed advocacy into volunteer training. This is what Loeb means by being a witness – described as
“taking these examples and lessons to the village square–or its contemporary equivalent–and then doing our best to convey them to as many others as possible. It means we must refute myths that justify callousness and withdrawal. It also implies that we do all we can to help those who are habitually ignored or silenced to find their own voices and platforms…”
As volunteers and service leaders, we need to get better at telling our story so that the public doesn’t simply see volunteers as feeding the hungry and clothing the poor but also as those who are working on all levels to create lasting social change.
We can’t let the mythology that volunteers are only good for fishing babies out of rivers stand unchallenged – we have the skills, knowledge, and ability to tackle the ogre, too!
We must have a multi-pronged approach to addressing social problems.
Of course we must treat the symptoms and address immediate needs of clothing, food, employment etc. but we also need to get involved in local government and teach others to do the same.
As my friends Rebecca and Melissa say,
“We must make sure that basic human needs are met. People can’t think about civic engagement when they’re worried about how to stay in their home or feed their kids. Once these are met then we can create a community around civic engagement and empower communities to use their own voice.”
My friends an I also believe that volunteers and service leaders should try to work with existing organizations.
All too often, people have an idea and start their own club or organization.
There’s nothing wrong with being a self-starter, but if there’s an existing framework, joining that group is an instant way to engage those people who are already involved instead of splintering off into smaller and smaller fragments of community.
It’s important to remember that people crave a sense of community.
If civic engagement just adds to our already overwhelming to-do lists, no one is going to want to get involved.
Have a block party with your neighbors!
Share your ideas, plans and resources with the young couple across the street!
Once real relationships are established we can ask people to take on more responsibility, but the relationships have to come first.
Special thanks to my friends Melissa Sines and Rebecca Southers, who always challenge me and helped write this blog post.
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Thank you for sharing this.
Like you I had a very negative reaction to this chapter. To look around and say that volunteering has done nothing to improve our communities is like saying that farmers don't provide food.
No community, regardless of how small, has not been impacted by acts of kindness of its residents. From visiting the ill to helping at the school's bake sale when pushed I think everyone has given of themselves in one way or another.
However, this does bring up some interesting points with regard to the definition of volunteering and there are some things that nonprofits can learn to be more effective in utilizing volunteers.
1- Defining volunteering is hard to do. Most people think of it as formally giving of your time and resources to a cause. But when approached from a broader perspective, helping out your neighbor when they're moving, visiting a church member that is ill and home bound, or helping out at your kids schools are all forms of volunteering, regardless of how informal the steps were to get there. When look at volunteering in the broader sense, one can quickly see that communities thrive on volunteering and a willingness to help out a fellow neighbor.
2- Combating surface projects that don't address the root. Yes there are limited resource for non-profits preventing them to often be able to do both the direct service and advocacy effectively without becoming a "jack of all trades master of none." However, as with most things you if one changes their perspective it makes sense. I'm a big believer in the "you've got to get them engaged" approach to building volunteer programs. Yes painting the hallways in a school may not improve the test scores of the students, but it is still a very import piece in the scheme of things.
a) painting is accessible to most people regardless of skill-level, thus allowing volunteers to make that first step to be introduced to the school or cause. Having them there provides that opportunity to engage them in education about your school needs, which hopefully gets them to come back, which will eventually lead them along the path to becoming an engaged citizen.
b) having a freshly painted or nicely landscaped school does impact the quality of life for the students, increasing their pride in the school, which helps provide an overall more positive attitude by all, and thus does increase test scores and improves behavior issues.
So yes, the direct service project might not be able to address the root cause directly, but without that entry way into the organization's mission, we'd never be able to amass enough passionate volunteers that can then become maintain the direct service while allowing the opportunity for others to become the advocates or project leaders for the tasks that do address the root cause.
3- One thing that your post does mention that gets my blood pressure rising is the lack of collaboration between non-profits or service providers. In my last month at HandsOn Northeast Georgia I was faced with just this instance. An individual contacted me about wanting to get their service listed in the newspaper through our Blueprint partnership with them for their new ESL program. Being the good community resource that I was, I engaged them in a dialog and asked if they had contacted the local Literacy council that provides support and networking among the various ESL and GED providers and if they had looked at supporting one of the other existing ESL classes in need of resources. I was told that they didn't want to work with the other programs because "we can do it better" and was then asked what resources I could provide them to get started with fund raising and volunteer recruitment. It's situations like these that deplete all of our resources because the pie is now being shared with one more person at the nonprofit table. Tales like this are a dime a dozen and I believe is the reason that our organizations are not able to amass the committed volunteers needed to do the necessary advocacy to address the root causes.
Thanks for starting this dialog. When does the book “The Soul of a Citizen: Volunteering CAN Solve Our Problems” come out?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Your argument regarding the entry points for volunteering and engaging the community are extremely important! I think it should be our goal to capture enough data so that we can tell that kind of story citing real life examples of how every day people solved local community problems. These are the stories that need to be shared across the country! To me – that is real social innovation!
Great post! I have often struggled with the issue of how volunteers can best be mobilized to change the world. I think there are a few ways to encourage volunteer leaders to go beyond the act of organizing other volunteers. One is to encourage a reflection period at the end of a volunteer opportunity where volunteers are asked to explore the underlying causes of the “problem.” Volunteer leaders can take an extra step here by doing some research into organizations that work more deeply on the problem at hand and provide resources to the volunteer team.
I also think that some types of volunteer projects/programs are more effective than others at getting to the root causes of poverty rather than just treating the symptoms. Education programs in particular have always appealed to me for their transformative potential. I firmly believe that volunteers can be successfully utilized to teach basic personal finance, for example, to adults. And some policies on the books are good, but need volunteers to help low and moderate income people access them, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Could I use the picture for a presentation with non profit propouses?
Really I love it!!!
[...] illustrate that your organization is credible and worth advocating for. third, you must enlist advocates to work on your behalf. you can’t do the big job of advocating alone, you need assistance. identify those [...]