volunteering

Nine Gallons #2: True Stories by Susie Cagle

tina — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In Nine Gallons #2: True Stories by Susie Cagle, writer and artist Susie Cagle recounts her experiences with Food Not Bombs. For those unfamiliar, Food Not Bombs is a "franchise activist non-organization dedicated to fighting hunger with vegetarian meals comprised mainly from wasted food.” Food Not Bombs chapters are all over the world, though predominantly in major cities.

Though this publication is small, Cagle covers a lot of ground. You learn that it’s not easy being involved with the non-organization. One will face working for free (not everyone can afford to volunteer), unreliable volunteers, and uncertainty over where food and resources will come from. The public responds to your work in varied ways, ranging anywhere from positive support to fevered rudeness. There are also issues of class and racial privilege that come into play. As the writer perfectly states, "a largely white monopoly on Food Not Bombs as a cultural institution is an impediment to people of color self-organizing.”

Though the artist didn't touch on weather being an issue, the climate in which you live greatly affects when and where you can serve food. One year, the Food Not Bombs chapter I was involved in served spaghetti at a park on the fourth of July. With little warning, there was a rainstorm that showered us and our hard work. We couldn't afford a tent or cover of any kind, so the food was flooded and had to be thrown away.

Susie's writing is skilled, her illustrations are well-formed and charming, and her characters are both believable and easy to relate to. The only qualm I had with the zine was her illustration style. The artist draws people from a two-thirds angle and they are usually facing the same way. I am unsure whether she is limiting her angles and facial drawings due to necessity or artistic choice. Either way, this repetition distracts us from good stories that deserve our focus.

Overall, Nine Gallons #2 serves as an easy to read, honest, and articulate recount of working with Food Not Bombs.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, April 11th 2011

Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America

jenna — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Alan Khazei

PublicAffairs Books

Alan Khazei is a heckuva guy. In 1988, he co-founded City Year, a privately funded domestic service organization that lead directly to the establishment of AmeriCorps. When AmeriCorps was threatened out of existence by budget cuts in 2003, Khazei spearheaded the drive to save it. Today he runs Be the Change, Inc., a group that “creates national public awareness campaigns to build momentum for citizen service as a practical solution to problems facing our communities and our country.” A better-intentioned guy would be hard to find.

Alan Khazei is also a politician. In 2009, he lost the Democratic primary for the Senate seat made vacant by the death of Khazei’s colleague and hero, Ted Kennedy. Everyone knows that the winner of that primary, Martha Coakley, lost in the general election to former Cosmo model Scott Brown. Had Coakley won by a clear margin, I doubt that Khazei’s Big Citizenship would exist. The book’s lines announce that Alan Khazei really loves his country; between them, the reader understands that Khazei plans to run for office again, with this sunny, confident book as part of his pitch.

Big Citizenship is ostensibly the tale of how Khazei cooked up the idea to send idealistic seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds into urban communities for a year of full-time service and what transpired afterwards. The book tells this story well, but it does little more than that: we’re not shown, in the creative nonfiction sense, what motivated Khazei. Guilt? Ego? Existential despair? All we’re told of Khazei’s early life is how dearly he loved his immigrant relatives, all of whom loved America so much that Khazei had no choice but to love it, too. We’re led to believe that City Year emerged from this overwhelming love of country (and love for the older Kennedy brothers, John and Robert).

Before you toss a used tea bag my way, let me assure you that I’m also fond of my homeland, including its ability to learn from its troubled history. Unfortunately, Khazei fails to unpack any of the root causes of persistent poverty and inequality, preferring instead to direct his considerable energy towards his many service organizations.

The birth of City Year smacks so much of Ivy League elitism (we, the Upper Class, shall help you, the Lower Class) that it’s easy to forget that Khazei, son of an Iranian immigrant, must have endured taunts of “Ayatollah Assa-holah” as a St. Paul’s prepster in 1979. But Khazei avoids introspection at every turn. His consistent emotional distance, perhaps born of his bruising Senate campaign, quells any desire in the reader to use Khazei’s methods to “bring out the best in America.”

Nitpicking the founder of a program that has done so much good for so many feels singularly shameful, but here it is: Big Citizenship is boring. Reading it is as much a chore as eating a plateful of steamed vegetables: good for you, yes, but in desperate need of salt. Were Khazei not planning a future campaign, I suspect he’d have shared a more complex portrait of City Year, including the inevitable ugliness and frustration, perhaps even acknowledging his own class privilege more deeply than expressing a vague desire to “give back.”

Written by: Shannon Drury, November 9th 2010

The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:00:00 +0000

By Shirley Sagawa

Jossey-Bass

Mom. Apple pie. Service. In The American Way to Change, Shirley Sagawa convincingly argues that volunteering is both deeply rooted in American history, as well as a creative solution to modern societal challenges. Sagawa argues that service can be used to impact many entrenched social ills, including an ineffective public education system, an aging population with fewer family support systems, environmental degradation, and poverty. Service—whether through a national program like AmeriCorps or through individuals working at volunteer-run organizations like Citizen Schools—is a critical component to a functioning civil society, according to Sagawa, and fill gaps between programs offered by the government, businesses, and nonprofits.

Over nine concise chapters, Sagawa outlines American volunteer service and its impact on the people serving, the communities being served, and the nation at large. This impact is not just due to the net social good that's being enacted through these programs, but also through the innovations that result from passionate people dealing with real challenges with limited resources. She also describes the people who serve, who are mostly people in transition: college graduates, retirees, and the recently jobless, among others.

Sagawa, who has been called "the mother of the modern service movement," is a very credible author, and The American Way to Change isn't pure conjecture about the impact volunteers and service organizations could have on the big issues facing America. She describes, at length, the impact of the volunteer-based programs that are presently working in prose both matter-of-fact and moving. For instance, one successful venture is the Prisoner Entrepreneurship Program, which combats recidivism through teaching basic business skills to the incarcerated. Founded by a former Wall Street investor, the program has a return-to-prison rate of less than ten percent, and an employment rate of eighty percent within thirty days of release. This is one of literally dozens of programs that Sagawa profiles that are both very successful and have concrete results that help solve some of America's biggest challenges.

In this fast-moving book, Sagawa makes a strong case for service no longer being considered something "nice" done to pad a resume or pass an afternoon, but an absolutely necessity in changing the United States for the better. Buy it if you're passionate about service, looking for organizations to volunteer with that are making a substantial difference, or simply in need of inspiration about the power of human potential.

Written by: Catherine Nicotera, August 16th 2010

Change the World, Change Your Life: Discover Your Life Purpose Through Service

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Angela Perkey

Red Wheel Weiser

Change the World, Change Your Life materialized as the author, Angela Perkey, reflected on how to help others find personal and community connections through donating one’s time. In her formative years, Perkey’s parents instilled in her the importance of volunteering and making a time commitment to help others. Thus, she spent time volunteering in various ways, and the most memorable volunteer experience to her was when she spent time painting the toenails of elderly women in a senior center.

Although she knew that she was providing companionship, she wasn’t wholly invested in the experience. As she got older, she realized she wanted to find volunteer experiences that matched her passions and interests, as well as find an opportunity to volunteer where her talents could be most utilized. Perkey discovered in college that she wanted to form an organization where students could apply for grants to fund their own service projects, and from this, Students Serve, Perkey’s nonprofit, was formed.

In Change the World, Change Your Life, Perkey advocates on how to find a type of giving that matches with one’s goals in life. At one point in the book, Perkey points out that, in reality, most organizations have failed because they have not succeeded in what they have aimed to do, such as eradicating hunger or providing an equal education for all students. Her brashness is a way to emphasize the fact that there are multiple problems which need solving and that maybe we are the ones to solve them.

Perkey also wants her readers to realize that we should be selective in choosing where we give our money and spend our time; in other words, we should think about what a volunteer opportunity is going to do for us as well as what we will be doing for the organization. Will we be happier as a result of the time we spend volunteering? Will we come home invigorated, so that our positive energy is felt by those around us? Perkey points out that only when we feel that we are making worthwhile contributions to our society will we be truly spurred on to continue our efforts, and only then will we be able to really help the causes to which we are dedicated. Furthermore, she creates many guiding questions which are meant to help her readers find the volunteer opportunities that will be the most fulfilling and rewarding, and have the most impact on those we are serving.

If an individual is not already volunteering her or his time to an organization, there are probably a plethora of reasons why she or he will start this important work in the future and not today. I have wanted to volunteer for years, yet my work and home schedule always seemed so hectic, and I couldn’t imagine fitting volunteering into my schedule. Then I had kids, and I wasn’t sure what service opportunities were available for families to do with their children. After starting Perkey’s book, I made a call to a local Meals on Wheels organization. I asked them if I could volunteer with my children, and sure enough, the following week I started taking meals to senior citizens in my town with my four year old and seven month old in tow.

That was a month ago, and now I am wholeheartedly enjoying spending a few hours each week volunteering due to Perkey’s straightforward guidance and gentle prodding to take action sooner rather than later. Any book that can motivate people to take action should be shared, and I’ll happily recommend this to anyone who is looking for a way to become involved in her or his community.

Written by: Kirsha Frye-Matte, July 6th 2010