TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.051

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 15.5 KB | 297 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

For Goodness' Sake


What Americans do when they see a crying need

By Nancy Gibbs


    Kenny spent his first two Christmases in the Harlem
hospital where his mother abandoned him, in a roomful of babies
with AIDS. His third Christmas he spent in an Albany children's
home. There he had the luck to meet his first angel.

    Gertrude Lewis spent her days driving a city bus and, every
other Saturday, volunteering at the Albany home. "I saw this
boy with these beautiful eyes," she recalls, "just looking up
and smiling." She was 47 years old, had never married, never had
a family of her own. She decided then and there she would become
a foster mother.

    Now Kenny lies in his crib upstairs in her home, in a house
she shares on a tree-lined street, where her heart prepared him
room. This nursery is merry with orange walls and pictures and
27 watchful stuffed animals. "It's going to be hard to lose
him," says Gertrude.

    What are we to make of a woman willing to take to heart a
baby she knows is likely to die? Surely, she confounds all
descriptions of the roaring '80s as a morally chintzy stretch
of history, where such problems as Kenny's are greeted with
more petulance than pity. In an age of toxic cynicism, Gertrude
is a Samaritan: a woman who, in the spacious privacy of her
life, went out of her way to help a child who needed her. She
is not running for office, not running charity balls and not
running away. Perhaps she seems a rare heroine at an end of a
decade when the rich got greedier, the poor got needier,  and
everyone else tended to his own shiny self-interest.

    But the redeeming truth, to our own surprise, is that
Gertrude is in vast company. Last March, Independent Sector, a
Washington research and lobbying group, commissioned a Gallup
poll to plumb the depths of our charity: What do we give, and
why, and who does the giving, and how much? It turns out that
almost half of all American adults offer their time to a cause,
an astounding figure even allowing for the number of people who
lie to pollsters.  And most are giving more time than ever.
These are commitments, not gestures. The average volunteer
offers nearly five hours a week, for a total of 19.5 billion
hours in 1987 -- the equal, roughly, of 10 million full-time
employees. There is something infectious about mercy.

    And so it is that George Bush, the heir-elect, looks out
over the nation and raptly muses about a thousand points of
light, savoring the phrase, if not quite understanding it. He
did not add that the lights are shining into corners that have
grown bleak and dim in the past eight years. And he got the
numbers wrong. Out of sight of the Rose Garden, something like
80 million individuals are doing whatever they can to address
the problems that politicians are fleeing.

    Try to draw a profile of the typical do-gooder, and the
only thing certain is that it is probably wrong. Volunteer work
is not the sole province of the housewives holding Christmas
fairs, the idle rich sponsoring  benefits and the young selling
cookies. The aggressive, entrepreneurial cast of much modern
charity reflects the fact that the largest number of volunteers,
according to a J.C. Penney survey, are between the ages of 35
and 49.

    Certainly the most eager and conspicuous new recruits are
the yuppies. Since they absorb much of the blame for the moral
defoliation of the '80s, they deserve some recognition for
their redemption. "We're trying to break the cycle of you get
up, you go to work, step over a homeless person on the way to
the subway, go to the gym, go to the sushi bar, go home and
fall asleep," says Kenneth Adams, executive director of New
York Cares, a sort of charitable clearinghouse for yuppies that
has recruited 600 young volunteers to tutor dropouts, serve in
soup kitchens, renovate housing and visit the elderly. "The Me
generation is dying," says Adams, "and New York Cares is one
example of how it's being put to rest." Call it yuppie love.

    But even that is not the whole story. For all the flood of
new professionals into charity work, more than a quarter of all
volunteers still come from households with incomes of $20,000
or less. Families earning less than $10,000 a year give more of
their income to charity than individuals earning more than
$100,000. Since the less rich families in this country rub more
intimately against its sores, they are often the first to offer
their money and time. "You feel the pain, you feel the hurt,"
says Wilfred Schill, a North Dakota farmer who with his wife
counsels couples who fear foreclosure. "It gives you the
greatest incentive to do something like this."

    Gallup's evidence defies our low expectations. We are,
perhaps, a little better than we think, though maybe not as good
as we'd like. If 80 million adults are volunteering, then there
may be 80 million impulses for doing so -- whether political,
professional, spiritual or personal. The precise mixture is
measured from needs within and needs without. In the end, the
decision to volunteer usually occurs at a crossroads, where
moral indignation and moral responsibility meet.

    In both the cities and the farmlands, the indignation of
the moment is palpable. The Reagan Administration did not invent
the poor, but it has largely ignored them. "We've dug deep pits
in this country in the past eight years," says Tanya Tull, a
Los Angeles housewife who founded Para Los Ninos, a
family-service facility on Skid Row. "People are falling into
them -- and we've taken away the ladders too." Reagan's
policies, argues Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense
Fund, have "created a set of social problems that simply were
not there in 1980. We're going to be paying for them for a long
time."

    Hence the sheer volume of volunteers: an overwhelming
majority of Americans believe that charities are needed more now
than they were just five or ten years ago. In New York City
there are about 35,000 people living on the streets, compared
with 500 a decade ago. AIDS, which alone has pulled thousands
of people into action, did not exist. Crack, which has perhaps
done more to ruin children than any other drug, did not exist.
"Volunteerism is as old as the nation," says Winifred Brown,
executive director of New York City's Voluntary Action Center,
"and it's as new as today's headlines."

    But it is not just that the needs are greater. In the minds
of many Americans, the weight of moral responsibility shifted,
publicly and dramatically, somewhere between Jimmy Carter's
"malaise" days in 1979 and the Hands Across America hoopla of
1986. "Government has a lot of money but doesn't know how to
take care of people," says banker Peter Flanigan, founder of
the Student/Sponsor Partnership, which helps shepherd poor kids
through Catholic schools in New York City. "That revives the
latent feeling in people that they should do it themselves."

    Democracy does demand shared responsibility, not only for
our governance but for our welfare as well. Yet each generation
weaves its own mythology of philanthropy. Ours in the '80s owes
most to the lessons of the 1960s and the heady afternoons of the
Great Society. For a time it looked as though Washington would
take care of everything: it was government as governess.
Caseworkers trooped through the ghettos and housing projects
promising advocacy, access and opportunity for the dispossessed.
For many, it was a dream that came true. But too often the army
hunkered down into an occupying, rather than a liberating,
force.

    The lasting accomplishments of the Great Society have been
challenged by some who believed in it deeply. But beginning in
1981, the very premises of activist government came under
attack as Reagan lashed the "welfare queen" and extolled
"neighborliness." By the time Charles Murray published Losing
Ground in 1984, his argument that the War on Poverty had wounded
more people than it had saved was poised to become conventional
wisdom.  "Whatever our political persuasion," says Independent
Sector president Brian O'Connell, "we all understand the
practical limitations of Big Government, and very often that
means setting up alternative organizations."

    In place of a waning welfare state, Reagan promised that
enterprise freed would bring prosperity for all. A surging
economy with low inflation and high employment would do more to
help the poor than a raft of welfare programs. As for solving
the particular problems of the poor, that was best left to
states and towns and, above all, individuals who knew better.
This transfer of responsibility camouflaged the neglect of vital
programs, particularly subsidized housing and programs for
children. "When voluntary action is translated to national
policy, it assumes that communities have the ability to pull
themselves up by the bootstraps," observes Barry Checkoway,
professor of social work at the University of Michigan. "Some
of them don't even have boots."

    One reason Reagan got away with the cuts was that he so
cannily persuaded people that they could do it better
themselves. And indeed, individuals began to step in the minute
government backed off. "My personal motivation," says Talmage
Newton III, 44, a St. Louis advertising executive who chairs
Operation Food Search, an organization to distribute food to the
poor, "was a belief that any citizens' group can perform any
function better than any government, with the exception of
national defense."

    Reagan's vision of America not only altered what Americans
expect of government; it also played deftly on what we expect
from ourselves.  We are all to some extent tending to our
character, trying to turn efforts of will into habits of mind
in the hope that generosity will one day come easily. People of
all faiths find in charity a chance for thanks, praise and
obedience. "What doth the Lord require of thee," asks Micah,
"but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
thy God?"  To borrow from the Quakers, many volunteers believe
that when the worship is over, the service begins.

    To be sure, there are also plenty of self-serving reasons
to serve: glamour seeking, resume padding and networking. "There
is usually an opening in your life when you decide to
volunteer," says Core Trowbridge, 26, volunteer coordinator for
TreePeople in Los Angeles. "Young people come here, treating
this as a singles' scene. Old people who've retired but not run
out of energy come." But when researchers inquire further into
motives, the most common reason cited is a desire to do
something useful. To comfort a child, succor a patient, rescue
a school or salvage a neighborhood gives volunteers a sense of
success that few jobs can match. The chance to create and
control a daring solution is irresistible and restorative.
Attorney Tom Petersen is on leave from the Dade County state
attorney's office to establish, among other community programs,
Teen Cuisine, which teaches culinary skills to teenage mothers.
"We discovered almost by accident," he says, "that creative
economic incentives can be much more effective in changing the
girls' behavior than traditional counseling."

    That sparkle of individual ingenuity sets many new
volunteer efforts apart from the huge corporate rescue missions
that define much American charity. While the United Way, the
American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society serve vast
needs and do great good, they are to charity what GM is to
industry. Charity too needs its entrepreneurs, dreaming on a
different scale, and perhaps genius ripens most fruitfully in
a free and private space. That may explain why 105,000 new
service organizations were born between 1982 and 1987.
"Volunteers are now expected to solve problems," says Jerri
Spoehel of the Volunteer Center of San Fernando Valley, Calif.,
"not just stuff envelopes."

    When, as now, there is hope ready for harvesting, excellent
ideas become especially fertile. The examples of some national
heroes -- Candy Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk
Driving; Bruce Ritter, father of Covenant House for kids in
trouble; and Eugene Lang, whose I Have a Dream program has
spawned innumerable imitations -- all proved what extraordinary
good can be reaped from one person's crusade. Faced with a
desperate need, many new volunteers see not only a moral
challenge but also a tactical one: to do as much as possible
with as little as possible, and then share the idea, to allow
it to spread.

    Take Chris Renner, 26, who helped create Food Partnership
Inc. outside Los Angeles. It troubled him that food banks were
spending a fortune in transport fees to collect donations. With
the help of the California Trucking Association and United Way,
he worked out a method for trucks to transport food between
donors and food banks when they were returning empty from a long
haul. So far, the program has carried nearly 4 million lbs. of
food and saved the food banks $55,000 in trucking fees.

    Or Pedro Jose Greer, a Miami physician who found his
calling not only in hospitals but also under bridges and
highways, where many of the city's homeless live. Four years
ago, "Dr. Joe," 32, opened a clinic next to a shelter called
Camillus House. He now has 130 volunteer doctors and medical
personnel working on 40 patients a day. "There is so much talent
among the poor, we must help them no matter what," he says. "We
lose so much when we lose the people from the inner cities." At
the University of Miami medical school, where he is a fellow in
hepatology, there is a three-month waiting list for the
"homeless elective" for medical students.

    Or Suzanne Firtko, an architectural historian in New York
City who invented the Street Sheet, instructions that direct
homeless people to the nearest soup kitchens and clothes banks.
She persuaded Du Pont to donate waterproof, tear-resistant
paper, and designed the sheets with easy-to-understand graphics
so the disoriented and illiterate could use them. The entire
operation that first year cost $1,800. "Projects like mine
become very expensive when they're done by established
agencies," she says. "It's very cheap when you're doing it at
your kitchen table."

    The efforts of American Samaritans, in short, reflect a new
frame of mind in which sympathy complements competence but does
not replace it: wide-eyed but hard-nosed. Private charity cannot
and should not replace public policy. It can, however, set
standards, set priorities and set an example for the best use
of resources. Throwing money at a problem may be just the
easiest way to attack it, not the wisest. The more effective
forces, it seems, are harder to marshal: vision, tenacity,
patience and courage.

    In the Bible, Samaritans were viewed with contempt until
Jesus' tale of how one of their community showed great mercy to
a stranger redeemed them for history. Perhaps the generation
that closes the millennium will find the same vindication. The
unheralded gestures of gracious individuals may in the end
outlast and belie the labels hung on the Me generation. And
government, in the meantime, could take some lessons from the
most creative of these very private enterprises. Good ideas need
money and leadership as well as light and oxygen to brighten and
spread. In the process, we might even discover that this is
already a kinder, gentler nation than we ever imagined.

-- Janice C. Simpson/New York and James Willwerth/Los Angeles