TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.051

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 16KB | 277 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