BYLINE: By Sara Mosle; Sara Mosle, a former editor for the magazine, is writing a book about a school explosion during the East Texas oil boom in the 1930's.
I am sound asleep. The phone rings. I fumble for the receiver in the dark. James is calling collect.
"I'm at 125th Street and need a token," he says.
I strain my neck to see my bedside clock and flop back on my pillow, groaning.
"James, it's after midnight."
It is June 1999 and James is 13 years old. For the last six years, I have been a mentor to him and his older brother, Adam, and to several other kids who at one time all lived on or around a single block on West 164th Street in upper Manhattan. (To protect their privacy, I have used their middle names, except when they don't have a middle name, in which case I have used a nickname.) Although James and I go weeks at a time without talking -- his family can't afford a phone -- he sometimes calls me collect three times a day. We are in the middle of one of his calling jags. When the phone rings, I am a sleepy, grumpy and inadequate volunteer, partly because what James really needs isn't a token.
"You shouldn't be out this late," I say wearily. James is often out when I think a 13-year-old should be in bed. Despite the boom, his family has been in free fall for a year -- ever since his father lost his longtime job as a butcher when the store closed after its owner died unexpectedly. Soon, the family was evicted from its apartment, and the parents, who had been together all the time I had known them, split up -- although the break doesn't appear to be permanent. As a result, James and Adam have lived in two different shelters with their mother. Their father is working again, and their mother is newly employed, part time, as a consequence of welfare reform. The boys, who used to be on a tight leash, now frequently go unsupervised. Or at least, I think this is all correct. To be honest, I don't really know. I've cobbled a lot of it together from things James and Adam have said in passing and from conversations with one of Adam's teachers. (Partly because of the phone situation, I haven't spoken to the boys' parents in months.)
James is now saying something about how he was supposed to spend the night at his dad's apartment, on West 120th Street, but his father isn't in, and he thinks he misunderstood and that his father is at his mother's place in the projects south of Houston Street, and he doesn't have any money to get home, and it's dark and there are all these crazy drunk people wandering around.
My eyes are closed.
"Why don't you explain to the token clerk and see if he'll let you in," I suggest groggily. It would be hard to overestimate how much I don't want to go up there.
"I already tried that," he says miserably.
I am no longer even holding the phone -- it's lying next to me on my pillow. "You could try another entrance," I say softly. A sweet nothing.
"O.K." His voice is far away. I hear a click and a distant dial tone. I am drifting, I am dreaming. I am dreaming of a little boy named James who is lost in the dark. . . .
I sit bolt upright in bed, electrified by the knowledge that I am an evil person. I have to go get him. But where? On 125th Street? Or did he say 120th? I have no idea. Twenty terrible minutes later, the phone rings again. He is still on 125th Street. "Start walking down Broadway," I say. "I'll meet you at 110th." Soon, I am in a cab headed uptown. Of course, in the broader context of James's life, this kind of rescue mission is "vain," as one writer has put it, "in both senses of the word." But it's a balmy night, and suddenly there is no place I'd rather be -- which is to say, I'm getting something out of it, even if he isn't.
I am a volunteer. for three years, I taught public school in New York City, and since 1994, the summer after my last third-grade class, I have served as an unofficial mentor to the families of four of my former students -- Adam and James, Jaber (and his younger brother, Lloyd), Keemy (and his older siblings, Clara, Elizabeth and Angelo) and Burger, plus a few of their friends. At any given time, "the group," as we have all come to call it, has numbered from 6 to 12 kids, a few of them Dominican, the rest of them black. I am 36 and white.
Over the years, we have gone ice skating, bowling, to movies, to museums and on the occasional overnight trip (to Washington, the east end of Long Island) and have generally hung out. I have been on hand for happy moments (the 100th birthday of Jaber's great-great-grandmother) and sad ones (his grandfather's funeral). When I met "my" kids, they were 7 and 8 years old, smaller than I am, and liked to hold my hand when we crossed the street. Now they are 15 and 16, nearly all are in high school and they hulk over me in puffy parkas or with long legs and gangly arms protruding out of shorts and tank tops. Not one of them would be caught dead holding my hand.
For more than a decade, politicians and civic leaders have been looking to volunteers like me to take over the government's role in providing vital services to the poor. Although the movement arguably began in 1988 with the candidate George Bush's invocation of "a thousand points of light" as a response to Reagan-era cutbacks in social spending, it has been embraced by the current Democratic administration, which has continued those cutbacks, and culminated in the 1997 President's Summit for America's Future in Philadelphia, where President Clinton and Gen. Colin Powell touted the power of volunteerism. Now George W. Bush has picked up his father's theme of "a kinder, gentler" America by pushing "charitable choice" -- the provision in the 1996 welfare reform bill that allows faith-based organizations to contract with government to provide social services to the poor. (Al Gore supports it, too, though less vigorously.)
"Compassionate conservatives" would probably claim that I am the kind of "caring adult" who can transform the lives of disadvantaged kids more effectively than any government program. I'm all for volunteering, but I would disagree. While I don't doubt that I have had some positive effects on my kids' lives -- studies show that mentoring can reduce dropout rates and drug use among teenagers -- they have mostly been of the "boosting self-esteem" variety that conservatives, in other contexts, usually disdain. Besides, I'm not a very good volunteer. To work, mentoring has to be performed consistently, over a sustained period of time and preferably one on one. For the first couple of years, I saw my kids as often as twice a week. But now I'm lucky if I see them once a month, and I almost never see them individually. In their lives, I'm less a caring adult than a random one. And my failure is representative.
Although 55 percent of Americans reported that they volunteered at some point in 1998 -- a 7 percent rise over 1995 -- this jump does little more than recover ground that was lost in the early 1990's and represents just a 1 percent increase over 1989. Moreover, the total number of hours that people are giving has actually declined. "It's a new trend," says Sara Melendez, the president of Independent Sector, which compiled this data. "People are volunteering, but when they do, it's more of a one-shot deal -- half a day one Saturday, instead of once a week for x number of weeks." Overall, Americans donated 400 million fewer hours in 1998 than they did in 1995.
Consequently, while Powell has made recruiting 100,000 new mentors a top priority of America's Promise, his volunteer outfit, there is little evidence that people are sufficiently answering his call. In New York, for instance, Big Brothers/Big Sisters receives just 4,000 inquiries each year from potential mentors. Of these, two-thirds never follow up once they learn they have to commit to seeing their kids at least twice a month. Another 700 lose interest after the initial training session or are eliminated through the program's rigorous screening process. Only 600 people ever become mentors -- this in a city with more than one million schoolchildren -- and nationally, the program has a waiting list of some 50,000 kids.
To help nonprofits cope with this new unreliable work force, groups like Impact Online and New York Cares have sprung up that act like temp agencies, matching the interests (and busy schedules) of what might be called the impulse volunteer -- someone with an urge to give but only a few hours to kill -- with openings, arranged by time slot and geographical location. But this Filofax approach to giving often robs volunteerism of the very thing that was supposed to recommend it over government in the first place -- namely, the personal connection that develops when you regularly visit, say, the same homebound AIDS patient.
And in a volunteer's market, not every need has a buyer. "People will come in and do a project -- a school painting, a school wiring -- and think they've done a good service and go away," says Paul Clolery, editor of The NonProfit Times. "But it's not the type of traditional, week-in and week-out volunteering that a lot of organizations really need." No case perhaps better illustrates how idealism has run amok than that of Bank of America, which under the rubric of "volunteerism" encouraged its employees in San Francisco to "adopt an A.T.M." -- mentoring it, so to speak, by visiting it regularly, sprucing up its surroundings, wiping away the little smudges from its face -- until the California labor commissioner ruled that the company had violated labor laws by trying to get its employees to work without pay.
The experience of Meals on Wheels in Dallas is typical. It can't find enough volunteers to commit to even a few hours a month to help deliver meals to the city's elderly shut-ins. "People can't get away during the middle of the day," says Helen Bruant, the program's director. "So, they ask, 'Why don't you deliver in the evenings?' Well, we looked at that. But for a lot of our clients, this is their only meal. They eat half at lunch and save the other half for dinner. Plus, it's not good for the elderly to eat a big meal at the end of the day." Therefore, the program must hire 30 percent of its drivers. Even paying people, Bruant cannot find enough help. "We can't compete with McDonald's," she says. "It can be draining working with the elderly. A lot of people would prefer to flip burgers." Yet, if anything, the need is increasing. "The aged population has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade," Bruant says, "but giving and government financing haven't increased."
Indeed, according to a study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors released in December, requests for emergency food and housing have climbed at their steepest rate since the early 1990's. As a result, the heads of some of the most reputable nonprofits -- the United Way, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities -- have reported that they can't keep up with rising demand for their services. "We're having to turn people away, or ration portions, to stretch supplies," says Deborah Leff, the president of America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest network of soup kitchens. And while charitable giving is up sharply, the growth has not kept pace with reductions in government aid to the poor. "People have replaced some of it with volunteering, some of it with cash, but not all of it," says Richard Steinberg, a professor of economics at the joint campus of Indiana and Purdue Universities in Indianapolis. He estimates that for every dollar of assistance that's cut, charitable organizations can recoup at most a third....
...Volunteering has always been inefficient. Most volunteers are concentrated in affluent suburbs far from blighted urban neighborhoods, where their assistance is needed most. "There is an extraordinary mismatch," says Lester Salamon, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, "between the geographical locus of the need and the geographical locus of the giving." It would often take me 45 minutes each way by subway just to pick up my kids. If we then headed back downtown, that's another round trip. I would often travel three hours just to take my group on a two-hour excursion.
Partly because of this mismatch, volunteering is also regressive. Far from alleviating the gap between rich and poor, it tends to aggravate it. That's because people are most likely to give if they are asked to by someone who knows them or if they already have strong ties to an organization. This is why universities do such a good job of fund-raising: they get your old college classmate Biff to call you up and ask you to contribute to an institution to which you already have a connection. It's a double whammy.
Consequently, time and money tend to stay in a donor's immediate social -- and economic -world. When people talk about giving, they are often talking about contributing to institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the New York City Opera, that confer prestige on the donor and improve the quality of life primarily for the middle class. Despite the roaring economy, organizations that work with the poor have actually seen their proportion of the charitable pie narrow in recent years. "Poverty relief, disaster relief -- it's a very thin slice," says Ann Kaplan, the editor of the annual report Giving U.S.A.
In fact, a lot of what passes for volunteering used to be called simply "parenting": people helping out in their own children's schools or coaching their own children's soccer teams. Kids with parents who already have resources end up benefiting the most. (One reason I even have time to volunteer is that I'm single and don't have children of my own.) And while the rich give to the rich, the poor, it is worth pointing out, give to the poor. Keemy's older brother, Angelo, won a national award for volunteering some 30 hours a week handing out used clothes to people in his neighborhood who are even needier than he is.
While it might seem, at first glance, as if I am an exception to some of these rules -- after all, I am crossing race and class lines to see my kids -- I am not. I didn't decide, after some careful needs-benefit analysis, to become a volunteer. I would have never called Big Brothers/Big Sisters on my own, for the same reason that most Americans don't: reluctance to commit to a regular schedule. (As a journalist, I'm often on the road.) I also have a proper respect for the flake factor in my personality. Rather, I fell into volunteering -- the way a socialite suddenly finds herself in charge of the charity ball. I was asked to give by someone I knew well (Adam) to an institution (in my case, a neighborhood, Washington Heights) to which I already had strong ties (because of teaching). He didn't ask me to mentor him in so many words. He just walked 100 blocks to my apartment one day after school to see me. It was the hard sell.
Around this time, I wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times about how my students didn't have enough opportunities to play. In response, I got a letter from a group in Washington called the American Committee to Invigorate the King Holiday, which seemed to be some quasi-civil-rights organization with an executive committee in perpetual "formation." The group offered me a few thousand dollars to start a program for my former students. The money was funneled through my old school, as it had to go to a nonprofit organization, and I invited Adam, Jaber, Burger and Keemy, some of their siblings and three girls from my old class to participate.
Some might argue that this is how the system should work: plucky Op-Ed writer gets nongovernment money to run efficient after-school program, entrepreneur-style, for former students. But I wasn't efficient. I enjoyed no economies of scale. My little program served just 12 kids. And to the extent that I succeeded, my success can't be replicated on a large scale. There were 1,500 other children at my old school who could have greatly benefited from an after-school program. Where were these kids' mentors? And even if the volunteers were suddenly to materialize en masse, who would finance their programs? There aren't enough American Committees to Invigorate the King Holiday out there to support them.
Although I was never a better volunteer than I was that first year, my success owed far more to the financial and institutional support I was receiving than to my idealism. My apartment in New York was too small for me to have all my kids over at once. Because the school was the ostensible sponsor of my program, it let me borrow a classroom after hours for my group. This meant desks! And access to scissors, crayons and glue. There was a chalkboard for writing out assignments, a tape player for playing music, an easel for displaying charts, a class library and so on. Because we were officially associated with a school, we could also ride the subway free whenever we took field trips on weekday afternoons. Together, these items -- the room, the basic supplies, the free transportation -- constituted a considerable capital investment in my program, all of it provided at taxpayer expense. This in turn helped me make the most of my grant money. "Government spending causes volunteering," the economist Richard Steinberg explains. "You can't have a volunteer in a school without a schoolhouse. Government institution-building increases volunteering."...
...Still, after two years, my mentoring was beginning to seem awfully vague and open-ended. I was earning about $40,000 a year freelance, and several of my kids had begun to age out of the "child" category. They could no longer ride the subway free and were beginning to require "adult" admissions, effectively tripling the cost of many outings. A bowling trip, including meals and transportation, often cost me more than $200. Plus, the kids were tired of bowling. Although the three girls had dropped out, the group was becoming unwieldy. Whenever I went up to the block, a crowd of kids would form, begging me to take them with me, as the drug dealers on the corner looked on, smirking. I wasn't very good at saying no -- it all seemed so arbitrary, who could come and who couldn't -- and I began to understand why the age-grouping of kids by grade had ever arisen as a custom: it provided a way for adults to care about children, and then to stop caring about them, without the kids' ever feeling abandoned.
My apartment was littered with "to do" lists -- get all the kids tutors, get them into summer camp -- that I never quite made good on because of the logistical or financial hurdles involved. Even the Washington trip had been little more than a grand gesture on my part to make up for the fact that I was no longer seeing as much of the kids. And when I did see them, I found I was becoming less and less ambitious: instead of a "unit" on jazz, we had seen an awful lot of movies lately. Their titles testified to the growing poverty of my imagination: had I really taken them to see "Spawn" and "Home Alone 3"?
In "the tipping point," Malcolm Gladwell's book about social epidemics, he cites an experiment devised by two Princeton psychologists to test why people give. The experimenters met individually with a group of seminarians and asked them to prepare a short talk. Some were asked to discuss the parable of the Good Samaritan. Others were given a more neutral topic. Then, just as they were about to leave for their presentations, they were told either that they were running late or had a few minutes to spare. On the way, the seminarians would encounter a man slumped in an alleyway, coughing and groaning in obvious distress. The idea was to see who would stop and help. Invariably, people assume that those who were asked to talk about the Good Samaritan were the most likely to assist the man. In fact, the only factor that influenced the outcome was time. Among those who thought they were in a hurry, only 10 percent stopped to help. Among those with extra time, 63 percent stopped. As Gladwell concludes, context, far more than conviction, influences behavior.
One obvious reason for the decline in volunteering is that Americans are working harder. "With the rise of the two-income family," Paul Clolery says, "the traditional volunteer who stayed at home with the kids no longer exists." According to one study, middle-class parents now punch the clock 335 hours more each year -- that's eight solid workweeks -- than they did in 1979. "I don't know how you ask people who are working 50-, 60-hour weeks, who already have children and elderly parents to care for, to volunteer on a more regular basis," Sara Melendez says. "The rhetoric about volunteering hasn't caught up with the reality of people's lives."
Between 1995 and 1997, for example, I cut back the amount of time I saw my kids by three-fourths, to about once a month. The reason wasn't that in 1995 I was a good person and in 1997 I was a bad one. Rather, in 1995 I had a flexible job with a lot of downtime, and in 1997 I took a full-time job as an editor and often worked into the evening or on weekends.
Before I made the shift, I began to look for an exit out of my kids' lives. At one point, I was approached about a job in Washington and figured that was how my mentoring would end: I would leave the city. But the opportunity fell through. I eventually decided I would get my four original students into a good, small junior high. (I also helped Angelo get into a good high school.) The younger siblings, I figured, could then follow suit. My idea was not to improve the city's schools systematically -- my children would almost certainly take the places of other poor, equally deserving students -- but to pass the kids off, into new caring hands, like batons....
...For all the talk about children in this country, we do very little for them -- or their families. What my kids really need, I can't give them: better housing, less crowded schools, access to affordable health care, a less punitive juvenile justice system, and for their parents, better child care (so they can work without leaving their kids unattended) and a living wage. Even the churches, in whose name the claims of volunteering are often made, have begun to protest. In February, a surprisingly large and diverse coalition of religious leaders -- from the conservative National Association of Evangelicals to the liberal United States Catholic Conference -- came together in Washington to inaugurate a new group, Call to Renewal, to insist that government do more to fight poverty. "Since welfare reform passed, all these problems have been dumped at churches' feet," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, one of the organization's founders. "But we can't do it all."...
..."If we're going to insist on smaller government and lower taxes," says Sara Melendez at Independent Sector, "then we're going to have to give more individually. But if what we're really saying is that we're giving as much as we can, that we're volunteering as much as we can, then we have a choice. We can either say, 'I don't care what happens to people in need,' or we can make sure that we have the government policies in place to pick up the slack."
One night, as I stood on the block of West 164th Street, the usual crowd having formed, a kid who hoped to join our group cried out, "Ms. Mosle, you need to start a center!" I laughed. I knew what he meant. What these kids need -- what all these kids need -- isn't me, but a real after-school program.
GRAPHIC: Photos: The author takes "the group" to Amagansett . . .; where they compete for Scrabble points . . .; and go for walks in the great outdoors. (Sylvia Plachy)(Brown Brothers)(New York Times Photo Archives)