Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nina Eliasoph is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of "Avoiding Politics".

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"This book is a pleasure to read--smart, insightful, tragic, ironic, and funny. Eliasoph brings to life the complicated relationships and dilemmas that surface in youth programs, and the twists and turns of the author's analysis are extremely compelling. This book is a must-read for those participating in NGOs, those trumpeting the virtues of volunteer work, and those social scientists interested in questions of government, community building, and civic culture."--Lynne Haney, New York University

"This clear and engaging book shows how community organizations really work. Nina Eliasoph tackles tensions that run through well-meaning organizations and lives, and she illustrates how people struggle with inequality, differences, having to be nice, and wanting to promote community but accomplishing much less than they desire or realize."--Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University

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"This book is a pleasure to read--smart, insightful, tragic, ironic, and funny. Eliasoph brings to life the complicated relationships and dilemmas that surface in youth programs, and the twists and turns of the author's analysis are extremely compelling. This book is a must-read for those participating in NGOs, those trumpeting the virtues of volunteer work, and those social scientists interested in questions of government, community building, and civic culture."--Lynne Haney, New York University

"This clear and engaging book shows how community organizations really work. Nina Eliasoph tackles tensions that run through well-meaning organizations and lives, and she illustrates how people struggle with inequality, differences, having to be nice, and wanting to promote community but accomplishing much less than they desire or realize."--Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University

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Making Volunteers

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Empower Yourself..................................................................................................................ixCHAPTER 1: How to Learn Something in an Empowerment Project....................................................................................1CHAPTER 2: Participating under Unequal Auspices................................................................................................17CHAPTER 3: "The Spirit that Moves Inside You": Puzzles of Using Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer's Problems..................................48CHAPTER 4: Temporal Leapfrog: Puzzles of Timing................................................................................................55CHAPTER 5: Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics, Blank "Reflections"......................................................87CHAPTER 6: Harmless and Destructive Plug-in Volunteers.........................................................................................117CHAPTER 7: Paid Organizers Creating Temporally Finite, Intimate, Family-like Attachments.......................................................146CHAPTER 8: Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort................................................................................152CHAPTER 9: Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: Getting People Out of Their "Clumps".............................................165CHAPTER 10: "Getting Out of Your Box" versus "Preserving a Culture": Two Opposed Ways of "Appreciating Cultural Diversity".....................183CHAPTER 11: Tell Us about Your Culture: What Participants Count as "Culture"...................................................................190CHAPTER 12: Celebrating ... Empowerment Projects!..............................................................................................206CONCLUSION: Finding Patterns in the "Open and Undefined" Organization..........................................................................231APPENDIX 1: On Justification...................................................................................................................259APPENDIX 2: Methods of Taking Field Notes and Making Them Tell a Story.........................................................................261Notes...........................................................................................................................................265References......................................................................................................................................281Index...........................................................................................................................................303

Chapter One

Community House beautifully illustrates Empowerment Projects' complex tangle of crisscrossed sponsorships and crisscrossed missions. It is a very successful Empowerment Project, coming close to fulfilling all the missions at once. Most of its funds come from the government, from nonprofit organizations, and from private donations. A small amount of money comes from its many fundraisers, which involve selling burrito or lasagna dinners, used clothes, old stuffed animals with dirty fur, and rumpled, second-hand books. So, to survive, the program has to act a bit like a state agency, a bit like a nonprofit, a bit like a charity, and a bit like a business. Such programs have to act like state agencies, expertly documenting their successes at preventing disadvantaged, minority youth from entering the futures which social scientists predict for their ranks, of drug abuse, poverty, teen pregnancy, and crime. Programs like these also have to act like civic associations, both by inviting adult volunteers to come help young people do homework in the after-school programs, and by encouraging youth members to conduct volunteer work themselves, on weekends, evenings, and holidays. In addition to acting like state agencies, businesses, charities, and civic associations, the programs are supposed to be "family-like," as organizers put it, thus further blending the kinds of obligations that participants might expect from one another.

The projects also have to "promote our diverse, multicultural community," as flyers and other publicity often advertise. To promote "bonding among diverse youth," organizers like Emily encourage disadvantaged youth from her after-school program to attend evening meetings of county-wide youth civic engagement projects like the Regional Youth Empowerment Project—planning and conducting litter cleanups or gathering food for the hungry—side-by-side with non-disadvantaged youth.

When the disadvantaged youth joined their non-disadvantaged peers in these volunteer projects, the blending grows yet more complex. The two sets of youth volunteers enter the programs on different trajectories, heading toward different projected futures. Most of the poor and minority volunteers like those from Community House come to the evening civic engagement projects in a group, with fellow members of their afternoon "prevention programs" for "at-risk youth." An important implicit goal of these prevention programs is, as the "van for needy youth" story illustrates, to prevent them from becoming future problems themselves. The relatively affluent, mostly white youth volunteers, in contrast, come partly for the purpose of plumping up their CV's for their future college applications, since they know that college admissions committees will want evidence of an applicant's good citizenship. Volunteers in this category usually come to meetings alone, driving their own cars, rather than as part of a larger group. Their volunteer work has different sponsors—including their families, who do not need to be publicly convinced to spend money (on transportation, food, adult planners' help, for example) to make these young people into good volunteers and good citizens. No one could avoid noticing these inequalities, but talking about them was taboo, resulting in another typical, everyday tension in Empowerment Projects.

Empowerment Projects are supposed to blend different kinds of people and different kinds of organizations—civic association, state agency, nonprofit organization, family, and cultural tradition. Since funding is usually short-term, all of this blending has to happen flexibly, rapidly, and transparently, with documentation for multiple sources, each with a separate form. Organizers celebrate all this melting of stiff boundaries, finding it exciting and empowering. But the blending also produces tensions, as it is often hard to juggle this many different types of relationships all in one place, all at once—as the anger in the awards luncheon shows.

Morally Magnetic Missions, Predictable Puzzles

A tangle of hopes gives Empowerment Projects their "family resemblance."

Like any kind of organization, an Empowerment Project has to make big, beautiful, public promises, both to participants and to outside onlookers. Organizations often do not fulfill their lofty promises, and, as this book will show, when one promise is met, it often conflicts with another of the many promises, yielding unintended consequences.

While these morally magnetic stories do not guide action in any straightforward way, they are not irrelevant, either. They nourish organizers' powerful passions, without which Empowerment Projects would be dry and empty—and much more expensive, since paid organizers often lovingly work for free on weekends and evenings. And even when people do not feel inspired, they still have to do something to appear to carry out an Empowerment Project's missions.

When focusing on promoting civic engagement, people are supposed to associate as independent equals, in an organization whose door should always be open to any newcomers. When hoping for safe, comfortable intimacy, people are supposed to be like family, not with an always-open door, not so flexible that their relationships should easily end when the grant ends. Emily, for example, knows how fast the hair on her kids' arms grows. When aiming for flexibility, innovation, inspiration, and multiculturalism, people are supposed to connect as respectful, curious strangers, open to new adventures, not necessarily comfortably, but "stretching their comfort zones" and "getting out of their boxes"—the farther out, the better.

In principle, organizers approve of all of the many missions, but in everyday practice, fulfilling them sometimes feels wrong—to organizers, youth participants, or both. Despite their feelings and their moral judgments, organizers still have to keep trying. All of the morally magnetic missions become harmful or beneficial, depending on how people manage to blend them with the other missions.

In principle, for example, flexible innovation means "breaking out of boxes" and "promoting diversity," which Snowy Prairie organizers relish. But in the conditions of an Empowerment Program, it also means constant fundraising for short-term funding, which organizers do not relish. Fresh projects get seed money, and old, stale projects are continually trimmed away; everyone has to be eager to start a new project all the time, even when their previous project is just getting off the ground. Youth volunteers have to want to combat homelessness for six months; next, they have to feel inspired to combat racism or promote literacy, depending on the next funder's agenda. Intimacy has to materialize fast, too, because programs can end when temporary funding ends.

In principle, Snowy Prairie organizers hope to help the needy, but saying it directly makes them uncomfortable. They do not want to speak of their work in those terms in front of the youth; to organizers' ears, "help" and "needy" sound disrespectful. They have to speak in those terms, however; as partly government-funded agencies, they have to demonstrate transparency, clearly documenting that they help the needy.

In principle, organizers also consider transparency and innovation to be fine ideals, but as we will see, these hopes often materialize as a nagging pile of forms on organizers' desks, for new grants every six months, each demanding slightly different data. Organizers dutifully supply the data and then, with an ironic lilt to their voices, mock their own comical precision: numbers of youth volunteers, numbers of minority youth volunteers (which means categorizing and labeling them, which organizers loathe to do), number of adult volunteers, tons of food delivered to the needy, numbers of recipients served, hours and minutes of service rendered to the community by the programs' volunteers, number of pregnancies and crimes and addictions successfully prevented.

In principle, organizers hope to promote civic engagement, but sometimes, as we will soon see, even this magnetic mission can be destructive, in practice, when temporary volunteers try to forge instant intimacy with disadvantaged youth. And when it is destructive, organizers still have to try to fulfill this mission, because funders want quality assurance, which means, in these types of organizations, systematic accounting, to demonstrate that these are not stiff, top-down bureaucracies. Empowerment Projects' twisted task, then, is to demonstrate to distant bureaucrats that they are grassroots, intimate, and non-bureaucratic.

This book tells how these morally magnetic missions transfigure when they materialize in the everyday lives of Empowerment Projects.

What Organizations Fit the Category "Empowerment Project"?

Different Empowerment Projects develop different organizational styles, but the family resemblance is clear: An Empowerment Project is an organization that blends most or all of these missions, using a complex mix of government, nonprofit, and private funds to transform whole groups of people's personal feelings and sense of self, to cure them of their social ills by "empowering" them. These projects' goal is to bring people closer to government, to bring people closer to each other, so that the participants can make decisions in a democratic way. The projects aim to make people take responsibility for—or unfairly make them feel responsible for—their own fates.

Included in this newly recognizable, newly prevalent constellation of organizations are "participatory democracy" projects that invite local citizens not just to contribute to local decision-making, but to transform their attachments, their feelings of belonging, responsibility, community, and self.

Included also are many current economic development schemes. In the past ten years, governments, intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, and non-governmental organizations have been aiming to build democracy and better economies, simultaneously, by bringing citizens closer to each other, and bringing citizens closer to government. The idea is that changing "the culture" and "empowering" poor people to run small businesses or cooperatives—in Cairo, or Santiago, or rural Malawi, for some examples—will promote economic development. This approach took off when development experts began noticing that an active economy develops in informal places: the people who gather in the local chorus, or the café, also network with one another—the shoemaker finds himself across the table from the shoelace maker and they make a deal, based on feelings of trust. Empowerment Projects draw upon these informal ties as resources for creating a better economy. These projects' common phrases include: "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime," "asset-based community development," "capacity-building," "participation," and "community."

Without emphasizing the "civic" side as much, some projects bear a family resemblance to Empowerment Projects that is a bit less immediate, but clear, nonetheless. For example, alternative women's prisons with mixed government-nonprofit funding sources encourage prisoners to transform their desires and become "empowered" to eat healthful food, avoid drugs, and get a good education. While the prison project does not aim to cultivate grassroots political participation, it aims to transform intimate feelings of a whole group, and to teach the women to "take responsibility" for social conditions, even those that are beyond their control.

Not included in the galaxy of Empowerment Projects would be social service organizations that receive mixed funding but do not aim to promote personal transformation and empowerment. For example, a preschool that takes care of clients, but in which "fostering community ties within the organization is not part of [the] focus," or a health clinic whose employees harbor no dreams of transforming clients and their communities, would not be in this strangely intimate, civic territory that I am calling the Empowerment Project. A purely corporate-sponsored volunteer project, such as Disney's Showyourcharacter.com, or Georgia-Pacific's "Angels in Action" award—of a year's supply of toilet paper for exceptional youth volunteers—would not be an Empowerment Project; funding comes only from one private source, and is mainly a clever form of public relations. Many American school districts require community service as a condition of high school graduation. While they use Empowerment Talk, student participation in them is not optional, and they usually do not have multiple funding sources, so they are not Empowerment Projects.

Organizers often expect Empowerment Projects to work the same way everywhere, regardless of conditions, as if "where there is a will, there is a way," as if keeping your eyes on the prize will get you there. This book shows how keeping your eyes on the prize can work, in certain conditions, but not just regardless of conditions. To make it work more often, participants would have to ask themselves why they had not gotten to the elusive prize yet. They would have to comb through their past and present conditions, to locate obstacles to the prize. This rarely happens; participants have usually run off to join another project before any serious questioning has begun. This disregard for past and present conditions is a central theme of this book—a predominant color braided through our rug.

Through reading studies of similar projects around the world, I saw that Empowerment Projects routinely face similar crisscrossed requirements, but have different routine, everyday, patterns for meeting them. In most, the hope of being able to start with a blank slate is a recurrent theme. When organizers try to empower people, they often assume that if a program worked well in affluent, egalitarian Denmark, for example, they can export it and make it work in Albania. They do not carefully consider how it matters that the two places have very different degrees of class inequality, different degrees of ethnic diversity, different charitable practices based in religion, family, civic association, and/or government, different etiquette, different levels of literacy, different degrees of access to running water, electricity and the Internet. So, our second step is to notice participants' everyday, routine ways of keeping their organizations going, as if no past or current conditions might get in their way.

An Archeology of American Empowerment Projects

Empowerment Projects missions have strong, long-lived roots in American history. Americans have long treasured "local, close-to-home civic engagement," "soul-changing inspiration," and "innovation and multiculturalism" as sources of good citizenship and good personhood.

Organizers' eagerness to link civic engagement with comfortable, intimate domestic life has a long history. When French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited the youthful America in the 1830s, he was amazed and amused at peppy, optimistic Americans' eagerness to fix local problems without any help from a centralized government. His example is a man who has to decide, with his neighbors, whether a road should be built in front of his own home. While it would be "hard to pull a man out of his own self, to interest him in the fate of the whole state," it is much easier for him to get involved in a local, close-to-home issue, in which, "he discovers, without even knowing it ... a tight link between his private interest and the common interest." In this long-standing American tale, the man's efforts to protect his domestic comfort imperceptibly slide into a broader concern for the whole society. The man's circle of concern expands. It may never have been as effortless as Tocqueville makes it seem, to move from private to public, but the parable is a powerful inspiration for American ideas about volunteering, nonetheless. If we were archeologists, this would be one layer in Empowerment Talk's sedimented riverbed of morally alluring stories.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Volunteersby Nina Eliasoph Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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