Givers : In Growing Numbers, County Residents Are Volunteering Their Time to Help Others

By PATRICK MOTT

Aug. 31, 1989 12 AM PT

Patrick Mott is a regular contributor to Orange County Life.

In the not-so-distant past, volunteerism meant being a den mother.

It meant manning the booth at the church bake sale for an hour on Sunday, or coaching Little League or helping out with the costumes for the school Christmas play.

It was something done by people with a lot of time on their hands, something to fill an otherwise uneventful day, a substitute for afternoon soap operas. And it was something that, for the most part, was not done by people sprinting down the career track.

How, then, to explain Don Simmons, a 33-year-old college professor from Huntington Beach who has probably done--and is doing--more volunteer work than Gandhi? Or Todd McKnight of Corona del Mar, at age 23 the head of his own real estate development firm, who coaches youth soccer, serves as a Big Brother and occupies a spot on the board of his local Girls Club? Or Kathy Scott of Placentia, a victim of a rare, stroke-like disease who, as a result, cannot drive, but regularly takes the bus to Santa Ana to work with elderly hospital patients?

The answer, in part, is that the children of the “Me Generation” have begun to develop a stronger social conscience. And volunteering, in Orange County and throughout the country, has entered a new day. More people than ever before--of nearly all ages and from nearly all social and business strata--are working somewhere, at some time, for free. They are staffing day-care centers, counseling pregnant teens, teaching reading to adults, participating in programs at senior centers, drug treatment facilities and, yes, Scouting and Little League.

Last year, about 15,000 of them--an increase of approximately 25% over 1987--were placed in volunteer positions in an estimated 600 nonprofit social, charitable and arts organizations around the county through the Volunteer Center of Orange County, a clearinghouse for volunteer workers.

“We’re really getting a lot more visibility these days,” said Carol Stone, executive director of the center. “And people have always wanted to volunteer. They don’t want to sit by the boob tube. They want to reach out and help others. It’s part of human nature, but sometimes they just didn’t know how to go about it.

“Sociologists would probably say we’re moving back to a different place from the ‘Me Generation,’ into a period when we want to help one another. A lot of young people were raised in the ‘70s to take the money jobs, but now they’re finding that other things are more important: their family, their community, making sure everybody has a decent life.”

The catalyst, Stone said, was “more publicity, both nationally and locally, about being involved. People are hearing about it and thinking about it more--President Bush and his ‘thousand points of light,’ opportunity columns in newspapers. And CEOs are encouraging people in their businesses to volunteer. There’s just a lot more visibility.”

And, Stone said, the realization has set in, after the social services cutbacks of the Reagan years, that needed jobs will not be done unless by volunteers. Still, she added, such needs alone have not been the ultimate spur to the new wave of volunteering.

“We’ve learned that volunteers can really enhance an organization that has had its financial resources cut,” Stone said. “That’s a large part of the reason (more people are volunteering), but it’s not the only reason. If society were not ready to do this kind of thing, I don’t think people would be doing it. People can do miracles that we once thought only money could do. That’s very exciting.”

And, it appears, volunteering begets volunteering. Many people, like Todd McKnight, find themselves drawn to multiple volunteer jobs.

“The three organizations I’m with are entirely different in what I give and in what I get back from them,” said McKnight, who moved to Corona del Mar from Dallas three years ago. “I was really concerned about the time commitment, but I find that I really look forward to all three activities. The hours do accumulate, but I don’t look at them as taking hours out of my day. They return much more.”

Volunteering, for Kathy Scott, grew out of frustration with dealing with the effects of her disease as well as what she said was the need to be useful. A former telephone operator service representative, Scott was struck by a stroke-like brain condition called arterial venous malformation in 1969. It left her paralyzed on one side of her body and severely limited her speech.

Today, after recovering nearly all of her speech and mobility through rehabilitation, she regularly works with patients at Western Medical Center/Bartlett, an acute and rehabilitative care facility for the elderly in Santa Ana.

“I was bored,” she said. “I called two different hospitals and told them I’d like to be a volunteer, but they said no, they had enough. Then I took the bus over here (to Western Med/Bartlett) and saw the handicapped people and in five minutes I said yes, I wanted to work here.”

Particularly gratifying for Scott is the work with stroke victims.

“Each one is different, and I know what it’s like, how frustrating it can be. Sometimes I feel frustrated too, but then I think that I need these people, the loving and caring. If you have 100 people and you get to just one, that’s all you want.”

It is a sentiment that is true for most volunteers, Stone said. For whatever reason people embrace volunteerism--a need to feel useful, a growing sense of social responsibility, the notion that it might be fun--the rewards are inevitably great.

“With the fulfillment and satisfaction it gives me, it’s hard to imagine my life without doing it all,” said Don Simmons, a professor of marketing at Biola University in La Mirada. “It is my outside life. My friends are people I work with in a volunteer capacity. It’s a social outlet as well as having the service element. It’s the relationships you form. That’s the kind of reward that goes way past any certificate or plaque you might get.”

Simmons began doing volunteer work in high school and never stopped. He tutored at children’s homes through his college undergraduate years, did foster parent recruitment and directed camps for abused children in graduate school and today serves on two Volunteer Center boards, is a volunteer fund-raiser for the AIDS Services Foundation based in Costa Mesa and directs a student volunteerism group at his college.

“It’s not as hard to become a volunteer now,” he said. “You don’t have to search and search to find a place to serve. It’s not just the little old ladies anymore. People who are pursuing their MBAs are also saying, ‘What is there in the community that I can get involved in?’

“The community responsibility is part of being an adult. And I can’t teach that with any integrity without going out and doing it myself.”

It’s not just adults who are doing the volunteering, however. People in their teen-age years--and younger--are filling more and more volunteer jobs. The Volunteer Center reported that 300 high school youths were recruited in the Santa Ana area for volunteer jobs in 1987, 672 in 1988. By July of this year, 729 had been placed.

Chamroun Ong, 15, a recent Cambodian immigrant who lives in Santa Ana, had not been in the United States a month before she was placed--through the Volunteer Center--in a day-care job with the Pride Development Council in Santa Ana. There she supervises up to 25 children, gaining experience, she said, to be a teacher.

The community service bug bit 9-year-old Tiffaney Schirling of San Clemente on a recent visit to the Adult Day Health Center in that city, where she spent an afternoon helping elderly center patients weave ojos de Dios-- Mexican Christmas ornaments.

“They’re really nice people,” she said. “A lot nicer than some teen-agers. I’m going to start coming here and bringing pens and making bookmarks.”

Such a reaction isn’t unusual, said Dee Leif, a San Clemente resident who accompanied Schirling and several other girls from the local Boys and Girls Club to the center for the afternoon. She has seen it happen many times. A member of the board of directors of the South Orange County Community Services Council--an umbrella volunteer organization with 130 member agencies--Leif began doing volunteer work in the early 1940s and has remained involved ever since, working with low-income families and teaching English and literacy classes. She started the South Coast Literacy Council and was one of the prime movers behind the South Orange County Community Services Council.

“What you do when you start training a volunteer or working with a new one is to go back and say, ‘What do you want to do with your life? What kind of an impact do you want to make on the world?’ she said. “It’s a question of do we just play all through our lives or do we contribute something valuable? Watching people grow in their proficiency and better their jobs and do a better job of raising their families, that makes it the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. I think society expects us to do our share.”

So, increasingly, do corporations. Once something of a rarity, corporate volunteerism has gained a firm foothold in Orange County as more and more companies are discovering the value of community service.

“People are such a wonderful resource, and there is a realization that tapping that resource is a way for corporations to stretch their contribution dollars and personalize their involvement in the community,” said Suzanne Esber, director of community affairs for Fluor Corp. Fluor has had a corporate volunteer program--called a community involvement team--since 1976, Esber said. Through the team, employees, retirees and friends and family of employees participate in service projects, such as walks for the March of Dimes or work with the developmentally disabled.

While Fluor’s community involvement team is an in-house effort (other corporations have similar programs), employees from many Orange County corporations participate in the Combined Corporate Project, a multicompany volunteer effort that each year focuses on a specific goal.

The CCP has helped with the renovation of the Santa Ana Zoo, the Bright Lights Center (a community center for inner-city families in Santa Ana) and the Discovery Museum of Orange County. About 650 people representing 37 companies participated in this year’s project, making improvements at the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in Fullerton.

“We’re going to begin to see, with the current (presidential) administration, with the emphasis on the ‘thousand points of light,’ that there’s going to be continued emphasis on everyone’s involvement, not just the corporations,” Esber said. “Everybody’s going to be asking what they can do.”

Indeed, the “traditional” volunteer is becoming harder to find, Stone said.

“We are seeing people volunteering today who are sharing such high-powered skills,” she said. “Computer people are coming in and writing programs specific for nonprofit organizations, financial people are revamping financial reporting systems for nonprofit. They’re not the traditional volunteers we knew 10 years ago.”

Today’s volunteer jobs, McKnight said, “don’t consist of making phone calls and stuffing envelopes at night. They used to be jobs that were done by housewives while the kids were at school. Now, on so many nonprofit boards, there are more professionals, and they’re there because they’re committed to the cause.”

For businessmen like McKnight, who have become successful after a period of paying their professional dues, the time has arrived when they now feel obliged to pay their social debt as well.

“I think the ‘Me Generation’ is disappearing,” he said. “Businesswise, I’ve done pretty well, but I feel like there’s more to life than making money. You go home at the end of the day and start asking yourself, ‘What am I doing for other people? Everybody’s giving me all these great things, but what am I doing for them?’

“It’s one of those deals where people say they’ll volunteer tomorrow and then tomorrow comes and they say they’ll do it the day after that and the day after that. But there’s only one Aug. 25, 1989. If you don’t take that day and give something back, it’s gone forever.”

WHERE TO VOLUNTEER IN ORANGE COUNTY

Here is a sampling of the many agencies in Orange County that accept volunteer help or that refer volunteers to other organizations:

* Volunteer Center of Orange County Central/South, Santa Ana--(714) 953-5757.

* South Orange County Community Services Council, San Clemente--(714) 364-6636 or 492-1300.

* Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, Orange--(714) 261-3608.

* Hospice-Martin Luther Hospital, Anaheim--(714) 491-5456.

* CASA Task Force (drug, alcohol education programs), Orange--(714) 550-9466.

* Sunshine Outreach (crop gleaning for low-income individuals), Laguna Niguel--(714) 831-6199.

* Vietnamese Community of Orange County, Santa Ana--(714) 775-2637 or 775-2638.

* Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled, Anaheim--(714) 772-8285.

* Beach Cities Braille Guild Inc., Huntington Beach--(714) 536-9666.

* March of Dimes, Costa Mesa--(714) 631-8700.