Volunteerism Conference Buoys Spirits

As a presidential conference on volunteering closed Tuesday in Philadelphia, corporate participants and grass-roots activists headed home filled with optimism that the high-profile event will attract new recruits and additional funds to their causes.

The participants, who spent three days sharing ideas and plotting strategy to expand services for children, predicted that the call to arms sounded by President Clinton and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell will heighten public sensitivity to the crises facing 15 million at-risk youth.

At the same time, they expressed concern that the problems facing children will only get worse because of the potentially overwhelming impact of welfare changes. Hence, even a new wave of volunteering may not be enough to improve the lives of a significant number of disadvantaged children.

“I think there will be more volunteers,” said Donna Bojarsky, a participant in the three-day event who co-chairs L.A. Works, an organization that dispatches volunteers to help disadvantaged youth. “But considering the impending crisis expected from welfare reform and government cutbacks, volunteerism can help. But the needs will be greater than the volunteer sector can handle.”

Powell, general chairman of the event--the President’s Summit for America’s Future--told those attending not to be deterred by skeptics. “We’re going to glue this together and make reality” out of the hundreds of pledges that corporations and charity groups made to improve the lives of at least 2 million disadvantaged children by 2000, he said.

But advocates for the poor warned that, while volunteers may be able to fill much of the void in small towns and suburbs, the vacuum is likely to be far too great in Los Angeles and other large cities, with huge areas of highly concentrated poverty.

“Los Angeles as a city and a county will probably have more adverse effects from moving people from welfare to work than anywhere else,” said Russel Sakaguchi, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Arco Foundation, who also attended.

The new welfare laws curtail eligibility for public assistance and require poor women to work outside the home.

Sakaguchi was most interested in researching how best to provide at-risk young people with marketable skills.

During the meetings, city and state delegations developed strategies for implementing the summit’s lofty goals and many pledged to stage their own volunteer conferences.

Steve Culbertson, the CEO of Youth Service America, an alliance of community and national service groups from across the country, said he believes that the success of the conference will come from refocusing current volunteer efforts to young people with the greatest needs.

For instance, the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish Retired Service Team, which has generally pursued patchwork community service projects, has made a commitment to funnel its resources--alumni in 200 clubs across the country--to helping 153,000 young people, especially those in low-income neighborhoods.

“It has caused those in the field to rethink the way we volunteer and the focus of our volunteer effort,” Culbertson said. “We have lots of people volunteering. . . . We just have to focus them on the target market.”

Christopher Townsend, who directs the Los Angeles-based Taco Bell Foundation, the fast-food giant’s charity arm, said that the summit convinced more corporations of something his company has long believed: Serving your community is good business.

His company plans to donate $15 million to Boys and Girls Clubs of America over the next five years, Townsend said.

But community activists will face daunting obstacles--including the divides of race, income and community--that could continue to separate volunteers from those who most need their help.

Scholars were skeptical that the conference would change volunteering patterns. Most people tend to volunteer in their own neighborhoods and with people of their own racial and socioeconomic group.

A recent poll conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center showed that human services-related work ranked sixth among volunteer preferences.

Princeton University Professor Julian Wolpert warned that volunteers are “most effective in their own communities rather than reaching across communities.”

Wolpert said that he worries about an influx of new, and thus not solidly committed, volunteers coming into poor communities at precisely the time when the needs of these communities--coping with sweeping changes in federal aid programs--are most likely to seem overwhelming.

“For problems that are sustained and difficult, where it takes time to see results, it’s hard to expect volunteers will stay with it,” he said.