Related articles and links |  1 of 3

If the 1970s was the "me decade" and the 1980s the "decade of greed," some analysts think the 1990s is emerging as the "we decade." After spells of looking inward, then grabbing as big a slice of the pie as possible, Americans are rediscovering meaning in togetherness and giving to those in need.

That's wishful thinking, perhaps, but it is the hope of the organizers of the Presidents' Summit for America's Future. The April summit's goal was to mobilize 2 million volunteers by the year 2000 to help "at risk" children and to enlist the support of corporate America. The volunteers are to serve as mentors and models to children and youth, ensuring their safety and health, giving them the tools to succeed through education, and encouraging them to serve in their own communities.

The crisis among America's youth is acute: According to one report, 14.7 million American children (21 percent) lived in poverty in 1995, 2.1 million more than in 1989. Almost 10 million children (one in seven) have no health insurance, 3 million are abused every year, and more than a half-million teens belong to gangs. Teen violence, suicides, and pregnancy are all on the increase.

With such daunting needs, it is strange that the faith community was given a seat at the back of the bus en route to the volunteer summit, especially since more than half of American volunteers credit faith as their motive. Religious leaders were not at first included in planning the event, and when they were invited to join, the religious leaders involved felt marginalized by the political and business interests already engaged.

The potential for volunteering should not be overlooked. For example, an African-American young adult testified recently in my church that he was mentored by one of our members in his inner-city Sunday-school class when he was a child. He has accomplished more in life than he could have imagined otherwise, he said, just because someone saw potential in him that his environment did not allow him to see.

However, we should not assume that massive volunteerism can solve all our social ills (any more than big government has done). Mentoring programs can ameliorate the problems of children growing up in single-parent families, but it does not guarantee stable homes. Corporations can donate people and financial resources to charitable causes, but that does not create more jobs. Volunteerism cannot solve the systemic problems in public education or make health care accessible to all the poor—though volunteers in both areas make valuable contributions. Those goals demand social policies that make financial and human resources available to all, as well as nurturing homes and local communities that cultivate environments hospitable to learning and good health.

Volunteer America
Volunteerism and voluntary associations form a "hidden" component in American history, according to American historian Daniel Boorstin. Out of necessity, colonial and frontier Americans formed associations to do for each other what they couldn't do alone. In signing the Mayflower compact, the pilgrims pledged "to all care of each others good and of the whole by everyone and so mutually." From the first, we were a nation of givers and joiners.

In the 1830s, the French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the new American republic was marked by a spirit of generosity and a practice of voluntary association. A century and a half after Tocqueville, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow has documented that volunteerism is alive and well in America, but that it has always paradoxically existed alongside an oftimes stronger impulse toward personal freedom and self-reliance.

next page... |  1 of 3

June 16 1997, Vol. 41, No. 7