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BORED BY BUSH BAMBOOZLES? Subscribe to "Inside Bush Watch" and you'll get the stuff we don't report at "Bush Watch." Breaking news and broken promises. Quotes, jokes, blokes, and tokes. For you? Free. Such a deal! (Click on "JoinList") Voodoo Volunteerism: The Facts Speak Louder Than Bush's Words. A year ago in Indianapolis George w. Bush gave a speech which served as his battle-cry for a new kind of social welfare system, one based on volunteerism. But the facts about volunteerism contradict the premises of his speech. Bush told his audience, "In every instance where my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based organizations, charities and community groups that have shown their ability to save and change lives. We will make a determined attack on need, by promoting the compassionate acts of others. We will rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart by heart." However, the facts recently presented by Sara Mosle in NYT suggest that Bush's plan will fail in the face of reality because fewer people take the time to volunteer, those who do devote fewer hours to it, and the number of requests for volunteers is rapidly growing. Further, those who volunteer tend to live in upscale neighborhoods and remain there to do their volunteer work, while those who need it live in poorer neighborhoods where fewer have the time to volunteer. This will not change as the poor are given less government support. In his speech Bush notes that the value of volunteers is that "real change in our culture comes from the bottom up, not the top down. It gathers the momentum of a million committed hearts." Yet, the lack of volunteers is forcing established groups to pay their volunteers. Even in Bush's Texas Meals on Wheels has been forced to hire 30 percent of its work force. Should we assume that such paid workers are more committed to their tasks than government welfare workers? As welfare programs such as Bush's in Texas are cut to the bone, there's no evidence that he is filtering more money into non-governmental care groups. In fact, it has been estimated that for every three dollars of welfare that have been taken out of the governmental budget, one dollar finds it way into the coffers of non-profit volunteer institutions. While Bush included faith-based institutions in his speech, saying he will help to change federal laws to allow religious groups to provide their religious teachings with their volunteerism, many such groups are leery of the proposal. "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.' At what point, one wonders, will religious institutions throughout the world be taking up collections to send to churches in the United States to spread their religious teachings through Bush welfare reforms? --Politex, 7/9 excerpts from "The Vanity of Volunteerism" By SARA MOSLE, NYT MAGAZINE, July 2, 2000 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." ... 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. As someone who once worked in the New York public school system, I am not inured to the problems of government bureaucracy. I have not forgotten the asbestos crisis (which sealed my own classroom), the idiocy of the custodians' contract, the mind-numbing hours I spent at the Board of Education trying to get someone, anyone, to answer a straightforward question about licensing. But what's so odd about the current volunteer movement is how the broad claims often made on its behalf run counter to the on-the-ground testimony of those, like Bruant, who actually do the hard work of ministering to the poor. Compared with someone like her, of course, I am pathetic. Still, in the words of a protester's placard at the volunteer summit, I've "volunteered enough to know volunteering isn't enough." As a substitute for the social safety net, I am as inefficient, indifferent and arbitrary as any government program. The problem isn't with volunteering, but with what we're asking it to do.... 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 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."... 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." As it stands, the government isn't even doing what it said it would. One reason that hunger and homelessness are on the rise is that many states, including New York, have prevented even the deserving working poor from receiving basic benefits, like health care and food stamps, to which they are legally entitled. Nationwide, a million people have lost Medicaid benefits and are now uninsured. As a result, many working families are worse off financially than they were under the old system. Minnesota, by contrast, has offered ample assistance -- cash allowances to supplement income, job training, more opportunities for health and child care -- in addition to requiring that welfare recipients work. The approach hasn't been cheap, but the results, according to a widely praised study released in June, have been remarkable: not only have poverty and homelessness declined but the marriage rate has also risen, domestic abuse is down, truancy rates have fallen and children are doing better in school. The best way to help kids, in short, is not to recruit strangers to take the place of parents, but to help those -- their families and teachers -- who are already in the best position to help them.... "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." for previous bush headlines, go to...