Gerry Charlotte Phelps: Chapter 26: Volunteers Who Help the Poor

(This is chapter 26 of "Up and Out," a book condensing my long experience about how to best help poor people. I pledged earlier to get it up online as soon as possible, so it would be available for free to everyone trying to cope with helping the Katrina evacuees.)

(These are not things that need to be done during the first part of this emergency. Rather, this is for the time after that, when Katrina evacuees will be moving from getting immediate emergency assistance to trying to normalize their lives. That is when good programs to help them "up and out" of their situation need to kick in. The following is for that time.)

(For other chapters, look under "Categories" and click on the chapter you want.)

“UP AND OUT: A GUIDE TO TRUE COMPASSION FOR THE POOR"

PART II: MOVING UP AND BREAKING OUT OF POVERTY

Section 3: Getting Into Action

Chapter 26: Volunteers Who Help the Poor

Enough of the right kind of volunteers can make a program aimed at helping the poor. Not having enough volunteers of the right kind can break such a program. Volunteers are truly “make or break” for a charity.

Any charity using volunteers quickly learns some things about them, and about their “care and feeding.”

One is that they are there to work. If they arrive and there is no work for them to do, they are frustrated. If this happens consistently, they will leave and go to another charity better able to utilize their willingness to help.

Another is that volunteers are not employees. They cannot be ordered about like employees. They may not come as regularly or be as punctual as employees. That may be one reason that some choose volunteer work rather than paid employment, so that they can be more flexible.

That means that volunteers usually are not as reliable as employees.

For that reason, there are some tasks requiring consistency or meeting important time lines, which usually should not be given to volunteers. These include filing and bookkeeping, among other things.

Most especially, the leader of the charity should never be a volunteer. That position needs to be paid and to be full time. Since it typically will involve working more than full time, part time pay would be unfair and exploitative. And part time hours just would not work.

Another is that volunteers should be accepted with as much care as used in hiring employees. The charity will be held liable if volunteers do not behave as they should. References and resumes should be given and checked.

Another is that volunteers should be well trained initially, with additional training from time to time. In addition, they need supervision and direction, just as employees would.

For all these reasons, volunteers are not “free.” The cost of volunteers is the cost of the staff needed to utilize them. Paid staff is essential for continually recruiting, training and managing volunteers.

The fact that volunteers cost something comes as quite a shock to many new charities. They may assume that volunteers can do all the work, and that they will need no paid staff. Even inexperienced donors may assume that. They soon learn better.

While not free, volunteers are a great gift to any charity. And nowhere are they more important than in charities that help the poor.

At the San Jose Family Shelter, there were over 500 regular volunteers. Some cooked meals on weekends. Some did many other things.

Some churches sent teams of eight once a month to spend the night. Four each of men and women, they slept in two special rooms. They were awake in two-hour shifts during the night, a man and a woman in each shift. On their shift, they constantly toured the shelter.

The lone night manager on duty was tremendously helped by their presence. Because he or she was not there alone, many problems that might have happened otherwise simply never came up. The presence of these teams of volunteers was important in increasing the safety and security of the shelter.

This was hard volunteer duty. Most came after a full day of work. Some could not sleep under those conditions. Many had two or three tired, bad days out of every month, following their turn at the shelter. Yet they kept coming. They were truly heroic in our minds.

These teams had to replace members so often, however, that it took continual recruiting in churches to keep the teams filled. But it also took continual recruiting to fill all our other volunteer needs as well.

When I started the LIFT Project later because I expected that welfare would not last much longer, it was with the hope that church volunteers would do most of the work. The plan was to prepare churches to help poor people make a successful exit from welfare into work when the time came.

Our initial plans were based on the historical model of how churches helped the poor before welfare became so dominant. We used Marvin Olasky’s history of that period, The Tragedy of American Compassion, as our guide.

In that model, church volunteers in pairs work directly with clients, staying in close contact and making home visits. Only those clients willing to work are assisted financially. Certain conditions set by the volunteers must be met in order to receive aid. Abuse of alcohol or drugs or various bad behaviors result in termination of aid. Attempts are made to draw the client into the life of the church. Funds come from “silent donors” within the church, only as needed.

Since we did not know whether the methods of that time could be transposed directly to the 1990s, however, we set up a pilot project first.

That pilot project lasted eighteen months. Two large, lively churches were involved. About thirty volunteers were trained at each church. They were trained to follow the historical model. There was intensive initial training and follow-up training and meetings. They began working with a great deal of enthusiasm.

After eighteen months, the volunteers were debriefed exhaustively. The results were astonishing.

These volunteers, first of all, were “the best.” They were persistent, highly motivated, dedicated, compassionate, caring, intelligent, and mostly well educated. They included several professionals and successful business people and entrepreneurs. Further, they were conservative, evangelical Christians from the “buckle of the Bible belt.”

But despite all the training, reading, coaching and encouragement, most could not bring themselves to hold their clients accountable! That was in spite of their wholehearted agreement that this was the best way.

In addition, despite repeated warnings that they risked burning out if they did, they repeatedly took on more clients than they were supposed to. And as a result, many of them did burn out. They literally could not say “No.”

After the debriefing, we came to two main conclusions. One was not so surprising. It was that the needy population is different in important ways than it was before welfare.

But what was surprising was that the “giver” population, the middle class, had also changed so much, in ways that made the old way of giving extremely difficult for them. They almost could not confront poor people, make demands of them, set conditions for receiving aid, or withhold aid if those conditions are not met.

Such behavior seemed to them to be unkind and unloving on an emotional level, however much they agreed with the program on an intellectual level, and even though they were really trying very hard.

As a result, the poor people they worked with played most of them like a piano. Their skilled blandishments were more than a match for these new volunteers. And because their clients usually got to do what they wanted to do, rather than what would help them, their success rates ran only about 30%.

What we learned caused us to develop the LIFT Project in a different direction. The program was restructured so that church volunteers were still basic, but had different functions. They still were the friends that came alongside the poor person who hoped to do better. They were the main source of help during a trying period for the client. They also were good role models. They served as “buddies,” mentors and teachers for the clients and their children.

Their church was still an extra “home” for the clients and their children, giving them important social and emotional support, teaching, and responding to their spiritual needs.

Also, the program was restructured to give the volunteers more of the “good guy” tasks that were needed. We used paid staff to do more of the things that seemed to make people feel like the “bad guys.” (Then we raised money to pay for the additional staff.)

We continued to recruit the volunteers in each church, give them intensive initial training, and continuing “hands-on” training during the weekly church team meetings. We were also available between meetings if any needs or issues came up.

The churches paid us to provide staff support for their teams of volunteers. Although our staff person was present for weekly team meetings, the team provided its own leader. The leader, not our staff, led the team.

We also provided a preliminary week of basic “boot camp” training for new clients at our offices. Toward the end of that week the clients had a “make over” and then a job interview. They had to be working before the church team took them on. Then the church team worked with them for up to six months.

Our staff visited the client weekly on the job, talking to the employer about any issues that might have come up, and then to the client. The aim was to keep the client employed and progressing. When a “training” job seemed to have imparted enough training and experience, we would help the client move up or find a better job.

The client would also meet with the team at the team’s church one night a week. There would be a supper for all, then the client’s children would be mentored while the client had three classes. Those would be in Bible, job skills and living skills.

The job skills training would range from ESL or work on the GED to computer skills. The living skills classes would address some of the most common client dysfunctions, such as parenting skills and money management. The Bible classes would supply the motivation, encouragement, strengthening and character building needed to make the difficult change to a new way of living.

All the classes were taught by volunteers. Curriculum for the living skills classes was written by LIFT in collaboration with professionals. Off-the-shelf materials were used for the education and job skills classes. While we suggested various Bible class materials, each church chose materials in line with its own beliefs.

While the clients and children were in their classes, the church team of volunteers had their weekly meeting. Our staff person was always there, but only for advice and counsel. The team of volunteers ran everything about the church-based part of the program.

During this meeting both the staff person and the team members shared with each other what each knew about what was happening with the clients. They developed strategies for dealing with their situations.

That program worked very well. When I stepped down as Executive Director, our success rate was 76%.

The volunteers in our program had frequent assistance from professionals. They were protected from their own inexperience by the advice, experience and training of our staff.

Month by month, the volunteers became more expert. They were not such easy marks as at first. It was no longer so easy to take advantage of them. They had assistance, time and space to learn to say “No” and to hold people accountable.

Two basic models developed out of this program. Volunteers mostly ran both of them, with direction from paid staff. In one model, the church paid us to staff their team. In the other model, after being trained by us, the church hired its own paid staff to work with its volunteers and became independent of LIFT.

Both models worked well. Probably, the model where the church team was initially trained and staffed by us, then eventually became independent of us, hiring its own staff, worked better. It cost more, of course, but it also could grow larger more easily. The church had to be committed to that, and to be willing and able to pay the higher cost.

We had expected that it would take the volunteers we trained about five years to become “con-wise.” That is about how long it takes in prison. There, the training is more intense, because the conning never ends. Furthermore, some of the best con artists in the world help with the training!

Actually, however, our church volunteers were pretty good at that after only about two years. They must have been doing something right!

The lesson was clear. The volunteers of today are not like the volunteers of an earlier time. Still, they can succeed very well in helping the poor to move up. But it takes a program carefully crafted to enable them to do that.

That program must have experienced and highly motivated paid staff to supply continuing training, counsel, and direction.

In addition, adequate organizational and staff support for the program are essential. And most basic of all, there must be the funding needed to pay for all that.