An inside look at how community service organizations really work
Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty,
and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from
nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these
programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers
an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside
youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy
reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while
volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that
empowerment programs aim to teach.
With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple
sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy,
governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served
by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless
inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two
groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She
looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school
programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to
youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots
support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by
paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic
rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that
volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment
projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning,
and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from
volunteers.
Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations,
Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot
achieve, and how to make them more effective.
