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Making Volunteers
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Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology
Series Editors:
Paul J. DiMaggio, Michèle Lamont, Robert J. Wuthnow,
Viviana A. Zelizer
A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book
Eliasoph.indb iiEliasoph.indb ii 1/5/2011 10:47:27 AM1/5/2011 10:47:27 AM
Making Volunteers
civic life after welfare’s end
Nina Eliasoph
princeton university press • princeton and oxford
Eliasoph.indb iiiEliasoph.indb iii 1/5/2011 10:47:27 AM1/5/2011 10:47:27 AM
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eliasoph, Nina.
Making volunteers : civic life after welfare’s end / Nina Eliasoph.
p. cm. — (Princeton studies in cultural sociology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14709-3 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Voluntarism—United States—Case
studies. 2. Young volunteers in community development—United States—Case studies.
3. Volunteer workers in community development—United States—Case studies.
4. Community development—United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HN90.V64E425 2011
361.0068⬘3—dc22 2010048925
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Empower Yourself ix
chapter 1:
How to Learn Something in an Empowerment Project 1
part one: Cultivating Open Civic Equality
chapter 2:
Participating under Unequal Auspices 17
chapter 3:
“The Spirit that Moves Inside You”: Puzzles of Using
Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer’s Problems 48
chapter 4:
Temporal Leapfrog: Puzzles of Timing 55
chapter 5:
Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics,
Blank “Reflections” 87
part two: Cultivating Intimate Comfort and Safety
chapter 6:
Harmless and Destructive Plug-in Volunteers 117
chapter 7:
Paid Organizers Creating Temporally Finite, Intimate,
Family-like Attachments 146
chapter 8:
Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort 152
chapter 9:
Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: Getting
People Out of Their “Clumps” 165
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vi • Contents
part three: Celebrating Our Diverse, Multicultural
Community
chapter 10:
“Getting Out of Your Box” versus “Preserving a Culture”:
Two Opposed Ways of “Appreciating Cultural Diversity” 183
chapter 11:
Tell Us about Your Culture: What Participants Count as
“Culture” 190
chapter 12:
Celebrating . . . Empowerment Projects! 206
conclusion:
Finding Patterns in the “Open and Undefined” Organization 231
appendix 1:
On Justification 259
appendix 2:
Methods of Taking Field Notes and Making Them Tell a Story 261
Notes 265
References 281
Index 303
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Acknowledgments
L , this one is the fruit of many minds. Ilana
Gershon, Jack Katz, and Laurent Thévenot each combed through many
chapters, line-by-line; I am grateful to each of them for convincing me to
make big changes, however ornery I may have been at the time. Many
generous and thoughtful people read and gave helpful comments and
critiques on eld notes, multiple drafts, or papers that I wrote while puz-
zling my way through the book, including Daniel Cefaï, Paul Dekker,
Mike Edwards, Andreas Glaeser, Lynne Haney, Ron Jacobs, Michèle
Lamont, Caroline Lee, Patricia Paperman, Isaac Reed, Michael Schudson,
Tommaso Vitale, Ed Walker, and Robert Wuthnow.
Faculty and staff at the University of Wisconsin and the University of
Southern California have provided friendly and intellectually stimulating
homes. A year at Princeton shifted my agenda when I discovered the lit-
erature on the nonpro t sector, thanks in part to Stanley Katz. The Uni-
versity of Wisconsin conducted a brave experiment in adjusting the
“work-family balance,” by giving me a half-time, tenure-track position.
To my mind, the experiment was a great success, and a blessing that I
hope other academic parents get a chance to taste.
I have been lucky to have so many smart undergraduate and graduate
students who make sure that my mind stays on its toes. One of the won-
derful things about students is that they can become colleagues. I hope
that Julian Charles, Jade Lo, Eeva Luhtakallio, and I continue to walk (or
bike) the same path together for a long time.
Speaking of walking, I have traded stories about nonpro ts, volunteer-
ing, and Empowerment Projects, while strolling at night to listen to crick-
ets, sipping tea, savoring long meals, or exploring strange neighborhoods,
with many beloved friends and colleagues: Hanan A , Jeffrey Alexander,
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Bob Bellah, Marc Breviglieri, Marion Carrel, Ann
Crigler, Marcy Darnovsky, Sophie Duchesne, Mitch Duneier, Merija
Eisen, Myra Marx Ferree, Shelly Freiberger, Lew Friedland, Tom Good-
night, Neil Gross, Camille Hamidi, Arlie Hochschild, Leslie Hustinx,
Dway May Ju, Ann Mische, Mary Nicholas, Jane Pilivian, Marion Smiley,
Ann Swidler, Iddo Tavory, Carole Viaud-Gayet, Erik Wright, and Philip
Ziegler.
While doing the research and writing, I gave several talks, many based
on my raw eldnotes before I had discovered what they meant. At North-
western, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Yale, Radcliffe, the University of
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viii • Acknowledgments
Chicago, Vanderbilt, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, the
Institut d’études politiques, the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the
Université de Lyon, the Université de Lille, and Helsinki University, fellow
scholars helped me gure out what all my funny and sad stories meant.
Eric Schwartz, at Princeton University Press, has been a wonderful edi-
tor of the sort that is reputed no longer to exist: wise, subtle, kind, and
often able to discern and organize my thoughts more clearly than I have—
a true master of his craft.
My children Olivia and Leo have provided endless entertainment, and
have nobly argued with me in my most cynical moments, to show me,
based on their own experience, how volunteers can change people’s lives.
Nobody slept a lot, which is as it should be, because Nobody is our cat.
My loyal husband, colleague, and lifetime collaborator, Paul Lichterman,
and I have been together for twenty- ve years now. Together, we have
created articles, courses, reading groups, gardens, children, and a cozy
home for enjoying each other’s love, insight, and care. I am more thankful
for him than words can express here.
I greatly appreciate the many people who allowed me to observe, and
participate in, their gatherings. This book is dedicated to the “Emily’s” of
the world—the sensitive and energetic youth workers portrayed in this
book who work so valiantly in such dif cult circumstances to make peo-
ple’s lives better, and often succeed. I hope this book helps make it easier
for them to ful ll their missions.
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Introduction: Empower Yourself!
C “serve your community” come at us from every direc-
tion lately. From the heights of national government to the lowly of ces
of nonpro ts,1 from universities to elementary schools, from breakfast
cereal companies to toilet paper companies,2 we hear summons to volun-
teer, to participate, to build grassroots, multicultural community, and to
become empowered. In everyday practice, these alluring ideas materialize
in surprising ways, sometimes with consequences that are nearly the op-
posite of anyone’s intentions.
Youth programs are ideal places to witness those transformations. A
program like Community House,3 for example, is a free after-school and
summer program for low-income, mostly minority youth in Snowy Prai-
rie, a mid-sized city in the American Midwest. One day, Community
House won an award from the local Rotary Club—money to help buy a
minivan. The group was told that it won the award for having done “ser-
vice to the community,” and this made sense, since members had helped
organize litter cleanups, food drives, and other events. Everyone was de-
lighted with how well the award t with the mission of empowering un-
derprivileged youth. But when they got to the awards luncheon, the
proud Community House youth volunteers read, on the list of award re-
cipients: “Community House: Van to transport needy youth.” Emily,
Community House’s adult organizer, told me, “If I’d have known [the list
was gonna say that], I wouldn’t have brought my kids at all. I wish they
had not seen that. I don’t pity them! If I did, I’d spit on them. You can’t
pity people.” Organizers and youth would often grow furious when such
messages about statistics and crime were said within earshot of youth
volunteers. Nonetheless, this kind of mistake was frequent and predict-
able in these organizations.
It made sense that these mistakes were common. Calling the youth
“volunteers” made sense because it was a way of highlighting their civic
spirit and independence. Calling the youth “needy” made sense too, even
though it seemed insulting to point out their dependence at the luncheon.4
It made sense because Community House’s funding came from govern-
ment, nonpro ts, and private donors, who needed evidence that the funds
were being spent wisely. After all, Community House could not use chari-
table contributions, or taxpayers’ money, to buy “a van to transport re-
ally rich youth,” or “youth who are perfectly ne.” To deserve the van,
these youth had to be needy. Crisscrossed moral inspirations—these and
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x • Introduction
others as well—collided at the awards luncheon. When the organizations’
missions tangled up like this, it was not just a random quirk. Crisscrossed
promises justi ed these programs’ very existence.
Programs like Community House have a veritable mantra, calling for
engagement that is:
• Civic, participatory, open and inclusive, egalitarian, voluntary
• Innovative, multicultural, diverse, aimed at getting you to “break
out of your box” and “stretch your comfort zone,” and at promot-
ing leadership, choices, and options
• Inspiring, in the here-and-now, not dwelling on the past
• Community-based, local, grassroots, comfortable, personalized,
natural
• Transparent, unbureaucratic, not reliant on distant experts, not
abstract, not hierarchical, not managed or controlled from the
top down
Preface each of these words with the word “potential”: potentially civic,
potentially innovative, potentially comfortable, and so on. As we will see,
“potential” is the most important “keyword”5 that makes it all run.
This refrain is what I will call Empowerment Talk. It is a theme, and
variations on it are heard around the world, wherever of cials try to cul-
tivate grassroots community empowerment, from the top down. Any
American who has volunteered lately has heard it.
With its blend of government, business, volunteer, and nonpro t sup-
port, and its mantra of empowerment, Community House is typical of a
newly prevalent type of organization that we can call the Empowerment
Project. An Empowerment Project is an organization that has short-term,
exible funding from a “hybrid”6 of private, public, and/or nonpro t
sources, and that uses Empowerment Talk. Not all organizations that use
Empowerment Talk are Empowerment Projects—many businesses and
schools use it, too.7 Conversely, not all organizations that have hybrid
sponsorships use Empowerment Talk.
Empowerment Projects have many morally magnetic missions. By
“morally magnetic,” I mean that most Americans, myself included, nd
them to be simply and almost irresistibly good, for reasons that we as-
sume don’t need much further explanation. One set of puzzles, however,
is that these morally magnetic missions sometimes undermine each other.
Many projects’ short-term funding adds to the dif culties of blending the
hopeful missions. But since Empowerment Projects have to be innovative
and exible, their funding is very often short-term. Since time is short,
fundraising is almost constant, success has to come fast, and document-
ing and publicizing every success has to be nearly constant.
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Empower Yourself • xi
When we say “voluntary association” or “social service agency,” what
we often have in mind is this kind of semi-voluntary, semi-government,
semi-nonpro t, exible, transparent, short-term organization whose re-
frain is Empowerment Talk. More and more common since the 1970s,
both in the United States and around the world,8 organizations like these
are transforming volunteer work and government, simultaneously. Though
they are not entirely new in the United States, they are newly prevalent
here. Compared to Europe, Canada, and other wealthy nations, however,
the U.S. government provides only the most minimal services, if any at
all, for the elderly, children, college students, the poor, the mentally ill, the
physically ill, and the disabled. The United States has never had “big gov-
ernment,” and still does not. Part of the American government has always
included a thin, decentralized web of nonpro t and for-pro t organiza-
tions, not just one big central state. Now, however, this hybrid form of
government has seized policy makers’ imaginations both within the
United States and around the world, fueling a dramatic, exponential,
global rise of Empowerment Projects.9 Projects like Snowy Prairie’s youth
programs are typical embodiments of “neo-liberal” governance.10
What can we expect from this increasingly prevalent kind of semi-
civic life? Missteps like those in the story about the van for needy youth,
for example, were not mistakes, as I had thought the rst ten times
I heard them. Rather, they reveal one of the typical “patterns in the
rug” that I recognized only after hearing them over and over again. By
getting inside the programs and patiently waiting for de nite patterns
like these to appear, we will see how this newly prevalent kind of civic
life is being born.
Predictable Methods of Putting the Puzzle Together: Organizational Style
Participants kept going without becoming impossibly tangled up in the
crisscrossed missions. How? The “van for needy youth” scenario shows
tensions and, by default, shows typical ways of easing them: Emily’s teens
got the van because they were independent civic volunteers. They got it
also because they were needy, not yet independent. For Emily, who adored
these teens, they were also neither independent nor dependent, but at-
tached, almost part of her. In the youth programs, the most polite method
of unknotting these tensions, between treating the young people as “ac-
tive volunteers,” as “needy wards,” and as “intimate family members,”
would have been to avoid mentioning the volunteers’ neediness at the
awards luncheon. This was a very rm bit of etiquette, but the mistake
was hard to avoid, since it was hard to keep all the missions spatially
separate from one another.
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xii • Introduction
Notice: the teens already knew they were poor. Everyone knew it; the
teens themselves said so in other situations. So did Emily. The problem
was not that they had just learned something new and sad about them-
selves. The offense was in the saying it, aloud, here in front of the youth
volunteers and adults, here at this luncheon.11
Having multiple, often contradictory missions is not at all unique to
Empowerment Projects—most organizations do. In organizations that
make their missions explicit (as opposed to friendships or families, for
example, that do not have by-laws and missions statements), competent
actors have to know how and when to invoke which mission, how to
keep them separate, or blend them, or ignore them—when and how to do
something about the missions—at least enough to keep the organization
going, with members and onlookers sharing general ideas about how to
act appropriately and what to expect next.
To become competent participants, people got a feel for their organiza-
tions’ unspoken etiquette: to learn not to call the young people needy
here, in this place, but to call them needy there, in that other place; to call
them needy on this grant application, but not in this thank-you speech; to
this person, not that person. They had to learn how to feel and express
bonds between one another, and how to talk about these bonds differ-
ently in different places within the organization. They had to learn how
to imagine their organization on a wider social map, and how to talk
about this map differently in different places within the organization.
When people got a feel for all of these “how’s,” they mastered what I call
an organizational style, learning:
who could say or do what, how, to which audience, and with what
kinds of props or equipment.12
Participants in any ongoing organization need an intuitive feel for the
ground on which they are walking together, implicitly answering, “What
are we doing here together here, now? Who, if anyone, is watching this
activity?” and “What is appropriate to say here versus there?” What do
we intuitively feel this relationship to be a ‘case of’ at this moment?13
All of this is the “organizational style.” People learn patterned ways of
harmonizing predictable discords between an organization’s varied mis-
sions, just as a listener can recognize, within the rst few notes, that John
Coltrane’s harsh, squeaky rendition of “My Favorite Things” is not the
same as Julie Andrews’ honey-smooth version in The Sound of Music.
The listener cannot guess every single move in advance, but can hear
continuity in style—in the different musicians’ typical methods of con-
necting the notes. Snowy Programs had one typical style of connecting
the notes; the concluding chapter will show that while Snowy Prairie or-
ganizers’ method of connecting the notes was probably common, other
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Empower Yourself • xiii
styles are possible, too. However, people’s methods of connecting the
notes are not in nite, not simply random improvisations; if they were,
each participant would have to relearn how to participate afresh, from
scratch, upon entry into each new program. Finding the pattern in the rug
means nding participants’ typical methods of varying the themes.
Finding Youth Programs: Where I Went and What I Did
I spent almost ve years in Snowy Prairie’s youth programs, beginning
with the rst event of a city-sponsored youth volunteer program. I was
excited. The event was a somber ceremony, beneath an American ag on
a windy, freezing hillside, to commemorate a terrible, nationally televised
school shooting.
Connie, the adult who organized this event, invited the ceremony’s par-
ticipants to a meeting to plan the city’s annual Martin Luther King Day
celebration, and I volunteered to help her. Her teen volunteers had come
from after-school programs, including Community House. Having met
Community House’s leader, Emily, in those meetings, I started volunteer-
ing there, as well. Connie introduced me to the meetings of the Network
of Youth Organizations, and I started volunteering in its member organi-
zations, and attending the NOYO’s meetings.
My initial question was that since the world seems to be in such a
hopeless condition, how does anyone imagine raising hopeful youth? I
wanted to see what moral, cultural resources American adults could mus-
ter or create for the purpose. I spent many hours at the tiger cage at the
local zoo, listening in on adults and children talking about the posters
that explained extinction and habitat destruction. I also went to schools’
Current Events classes, and a nature education program for elementary
school kids. I soon realized that I wanted more than abstract discussion,
however; I wanted to see how adults tried to put their hopeful ideas in
practice, where the adults could, I thought, neither melt into hopelessness
nor issue vague pep talks about “making a difference,” but had to think
of something to do, today, with young people. So I looked for some vol-
unteer or activist groups. But could hardly nd any. Instead, I found my-
self in a galaxy of Empowerment Projects. This form of organization was
initially unfamiliar to me. Participants called them “volunteer groups,”
but they were not.
Thus, my question soon changed. I realized that getting a feel for the
form of these organizations was, itself, the main lesson that participants—
youth and adults alike—were learning. Watching them learn it captivated
me, and I dropped the other research sites so I could see how these strange
hybrids worked. After having been surprised by the ubiquity of this
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xiv • Introduction
strange hybrid form, I discovered that policy scholars had already started
documenting their spectacular growth over the past fteen years. I real-
ized that I was witnessing these organizations’ infancy, during which rou-
tine patterns were developing and solidifying.
After casting my net very widely, I settled into a few Empowerment
Projects. Like me, organizers often started with volunteer work, then
moved from one hybrid organization to another. My path followed a
typical path through a constellation of Empowerment Projects.
My home base was a set of free after-school homework clubs,14 and
summer day camps for disadvantaged youth. They promoted civic en-
gagement in two ways: adults volunteered in them, and some of their
youth participants conducted community service projects.
• Community House had about sixty members. It met in a tiny, one
story building. Its narrow entry hall had tables to collect food for
the hungry—usually day-old bread and scabby potatoes. Down a
half a ight of stairs were a high-ceilinged basketball gym, some
brightly lit vending machines, and a tiny kitchenette. Down another
half ight were three dim basement rooms: one for participants to
do their homework, another for doing art projects, and a third for
playing games. I attended Community House’s afterschool and
summer programs, events and meetings, at least one day a week for
four and half years.
• Two Casa Latina programs: One, run by Nan, met in a big school
cafeteria. It had sixty members. The other, run by Laura, met in a
small classroom, with about twenty- ve members. Both were for
Spanish-speaking youth; Casa Latina was the umbrella organiza-
tion that sponsored the two. I attended each for one afternoon a
week, for at least a half a year.
• Chippewa Middle School after-school program, run by Kristin and
Karen, had about sixty members. It also met in a big cafeteria. I
went one afternoon a week for two years.
Through the after-school programs, I also became involved in a set of
civic engagement projects for socially diverse youth. Among these, I espe-
cially focused on the Regional Youth Empowerment Project (Regional
YEP) and the Martin Luther King Day Planning Committee. Both had
about twenty members. I attended all of their monthly meetings, and
most of the community service activities that they conducted between
meetings.
This web of organizations might seem confusing, and it was. Partici-
pants were often members of two projects that met one right after the
other, in the same room, and this sometimes made it hard for members
themselves to distinguish between one organization and another.
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Empower Yourself • xv
I also attended adult planners’ meeting, including:
• The Network of Youth Organizers (NOYO): About forty- ve pro-
gram leaders, city and nonpro t of cials came to any given monthly
lunchtime meeting, each representing one of about a hundred orga-
nizations. I attended almost all of their monthly meetings for four
years and several subcommittee meetings, workshops, and classes
per month.
• The Certi cate Course for youth workers was the most intensive
NOYO course I attended. It was a twelve-week, four-hour-per-week
course for about forty organizers who worked in a very diverse set
of youth programs, from the Girl Scouts to a program for teens
who were in trouble with the law. Earning the certi cate could
qualify the youth worker for a higher-paying job.
In the after-school programs, I helped with homework, played capture
the ag, checkers, ping-pong, and “ice-breakers,” went to dances and
movies; baked banana bread with participants; and generally did what-
ever other adult volunteers did. In the youth civic engagement projects
like the Regional YEP, I helped plan events such as food drives, and public
events like Martin Luther King Day, awards ceremonies, and litter clean-
ups in parks; painted posters, and gathered food for the needy. I attended
big, public events—Juneteenth, Cinco de Mayo, Martin Luther King Day
and others—that the youth groups helped to plan. I also helped with
Community House’s fundraisers, such as dinners and rummage sales.
Many of Snowy Prairie’s youth programs were exceptionally good by
U.S. standards. They won grants partly because some local of cials kept
up to date on research on youth and on civic engagement. Snowy Prairie
had a low crime rate, good public schools, and a large middle class. Pro-
grams there were probably easier to run than they would be in a city with
less money, fewer educated of cials, a smaller middle class, more linguis-
tic diversity, a bigger gang problem, worse public schools, or worse pov-
erty. Snowy Prairie was one of the best places in the country for youth
programs, and Community House was one of the best in Snowy Prairie.
Diversity
The after-school and summer programs involved disadvantaged, mostly mi-
nority youth. The evening civic engagement projects also included college-
bound, mostly white, mostly relatively af uent youth. In those civic en-
gagement projects, the two sets of youth were supposed to conduct
volunteer work as equals, side-by-side. While it was taboo even to ac-
knowledge noticing the distinctions at all, they silently motivated many
interactions, so I have to name them here, however rude that may have
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xvi • Introduction
been to do on site: The one set was mostly poor, and mostly but not all
non-white.15 The other set was even harder to classify: while most were
not poor, some were very poor, rural whites. While almost all in this sec-
ond set were white, a few were Asian, and one was Latino; none were
black.
Organizers did not like to make distinctions like these, but when forced
to, on a grant, for example, they named the rst set “disadvantaged
youth.” Organizers never had to name the second set in order to justify
funding, so this set was just called “youth.” Following organizers and
participants themselves, I will, throughout the book, name members of
this second category only by what they were not—by an absence, a lack
of a marker: the “non-disadvantaged youth.”
And nally, I should introduce myself, because I was at all of these
meetings. Rather than telling you about my whole self and my personal
history, I can just say how I appeared in these meetings: as a mom with
two young children (and some kind of professor or teacher, though I
think the professor part seemed implausible, considering how excessively
self-effacing I am), always introduced as “someone who really likes kids,”
or “cares about youth,” who likes to play, always ready to laugh at a bad
joke (these last three are, in fact, deeply “me”), probably white, “casual”
in dress, and present mainly in the capacity of adult volunteer, though
with a better attendance record than most.
How Empowerment Projects Amplify Participants’
Feelings of Doubt
Initially feeling inspired by Empowerment Talk’s promises, I became
more and more equivocal. Organizers did not want to sti e volunteers’
creativity, so they repeated, in words that varied slightly from one meet-
ing to the next, that their organizations were “open and unde ned, up to
you to decide ‘whatever’.” I admired their motive, but nally had to rec-
ognize that the seeming openness posed a problem: nally had to recog-
nize that the seeming openness posed a problem: in organizations that
claim to be “open and unde ned, up to you to decide ‘whatever’,” every-
thing you do tends to look like a direct expression of your deepest self,
your inspirations, your “gut feelings,” your traditional culture, and your
very unique form of diversity. You must be able to express complicated
and possibly ambivalent feelings about it all, quickly and unequivocally.
With all their seemingly limitless blending and exposure, Empowerment
Project participants cannot easily hide behind any prescribed roles. It
might feel like being naked in public. Empowerment Talk turned nearly
inside out when used in Snowy Prairie’s Empowerment Projects.
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Empower Yourself • xvii
Publicly and explicitly justifying one’s volunteer efforts so frequently
makes it hard not to doubt one’s own motives. As we will see, being
thrown together with people from diverse backgrounds makes it hard to
avoid noticing how emotionally powerful class and race differences can
be. Since participants are supposed to be learning about and celebrating
“cultural diversity,” they constantly have to explain and display their cul-
tures; needing to explain and display one’s culture under so many criss-
crossed spotlights encourages participants to question their cultures. All
the public, speedy presentations aimed at multiple, hurried, distant audi-
ences makes it easy for participants to see themselves through the wrong
end of the telescope—the wrong ends of many telescopes. In Snowy Prai-
rie’s hurried performances aimed at distant audiences, there is no time to
express or explore the doubts, puzzles, or ambivalence that this participa-
tion itself generates. In this way, as we will see, Empowerment Projects
increase people’s chances for people to feel doubt,16 vertigo, and possibly
fruitful perplexity, but diminish their chances to explore them together in
comfortably long-lived relationships.
So, participants rarely taste the delights that Empowerment Talk prom-
ises, but they do learn other lessons and skills. While not the programs’
intended lessons, some may be useful nonetheless. Participants learn how
to produce and value pleasant small talk with people whose lives are
vastly different from their own, how hard it is to ignore these differences,
and how deep the currents of class and race inequality run. They learn
how to listen politely to, politely doubt, and promptly ignore, the adult
volunteers who come to help their afterschool program, promising to
become like “beloved aunties” to them, but with only two hours a week
for four months to spare for the purpose. They learn to doubt organiza-
tions’ grandiose claims more generally. They surreptitiously learn how
their programs got funding and they learn how to stage public events that
make their programs appear worthy in those funders’ eyes. They learn
how to display enthusiasm for each new short-term project, and how to
juggle multiple organizations’ discordant timelines. They learn how to
document and publicize diversity quickly, for multiple, distant, hurried
audiences. They learn very speci c skills for civic engagement, such as
how to take notes and chair a meeting, but not how to develop passionate
opinions or to re ne political ideas. They learn to maintain a tentative,
doubting, distant relation to their own culture, enough to be able to dis-
play it to hurried spectators. Above all, they learned to treat the past as
irrelevant and keep their hopes relentlessly focused on limitless, hopeful
future potentials that they doubt will ever materialize. This, then, is how
we arrive at our puzzling inversion of Empowerment Talk’s hopes.
Learning to make conversation with strangers is an important skill for
anyone; not all relationships ought to be deep and heavy. Some of the
Eliasoph.indb xviiEliasoph.indb xvii 1/5/2011 10:47:29 AM1/5/2011 10:47:29 AM
xviii • Introduction
lessons, however, seem to be useful mainly for creating citizens who will
placidly accept contemporary governments’ increasingly short-term proj-
ects; who will not panic about short-term employment in an unsteady job
market; who will feel calm about short-term marriage; not become too
passionately attached to any people or ideas: citizens who will change
their souls rather than their conditions. These lessons are also unintended
consequences of participation, not the lessons that Empowerment Proj-
ects aim to teach.
Some of the programs’ lessons come from mixing many missions at
once. Though possibly perplexing, those lessons are not harmful. The
harmful consequences came from these projects’ short time horizons.
Policy makers take note: temporary funding meant constant fundraising,
documentation and constant publicity. This made volunteering seem, too
often, like a loud public ad for the youth programs, rather than an intrin-
sic good. Speed-up undermined these programs’ potential bene ts.
To see what should or could change, we need slow, patient observation.
Our rst step, then, is simply to observe how people experience these
projects in everyday life. Only after taking this rst step can we know
where to anticipate useful lessons and moments of predictable failure in
them. Viewing these programs from the inside, over the long haul, we can
see what they can and cannot realistically do. Through patient observa-
tion, we can see how they could ful ll more of their hopeful missions,
making volunteering truly soul-changing and world-changing.
Eliasoph.indb xviiiEliasoph.indb xviii 1/5/2011 10:47:30 AM1/5/2011 10:47:30 AM
CHAPTER 1
How to Learn Something in an
Empowerment Project
C H Empowerment Projects’
complex tangle of crisscrossed sponsorships and crisscrossed missions. It
is a very successful Empowerment Project, coming close to ful lling all
the missions at once. Most of its funds come from the government, from
nonpro t organizations, and from private donations. A small amount of
money comes from its many fundraisers, which involve selling burrito or
lasagna dinners, used clothes, old stuffed animals with dirty fur, and rum-
pled, second-hand books. So, to survive, the program has to act a bit like
a state agency, a bit like a nonpro t, a bit like a charity, and a bit like a
business. Such programs have to act like state agencies, expertly docu-
menting their successes at preventing disadvantaged, minority youth from
entering the futures which social scientists predict for their ranks, of drug
abuse, poverty, teen pregnancy, and crime. Programs like these also have
to act like civic associations, both by inviting adult volunteers to come
help young people do homework in the after-school programs, and by
encouraging youth members to conduct volunteer work themselves, on
weekends, evenings, and holidays. In addition to acting like state agen-
cies, businesses, charities, and civic associations, the programs are sup-
posed to be “family-like,” as organizers put it, thus further blending the
kinds of obligations that participants might expect from one another.
The projects also have to “promote our diverse, multicultural commu-
nity,” as yers and other publicity often advertise. To promote “bonding
among diverse youth,” organizers like Emily encourage disadvantaged
youth from her after-school program to attend evening meetings of
county-wide youth civic engagement projects like the Regional Youth
Empowerment Project—planning and conducting litter cleanups or gath-
ering food for the hungry—side-by-side with non-disadvantaged youth.
When the disadvantaged youth joined their non-disadvantaged peers
in these volunteer projects, the blending grows yet more complex. The
two sets of youth volunteers enter the programs on different trajectories,
heading toward different projected futures. Most of the poor and minor-
ity volunteers like those from Community House come to the evening
civic engagement projects in a group, with fellow members of their after-
noon “prevention programs” for “at-risk youth.” An important implicit
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2 • Chapter 1
goal of these prevention programs is, as the “van for needy youth” story
illustrates, to prevent them from becoming future problems themselves.
The relatively af uent, mostly white youth volunteers, in contrast, come
partly for the purpose of plumping up their CV’s for their future college
applications, since they know that college admissions committees will
want evidence of an applicant’s good citizenship. Volunteers in this cate-
gory usually come to meetings alone, driving their own cars, rather than
as part of a larger group. Their volunteer work has different sponsors—
including their families, who do not need to be publicly convinced to
spend money (on transportation, food, adult planners’ help, for example)
to make these young people into good volunteers and good citizens. No
one could avoid noticing these inequalities, but talking about them was
taboo, resulting in another typical, everyday tension in Empowerment
Projects.
Empowerment Projects are supposed to blend different kinds of people
and different kinds of organizations—civic association, state agency, non-
pro t organization, family, and cultural tradition. Since funding is usually
short-term, all of this blending has to happen exibly, rapidly, and trans-
parently, with documentation for multiple sources, each with a separate
form. Organizers celebrate all this melting of stiff boundaries, nding it
exciting and empowering. But the blending also produces tensions, as it
is often hard to juggle this many different types of relationships all in one
place, all at once—as the anger in the awards luncheon shows.
Morally Magnetic Missions, Predictable Puzzles
A tangle of hopes gives Empowerment Projects their “family
resemblance.”1
Like any kind of organization, an Empowerment Project has to make
big, beautiful, public promises, both to participants and to outside on-
lookers. Organizations often do not ful ll their lofty promises, and, as
this book will show, when one promise is met, it often con icts with an-
other of the many promises, yielding unintended consequences.
While these morally magnetic stories do not guide action in any
straightforward way, they are not irrelevant, either. They nourish orga-
nizers’ powerful passions, without which Empowerment Projects would
be dry and empty—and much more expensive, since paid organizers
often lovingly work for free on weekends and evenings.2 And even when
people do not feel inspired, they still have to do something to appear to
carry out an Empowerment Project’s missions.3
When focusing on promoting civic engagement, people are supposed to
associate as independent equals, in an organization whose door should
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Learning in an Empowerment Project • 3
always be open to any newcomers. When hoping for safe, comfortable
intimacy, people are supposed to be like family, not with an always-open
door, not so exible that their relationships should easily end when the
grant ends. Emily, for example, knows how fast the hair on her kids’ arms
grows. When aiming for exibility, innovation, inspiration, and multicul-
turalism, people are supposed to connect as respectful, curious strangers,
open to new adventures, not necessarily comfortably, but “stretching
their comfort zones” and “getting out of their boxes”—the farther out,
the better.
In principle, organizers approve of all of the many missions, but in
everyday practice, ful lling them sometimes feels wrong—to organizers,
youth participants, or both.4 Despite their feelings and their moral judg-
ments, organizers still have to keep trying. All of the morally magnetic
missions become harmful or bene cial, depending on how people man-
age to blend them with the other missions.
In principle, for example, exible innovation means “breaking out of
boxes” and “promoting diversity,” which Snowy Prairie organizers relish.
But in the conditions of an Empowerment Program, it also means con-
stant fundraising for short-term funding, which organizers do not relish.
Fresh projects get seed money, and old, stale projects are continually
trimmed away; everyone has to be eager to start a new project all the
time, even when their previous project is just getting off the ground.
Youth volunteers have to want to combat homelessness for six months;
next, they have to feel inspired to combat racism or promote literacy,
depending on the next funder’s agenda. Intimacy has to materialize fast,
too, because programs can end when temporary funding ends.
In principle, Snowy Prairie organizers hope to help the needy, but say-
ing it directly makes them uncomfortable. They do not want to speak of
their work in those terms in front of the youth; to organizers’ ears, “help”
and “needy” sound disrespectful. They have to speak in those terms,
however; as partly government-funded agencies, they have to demon-
strate transparency, clearly documenting that they help the needy.
In principle, organizers also consider transparency and innovation to
be ne ideals, but as we will see, these hopes often materialize as a nag-
ging pile of forms on organizers’ desks, for new grants every six months,
each demanding slightly different data. Organizers dutifully supply the
data and then, with an ironic lilt to their voices, mock their own comical
precision: numbers of youth volunteers, numbers of minority youth vol-
unteers (which means categorizing and labeling them, which organizers
loathe to do), number of adult volunteers, tons of food delivered to the
needy, numbers of recipients served, hours and minutes of service ren-
dered to the community by the programs’ volunteers, number of preg-
nancies and crimes and addictions successfully prevented.
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4 • Chapter 1
In principle, organizers hope to promote civic engagement, but some-
times, as we will soon see, even this magnetic mission can be destructive,
in practice, when temporary volunteers try to forge instant intimacy with
disadvantaged youth. And when it is destructive, organizers still have to
try to ful ll this mission, because funders want quality assurance,5 which
means, in these types of organizations, systematic accounting, to demon-
strate that these are not stiff, top-down bureaucracies. Empowerment
Projects’ twisted task, then, is to demonstrate to distant bureaucrats that
they are grassroots, intimate, and non-bureaucratic.6
This book tells how these morally magnetic missions trans gure when
they materialize in the everyday lives of Empowerment Projects.
What Organizations Fit the Category “Empowerment Project”?
Different Empowerment Projects develop different organizational styles,
but the family resemblance is clear: An Empowerment Project is an orga-
nization that blends most or all of these missions, using a complex mix of
government, nonpro t, and private funds to transform whole groups of
people’s personal feelings and sense of self, to cure them of their social ills
by “empowering” them. These projects’ goal is to bring people closer to
government, to bring people closer to each other, so that the participants
can make decisions in a democratic way. The projects aim to make people
take responsibility for—or unfairly make them feel responsible for—their
own fates.7
Included in this newly recognizable, newly prevalent constellation of
organizations are “participatory democracy” projects that invite local
citizens not just to contribute to local decision-making, but to transform
their attachments, their feelings of belonging, responsibility, community,
and self.
Included also are many current economic development schemes. In the
past ten years, governments, intergovernmental organizations like the
World Bank, and non-governmental organizations have been aiming to
build democracy and better economies, simultaneously, by bringing citi-
zens closer to each other, and bringing citizens closer to government.8
The idea is that changing “the culture” and “empowering” poor people
to run small businesses or cooperatives—in Cairo, or Santiago, or rural
Malawi, for some examples9—will promote economic development. This
approach took off when development experts began noticing that an
active economy develops in informal places: the people who gather in
the local chorus, or the café, also network with one another—the shoe-
maker nds himself across the table from the shoelace maker and they
make a deal, based on feelings of trust.10 Empowerment Projects draw
upon these informal ties as resources for creating a better economy. These
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Learning in an Empowerment Project • 5
projects’ common phrases include: “If you give a man a sh, you feed him
for a day. If you teach a man to sh, you feed him for a lifetime,”11 “asset-
based community development,” “capacity-building,” “participation,”
and “community.”
Without emphasizing the “civic” side as much, some projects bear a
family resemblance to Empowerment Projects that is a bit less immediate,
but clear, nonetheless. For example, alternative women’s prisons with
mixed government-nonpro t funding sources encourage prisoners to
transform their desires and become “empowered” to eat healthful food,
avoid drugs, and get a good education. While the prison project does not
aim to cultivate grassroots political participation, it aims to transform in-
timate feelings of a whole group, and to teach the women to “take respon-
sibility” for social conditions, even those that are beyond their control.12
Not included in the galaxy of Empowerment Projects would be social
service organizations that receive mixed funding but do not aim to pro-
mote personal transformation and empowerment. For example, a pre-
school that takes care of clients, but in which “fostering community ties
within the organization is not part of [the] focus,”13 or a health clinic
whose employees harbor no dreams of transforming clients and their
communities, would not be in this strangely intimate, civic territory that
I am calling the Empowerment Project.14 A purely corporate-sponsored
volunteer project, such as Disney’s Showyourcharacter.com, or Georgia-
Paci c’s “Angels in Action” award—of a year’s supply of toilet paper for
exceptional youth volunteers—would not be an Empowerment Project;
funding comes only from one private source, and is mainly a clever form
of public relations. Many American school districts require community
service as a condition of high school graduation. While they use Empow-
erment Talk, student participation in them is not optional, and they usu-
ally do not have multiple funding sources, so they are not Empowerment
Projects.
Organizers often expect Empowerment Projects to work the same way
everywhere, regardless of conditions, as if “where there is a will, there is a
way,” as if keeping your eyes on the prize will get you there. This book
shows how keeping your eyes on the prize can work, in certain conditions,
but not just regardless of conditions. To make it work more often, partici-
pants would have to ask themselves why they had not gotten to the elusive
prize yet. They would have to comb through their past and present condi-
tions, to locate obstacles to the prize. This rarely happens; participants
have usually run off to join another project before any serious questioning
has begun. This disregard for past and present conditions is a central
theme of this book—a predominant color braided through our rug.
Through reading studies of similar projects around the world, I saw that
Empowerment Projects routinely face similar crisscrossed requirements,
Eliasoph.indb 5Eliasoph.indb 5 1/5/2011 10:47:31 AM1/5/2011 10:47:31 AM
6 • Chapter 1
but have different routine, everyday, patterns for meeting them. In most,
the hope of being able to start with a blank slate is a recurrent theme.
When organizers try to empower people, they often assume that if a pro-
gram worked well in af uent, egalitarian Denmark, for example, they can
export it and make it work in Albania. They do not carefully consider
how it matters that the two places have very different degrees of class
inequality, different degrees of ethnic diversity, different charitable prac-
tices based in religion, family, civic association, and/or government, dif-
ferent etiquette, different levels of literacy, different degrees of access to
running water, electricity and the Internet.15 So, our second step is to no-
tice participants’ everyday, routine ways of keeping their organizations
going, as if no past or current conditions might get in their way.
An Archeology of American Empowerment Projects
Empowerment Projects missions have strong, long-lived roots in Ameri-
can history.16 Americans have long treasured “local, close-to-home civic
engagement,” “soul-changing inspiration,” and “innovation and multi-
culturalism” as sources of good citizenship and good personhood.
Organizers’ eagerness to link civic engagement with comfortable, inti-
mate domestic life has a long history. When French observer Alexis de
Tocqueville visited the youthful America in the 1830s, he was amazed
and amused at peppy, optimistic Americans’ eagerness to x local prob-
lems without any help from a centralized government. His example is a
man who has to decide, with his neighbors, whether a road should be
built in front of his own home. While it would be “hard to pull a man out
of his own self, to interest him in the fate of the whole state,” it is much
easier for him to get involved in a local, close-to-home issue, in which,
“he discovers, without even knowing it . . . a tight link between his pri-
vate interest and the common interest.”17 In this long-standing American
tale, the man’s efforts to protect his domestic comfort imperceptibly slide
into a broader concern for the whole society. The man’s circle of concern
expands. It may never have been as effortless as Tocqueville makes it
seem, to move from private to public, but the parable is a powerful inspi-
ration for American ideas about volunteering, nonetheless. If we were
archeologists, this would be one layer in Empowerment Talk’s sedimented
riverbed of morally alluring stories.
Snowy Prairie organizers’ eagerness to honor deep, spiritual inspira-
tion also has long roots in American culture. In a canonical essay, “Self-
Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson18 says that it is a moral duty to “Insist
on yourself; never imitate . . . (for) God is here within.”19 Organizers
wanted youth to “get in communication with the internal ocean,” as
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Learning in an Empowerment Project • 7
Emerson put the idea. This internal ocean stretches, in nitely blue, past
the limiting, constricting horizons of social institutions, to a place where
each individual stands whole, free of social conditions, independent. In
this image, moral vision cannot come from waiting for some bureaucrat
or pious church of cial20 to tell you about goodness; the only reliable
source of morality is the sacred ocean within, the place where rivers of
deep personal feelings, intuitions, and passions merge in a communion
where “the most personal is the most universal.” In Emerson’s extreme,
mystical, solitary, cosmic vision, all ideas and all people are one vast
unity. Empowerment Projects somehow have to tame inspiration, to
make it useful for mundane, day-to-day organization-building.
Snowy Prairie organizers’ faith in innovation and multicultural ex-
perimentation has deep American roots, too. Social reformer Jane Ad-
dams re ected on her hands-on volunteer work with immigrants in early
twentieth-century Chicago, saying that in a diverse society, it is citizens’
“moral duty” to explore, to throw themselves into close contact with
people who are very different from themselves, to seek out situations that
she says should, if experienced slowly, delicately, with sensitivity, leave
them feeling “perplexed.” Addams’ thinly veiled self-portrait painfully
describes how the “daintily clad charity visitor” starts off wanting to help
poor immigrants without questioning her own morals, but soon discov-
ers that if she wants to help the poor, she has to challenge her own moral
assumptions. If, for example, a poor family has to choose between forc-
ing their children to drop out of school to take paid jobs, versus becom-
ing homeless as a family, Addams realizes that her initial indignation
about child labor, based on her own elite upbringing, rings false, because
she has misunderstood how their moral decisions make sense in their
real-life conditions of poverty. To help them, she realizes that she has to
change her own life, by changing the society that they all share. In this
example, she has to make child labor unnecessary by becoming a political
activist, advocating for minimum-wage laws, so the parents can make
enough money without relying on their children’s wages.21 What initially
seemed like harmless, apolitical volunteer work undermines the charity
visitor’s taken-for-granted sense of reality. Addams says it is her moral
duty to question the ground while walking on it, and not just to question
it, but to change the ground—to change laws regulating the economy, in
the minimum wages example.
Addams’ life illustrates Snowy Prairie organizers’ ideal model for soul-
changing, world-changing volunteerism. Such slow, delicate, tentative
groping is indeed possible for a very long-term, paid organizer like Emily,
but not for adult volunteers or youth volunteers. And as we will see, ght-
ing to change laws like Addams’ minimum-wage battle is not possible
in these organizations, since organizers assume that they have to avoid
Eliasoph.indb 7Eliasoph.indb 7 1/5/2011 10:47:31 AM1/5/2011 10:47:31 AM
8 • Chapter 1
political con ict. Addams’ vision shines through Empowerment Projects,
but like Emerson’s stringent vision, hers is tamed: Empowerment Projects
speed it up, vacuum any political con ict out of it, and make it accessible
to people who may not be ready to change their souls.
It may seem as if Empowerment Projects’ treatment of the young is not
new, either. Following a strong current in American child-rearing pat-
terns,22 Snowy Prairie organizers do not want to pass down any oppres-
sive, pre-set rules or rituals to youth, refusing, for example, to give curi-
ous teens in the Martin Luther King Day planning committee any hints
about how the holiday has been celebrated in the past. Organizers want
youth participants to take the future into their own hands—“never imi-
tate,” as Emerson said, to “make the road by walking it,” as activists since
the civil rights movement have said,23 to “learn by doing,” as American
schoolteachers say. If, they think, young people just started doing things
together, working together, they will learn to get along, and will make
discoveries that no adult could ever have imagined. Organizers consider
this process to be better than imposing any dusty, con ning old rules and
limits on the young.
Another aspect of Empowerment Projects echoes common, long-
standing patterns of child rearing: If the caregiver makes the young per-
son feel more independent than he or she actually is so far, the young
person may feel strong and proud, and may grow into the feeling, grow-
ing to t the projected image. Making her feel competent and con dent
by attributing more capability to her than she actually has may be a nor-
mal part of good, respectful nurturance. This feeling of “prospectancy”
may be the necessary leavening in a hopeful, buoyant personality.24
These fears and hopes are new neither for American social policy, nor
for American civic life, nor for American childhood. They are built into
the very structure of our government. In other wealthy nations, policy
makers and voters assume that the face-to-face process is not enough;
that citizens cannot become equals in the civic realm if they enter it as
extreme unequals in the rst place—if some are too poor, too sick, too
uneducated, homeless, or disabled to enter on equal footing. Rather than
waiting for private charities or nonpro ts or volunteers to take up the
slack, those other nations developed sturdy—or “expensive and in exibly
centralized and disrespectful,” depending on your point of view—social
safety nets. Voters in those countries have considered equality worth the
price if it means that no one has to enter civic life through the servants’
door, as a second-class citizen. Most Snowy Prairie organizers favor wel-
fare, but they also hope to lessen inequality directly, themselves, right
now, before government policies might change. They hope that people
can become equals by working together, step by step, regardless of their
divergent starting points. They hope that respectfully treating people
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Learning in an Empowerment Project • 9
“prospectantly,” as if they are independent equals will begin to make
them so, and might even set them on the path of upward mobility.
Snowy Prairie’s organizers echo Emerson’s, Tocqueville’s, and Addams’
and others’ long-lived, potent tales of good citizenship,25 along with our
deepest intuitions of how to raise creative and competent children.
Empowerment Projects’ many missions might then seem like timeless
manifestations of American culture: Tocquevillean civic engagement ⫹
Emersonian inspiration ⫹ Addams’ experimentation and multicultural
curiosity ⫹ common child raising patterns. But the result is not a simple
addition problem.
These old, nearly sacred ideals transform when they materialize in Em-
powerment Projects. In them, volunteers’ “internal ocean” is explicitly put
to use as, for example, a form of pregnancy and drug abuse prevention.
Emerson’s vast ultramarine ocean has a rapidly approaching deadline on
the rushed Empowerment Project’s short time horizon. Addams’ slow
cultivation of moral perplexity transforms, as well: civic participation,
inspiration, and appreciation of diverse cultures all have to be rendered
transparently visible, for quick and easy assessment by multiple, distant,
hurried audiences. The tradition of honoring youthful freshness also
transforms, in these short-term projects: it has high nancial stakes and
has to be constantly publicized.
The Flight from the Bureaucrat’s Ghost
Our local organizers often tell a tale that derides distant experts—speci -
cally, the government planners of the 1950s and ’60 s who bulldozed the
charming, mixed-use, slightly ramshackle ethnic neighborhood of three-
story wooden houses near Community House to build ef cient, imper-
sonal high-rise housing projects. Organizers say that those tidy modern
projects destroyed local, grassroots, informal comfort, where the friendly
old neighbor could sit on a stoop keeping an eye on the kids as they freely
roamed, where the corner grocery store, the school, and home blended
together, in the exuberant, creative life of the street.26 Distant experts
knocked down the homey neighborhoods without noticing what was
good about them.
The old twentieth-century bureaucrat’s ghost haunt organizers, moti-
vating them to try to bring government close to the people and bring the
people close to each other. With visceral disgust, organizers and funders
alike revile anything that smells of in exible experts, in exible govern-
ment, rigid rules, and rigid roles, people who are trapped in the past. In-
stead, they want open-ended, spontaneous voluntary participation; ap-
preciation of diverse cultures; a bridging of differences between rich and
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10 • Chapter 1
poor, white and non-white, expert and average non-expert citizens; they
want intimacy and exploration. They want organizations that can break
down borders and hierarchies, not be trapped by past expectations but be
open to limitless, seemingly impossible dreams. They want youth volun-
teers to open up their imaginations, in organizations that they say are
open and unde ned and up to you to decide ‘whatever.’
Organizers’ desperate ight from the bureaucrat’s ghost does not nec-
essarily yield the rosy outcomes for which they hoped. Making rigid dis-
tinctions and relying on experts had predictable opportunities and dan-
gers in the “modern” organizations of the mid-1900s. Trying to do the
opposite, and imagining that everything and everyone can effortlessly
blend, brings predictable opportunities and dangers to Empowerment
Projects.
Now, volunteering has become exible, temporary, “loose connec-
tions.”27 Volunteers are supposed to be capable of helping the needy
quickly, and without any need for expertise. Diverse participants are sup-
posed to be able to bond quickly and easily, and separate just as easily.
The past is no longer supposed to be a rigid model. On the contrary, it is
supposed to be completely irrelevant. Instead of making stiff judgments
based on narrow rules, organizers have dif culty pronouncing any judg-
ments at all. In this, Empowerment Projects echo trends that resonate
throughout society, with its temporary jobs, temporary marriages, tem-
porary government programs. They embody a future-oriented, doubt-
lled spirit that lters through many aspects of contemporary life—a
point to which we will return in the conclusion.
Empowerment Projects promote ideals that once were uncommon,
fresh, radical, and “anti-establishment.” Now, these ideals are common,
established principles in all sorts of organizations.28 And so, in the course
of volunteering, I was struck with the possibility that I was witnessing
how big processes were materializing, step by step, in little organizations
like Snowy Prairie’s youth programs, in themes and variations all over the
country and perhaps around the world.
Typical Puzzles in Empowerment Projects
Part One portrays puzzles of cultivating civic, open equality. Part Two
portrays the puzzles of cultivating intimate comfort and safety. Section 3
describes the twists and turns in promoting multicultural experimenta-
tion. Since organizers were supposed to be ful lling these missions at
once, while also helping the needy and being both transparent and exi-
ble, starting at any of these three points ends up looped together with the
others, where they all meet. So, my three categories follow organizers’
Eliasoph.indb 10Eliasoph.indb 10 1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM
Learning in an Empowerment Project • 11
attention, my gaze following the aspect of the Empowerment Project that
they themselves lit up most brightly at the moment.
Within part one, chapter 2, “Participating under Unequal Auspices,”
shows what happened when the two different sets of youth volunteers were
supposed to meet as equals in the civic engagement projects. Disadvan-
taged youth often overheard the public speeches about them, document-
ing their programs’ effectiveness in preventing crime, drug abuse, and
pregnancy. So it made sense that they spoke of themselves as outcomes
and variables; they understood that they themselves were considered
the main problem to solve. Non-disadvantaged youth assumed, in con-
trast, that they were supposed to solve the problems of distant others.
The two sets of volunteers could not talk about this inequality together,
but they had to know about it, just in order to make sense of action in the
programs.
In chapter 3, “‘The Spirit that Moves Inside You’: Puzzles of Using
Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer’s Problems,” we see that when the
soul-changing spirit ickers inside you, it can be exciting. It can also
be frightening. Since organizers also had to help needy or troubled
youth volunteers, volunteering usually had to be easy, not frighteningly
soul-changing.
Chapter 4, “Temporal Leapfrog: Puzzles of Timing,” portrays the pro-
grams’ possibly mismatched time lines, and shows how participants
aligned them by focusing on future potential. Sometimes this temporal
leapfrog worked, for example, when organizers patiently kept treating
needy, troubled youth participants as if they were self-propelled leaders,
even before they really were self-propelled leaders. After a year or so,
some of them grew into the “prospective” hope. But sometimes this focus
on future potential came at the expense of any focus on the past or pres-
ent. For example, hungry, homeless recipients of youth volunteers’ aid
might not be able to wait until volunteers become inspired and compe-
tent enough to nd them food and shelter. There were other temporal
disconnections as well: organizers needed to apply for grants over the
summer—often on speci c topics such as tobacco prevention, promotion
of the arts, or literacy—before new youth volunteers arrived each Sep-
tember. Another temporal disjuncture was that organizers tried to “build
community” by “drawing on community,” “build leadership by drawing
on leadership,” treating “the community,” “leadership,” “good choices,”
and other potentials “simultaneously as diagnosis and cure.”29 This chap-
ter shows how even with these mismatched time frames, people still man-
aged to coordination everyday action.
Chapter 5, “Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics,
Blank ‘Re ections,’” opens with some organizers’ passionate dream: to
encourage youth volunteers to care about politics and “the big picture.”
Eliasoph.indb 11Eliasoph.indb 11 1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM
12 • Chapter 1
Doing so would have required discussion and possibly led to con ict,
which most organizers considered depressing and dif cult, not inspiring
and easy. There was not enough time for re ective discussions, anyway.
So, the youth programs all just conducted projects with which no hu-
mane person could disagree—gathering mittens and cans of tuna for the
poor, but not asking why there is hunger, for example—thus severing any
connection between civic volunteering and political engagement, and
tending to breed, paradoxically, hopelessness about nding any solutions
beyond one mitten at a time.
Part Two follows organizers’ activities that aimed to cultivate intimacy,
comfort, and safety. Chapter 6, “Harmless and Destructive Volunteers,”
portrays adult volunteers who came to help in the summer and after-
school homework programs. Adult volunteers’ presence symbolized, in
funders’ eyes, that a program enjoyed local grassroots support, so paid
organizers could not shut out these volunteers. However, when they came
to the after-school programs for one or two hours a week for a few
months or a year at most, their short-term, optional, sporadic efforts at
creating intimate bonds with youth participants undermined the intimate
atmosphere that a devoted paid organizer like Emily managed to create.
Chapter 7, “Paid Organizers Creating Temporally Finite, Intimate,
Family-like Attachment,” shows how some of the paid organizers became
intimate with some of their program’s members. Organizers wanted to
become family-like with all of their program participants. But they were
not expecting to share a lifetime with them, and their intimacy was on
display for public judgment. Nevertheless, some full-time, long-term paid
organizers managed to become “like family” to their youth program par-
ticipants. Puzzles of loyalty—another set of temporal puzzles—ensued.
Chapter 8, “Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort,”
focuses on desires that organizers were not supposed to call “needs,” but
I do: for food, safety and comfort. Part of an organizer’s job was to make
participants question their feelings, and to treat all desires as “choices.
Empowerment Projects invited participants to draw on deep, intimately
comfortable feelings, but also to challenge these feelings, never taking
anything for granted. The projects put participants’ feelings on display, lit
up and explicit, in the glare of multiple, crisscrossed lights. In this shad-
owless light, organizers could, without offending any of the program’s
multiple audiences, say neither that their participants had any unmet
“needs,” nor any bad habits and desires, nor could they explain why par-
ticipants had ever any unmet needs or bad habits or desires in the rst
place. The programs were supposed to do more than ful ll basic needs,
but were supposed to retrain participants’ habits, to learn to satisfy their
need for food in healthful ways, for example. Organizers found that
funders would not pay for food unless the request for funding cast “food”
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Learning in an Empowerment Project • 13
as something more important than a mere “need,” saying that good nutri-
tion enhanced brain development, prevented obesity, or established a
homey feeling in a program. Programs still hardly ever got any food, but
did offer many theoretical lessons about food.
Chapter 9, “Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: Get-
ting People Out of their ‘Clumps,’” shows organizers’ heroic efforts to get
the socially diverse youth volunteers to bond quickly, easily, and comfort-
ably. Organizers hoped that sharing their tastes, habits, and desires would
help, but the only desires that these diverse and unequal youth ever said
they shared were for pizza and blue jeans. Paradoxically, these exercises
showed participants just how uncomfortable diverse, unequal people felt
when they were thrown together: an important sociological lesson in just
how deep social divisions go. It was an important lesson, but not what
the programs aimed to teach.
Part Three examines the promotion of multicultural experimentation
and diversity. Chapter 10, “‘Getting Out of Your Box’ versus ‘Preserving
a Culture’: Two Opposed Ways of ‘Appreciating Cultural Diversity,’”
shows that, for people who considered themselves minorities, multicul-
turalism meant safety and protection—protecting a tradition by staying
apart from the mainstream. For people who felt “mainstream”—usually
white, middle-class—it meant exploring and mixing, not staying apart.
Chapter 11, “Tell Us about Your Culture: What Participants Count as
‘Culture,’” shows how participants used the terms “culture” and “diver-
sity.” People used these terms so constantly, they seemed to mean every-
thing and nothing. While Empowerment Talk summons us to draw on
our unique cultures, no cultures t the bill. All were too hard to under-
stand quickly, or were considered too sexist, racist, hierarchical, inacces-
sible, constraining, frozen, or ossi ed. Participants had to cleanse their
cultures before allowing them to enter the open, exible, optional, trans-
parent, egalitarian civic arena. While the term “cultural diversity” never
led to exploration of anyone’s religion, history, or language, this chapter
shows that this cleansing still had an effect. It made the differences feel
transparent, weightless, and easy to doubt.
Chapter 12, “Celebrating . . . Empowerment Projects!” describes the
bewildering, over-stimulating form of Empowerment Projects’ public
events. In roughly similar words, all yers for these events invited people
to “celebrate our diverse, multicultural community.” The events had no
center stage, but loud music from multiple stages, each playing its own
music. Organizers would not specify what the celebrations were about,
intentionally leaving it “open and unde ned.” Nonetheless, anyone who
attended a few of them knew exactly what to expect: a jumble of non-
pro t, activist, and government programs—drug abuse programs, high
blood pressure prevention programs, prison rights projects, home heating
Eliasoph.indb 13Eliasoph.indb 13 1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM
14 • Chapter 1
projects—making the celebration of “our multicultural community”
seem like a public service announcement offering instruction in how to
avoid the heartbreaks that disproportionately touch the poor and the ill.
“Our diverse, multicultural community” became, in everyday usage, a
way of avoiding a conversation about poverty, and simultaneously, of
celebrating Empowerment Projects.
Having quietly, patiently, watched and waited for patterns in the rug to
appear, throughout these chapters, we can now piece together practical
proposals. Based on this now-solid ground that helps us see what we can
reasonably hope for or expect from them, the conclusion offers some
urgent proposals for Empowerment Projects.
Eliasoph.indb 14Eliasoph.indb 14 1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM1/5/2011 10:47:32 AM
PART ONE
Cultivating Open Civic Equality
The groups that Alexis de Tocqueville described were “classic volunteer
groups”: unpaid local folks who banded together in an open-ended
group, to x or accomplish something for their local community. Classic
American voluntary associations usually brought together people who
were already homogeneous in terms of race and class.1 They aimed to x
something in the community, not to cure the volunteers of their psycho-
logical problems by empowering them. Classic volunteer groups did not
have to justify themselves to any external funders. Classic volunteers
could start with something small, local, and uncontroversial, and expand
to something big, political, and controversial. As the next four chapters
will show, Empowerment Projects are very different on all these scores.
Some writers wax nostalgic for those old-fashioned, unfunded, local
volunteer groups, and see these newly prevalent Empowerment Projects,
with their dependence on money and external authorities’ approval, as
a downfall. At the moment, about forty years ago, that government fund-
ing for voluntary associations began to increase, a nonpro t executive
worried:
[T]ruly voluntary associations are desperately needed for the revitaliza-
tion of the democratic process, but they cannot be supported by gov-
ernment funds since government funding immediately contaminates
their nature and is self defeating.2
For the executive, grassroots voluntarism is the soul of America; the word
“contaminates” is no accident.3 The interesting and useful question, how-
ever, is not an up or down, a yes or a no, but a “how.” Empowerment
Projects do not necessarily kill the civic spirit—or bring it to life, either.
When they blend their many missions, civic life does not simply lose or
gain ground: rather, the ground changes.
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CHAPTER 2
Participating under Unequal Auspices
I who were helping out at a local
event, a reporter asks a question that was intended to give a boy a chance
to display his generous volunteer spirit:
Reporter: Why are you here today?
Wispy black boy, maybe fourteen years old: I’m involved instead of
being out on the streets or instead of taking drugs or doing something
illegal.
The wispy boy’s response was not a mistake. For poor and minority
youth, nding an implicit answer to the question, “Why am I in this
group?” was easy: I am slated to do poorly in school and in life, and my
after-school group exists for the purpose of helping me defy my condi-
tions. I am a problem. For non-disadvantaged youth, there were other
unspoken answers: I am here to help others (and perhaps boost my
chances of getting into the college of my choice).1
Volunteer work was supposed to bring the different types of youth to-
gether: even though participants were not equals in the rest of their lives,
just getting their hands dirty, doing the work, walking the walk, was sup-
posed to set them on equal footing right now, in the moment. In practice,
creating this haven meant learning how to ignore the differences, joining
together as equals by leaving the past behind.
This practical solution created its own puzzles and its own form of
inequality. It was hard for underprivileged youth to appear entirely civic,
self-propelled, and independent, since their programs had to document
exactly how much money had been spent on helping them. Disadvan-
taged youth overheard organizers’ constant fundraising efforts, which
often included expertly documenting their neediness. Their dependence
was publicly visible. It came with a dollar amount. For them, the missions
of promoting civic engagement, helping the needy, and transparently doc-
umenting their projects’ effects blended, often uncomfortably, but some-
times offering surprising insights, almost surreptitiously acquired. If un-
derprivileged youth heard data about poverty and racism, they might see
the big picture and feel pride at having beaten the stiff odds, surmounting
the obstacles that they faced as members of an unjustly deprived racial or
class category.
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18 • Chapter 2
The non-disadvantaged youth volunteers, in contrast, never heard any-
one publicizing the importance of spending money on preventing them
from becoming criminals and drug addicts. Their dependence and need
for protection was invisible, not subject to public questioning, though
one could glimpse, in small, hidden interactions, the dedicated parents on
whom they privately, almost secretly depended. According to this second
category of youth volunteers, it was urgent that the Empowerment Proj-
ects’ money be spent in a “civic” way, on helping someone else, not on the
volunteers themselves. Many came to the projects hoping to nd inspira-
tion, to be touched to the core, deeply transformed. So, initially at least,
they might appear to t the mold of classic volunteers better.
Yet, the non-disadvantaged volunteers, too, had an agenda beyond
helping others and seeking inspiration. Admission to a good university is
not automatic in the United States, as it is in some other nations; these
non-disadvantaged youth had to market themselves to future college ad-
missions of ces, using volunteer work to “signal”2 that they were good,
active, caring, and knowledgeable people. Knowing that they were sup-
posed to feel motivated by pure inspiration and altruism, they nervously
questioned themselves and each other about whether they were really
involved just to puff up their resumes, to market themselves.
The two sets of youth had different hidden reasons for being there, dif-
ferent sources of pride and shame, different ways of relating to broader
political issues, and even different ideas for what community service proj-
ects to conduct. The chapter portrays these knots of tensions, showing
how social inequality materialized here in a way that may be typical in
Empowerment Projects, wherever the implicit rules of engagement for the
two distinct sets of volunteers are so very different.
What Brings You Here? Implicit Answers
Poor and Minority Youth: I Am Preventing Myself from Becoming a Problem
I kept hearing minority youth making what I thought was a mistake
when they described their volunteer work. At rst, I though they misun-
derstood the question. “Safe Night” was a prophylactically named eve-
ning event to provide teens with a safe place to go at night instead of
drinking, taking drugs, or having sex. Participants ranged from about
eight to fteen years old.
A middle-aged white volunteer got up in front of the racially mixed
group of about 100 youth, passing around construction paper cut-outs
in the shape of hands. She asked them to write ve things—one on each
nger—that they could do to serve their community.
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 19
Most gave the standard, expected answers: “Shovel snow for old
people, baby-sit, help at a nursing home, go grocery shopping for
someone who can’t, help clean up a park.” But many black kids said
things like “get a job,” and “do my homework.”
After hearing these apparent misunderstandings numerous times, I saw a
striking “pattern in the rug.” These disadvantaged volunteers accurately
perceived that they themselves were considered the community problem.
Occasionally, impoverished white youth from rural or suburban areas
said the same thing. I never heard young people who were neither poor
nor minority say it.
Similar prevention programs exist nationwide, in which organizers and
youth explain volunteer work in similar terms.
The Dream Shop, an afterschool program for girls age ten to 15 from
an impoverished neighborhood in East Dayton [Ohio], is making a
dramatic difference in the lives of the participants, reports Cox News
Service. The majority of the families living in the census tract where the
Dream Shop is based are poor and Appalachian, with grim prospects
for the future and a high teen pregnancy rate. Approximately 180 girls
have joined the Dream Shop since it started. . . . Many work on com-
munity service projects [my italics—notice the very next sentence).
“We haven’t had a single pregnancy yet, and all the girls are still in
school,” said [an organizer]. The girls in Dream Shop are educated
about a range of health issues, including smoking, dental hygiene and
sexuality. “That’s the thing I like about the Dream Shop. It’s like kept
me off the street. It’s easy to say ‘no’ whenever I need to,” said Saman-
tha Brower, 15.3
A similar inspiration fuels prevention programs around the country.
Here is one from Nevada, where a school district had started a mariachi
band, so students could learn to play this kind of Mexican folk music.
Critics said the program was too expensive:
Supporters dismiss the critics. They say the program has the power
to keep at-risk students—many of whom are Latino—engaged in
school . . .
Javier Trujillo, project coordinator for mariachi instruction in the
Clark County School District, said $25,000 was “the average price to
keep a juvenile in the prison system per year. Now you apply that same
amount of money to education4—you’re impacting thousands of stu-
dent lives.”. . .
“I’m not on the streets trying to do bad things,” said [a student,
Edsel] Lemus, who plays the vihuela, a guitar-shaped lute . . . several
students boosted their grades . . .
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20 • Chapter 2
“There are not that many opportunities for at-risk Hispanic kids to
be successful,” [the band’s leader said].5
Many schools no longer automatically receive funds for music classes,
so they have to compete for grants.6 Of course, the young musicians, like
the young volunteers, may, as a by-product, learn to take pleasure in the
music, or the volunteering. Sensual pleasure in the present—in the music
itself—may very well overtake the music’s future-oriented utility.7 How-
ever, as these multiple excerpts from eld work show, the public message
was very hard to ignore since it was reaf rmed so frequently, by many
voices. The sensual feel in the present and the public justi cations about
the distant future, both felt real.
Seeing the pattern in the rug is easiest when the pattern is interrupted:
At Casa Latina, an after-school program for Spanish-speaking 11–14-year-
olds, the adult leader Laura sometimes invited youth to help solve the
world’s problems, rather than only treating the young people as the prob-
lem themselves. One day, Laura asked her teens to write messages on a
banner that she was going to bring to a pro-bicycle, anti-car rally. When
she, and I, and the other volunteers heard this interaction, the jolt of rec-
ognition of the absent common pattern made us all laugh aloud:
Laura had written on the banner “La Tierra = La Vida” [“The Earth =
Life”] and she also handed out a list of ten incriminating “Facts about
the Car”—like pollution, depletion of natural resources, poor working
conditions for auto workers, and sprawl.
Most of the kids misunderstood her point. They wrote and drew
statements [in Spanish] like “don’t drive drunk,” “don’t ride a bike
drunk,” “don’t smoke while riding a bike,” or even, “ride a bike to lost
weight!”
Laura’s teens expected to be asked to prevent themselves from becoming
problems—not to get drunk, fat, or high. They did not expect an invita-
tion to act as independent civic equals who would protest the world’s
problems, and not just x their own personal problems. They were so
unprepared for Laura’s invitation, they misinterpreted it. Everyone knew,
but could not say that, whether skating, singing, or shing (as in other
programs nationwide), the funding came with the purpose of preventing
them from becoming problems. Without knowing this prediction of fu-
ture disaster, one could not participate competently in the programs. It
was what brought them together—with each other, and with their be-
loved organizer, Emily—in the rst place.
This message delivered a possible moral insult to disadvantaged youth.
The puzzle was to act as if disadvantaged participants were in the civic
engagement project for the same reasons that other participants were, even
Eliasoph.indb 20Eliasoph.indb 20 1/5/2011 10:47:33 AM1/5/2011 10:47:33 AM
Participating under Unequal Auspices • 21
when it was not quite true yet. This was puzzling when, for example, youth
from Community House’s free after-school program attended evening
meetings of the Regional YEP just to have somewhere to go at night. To
NOYO’s adult organizers, but never to youth participants, Emily some-
times said that some of those quiet participants just wanted to stay away
from abusive or unpleasant relatives. Empowerment Talk extends the hope
that becoming volunteers will strengthen these youth, protecting the helper
from misery, as it did in the case of Daisy, the girl who become an ex-
tremely active volunteer after having been close to suicide at age thirteen.
Organizers hoped that the story about civic empowerment would
eventually t youth like twelve-year-old Raul, even if it did not do so just
yet. Raul came to meeting after meeting, doing nothing but twiddling his
mini-sized Nacho Doritos™ bags, trying to balance one full Nacho Dori-
tos bag upside down on top of an empty one. He never looked up and
never said a word except at one meeting, when he mentioned that he was
going to Mexico soon, to visit his father and other relatives. Since he did
not do any volunteer work, either, it may have been unclear why he at-
tended these meetings. Once in a while, his half-sister Bonita complained
about their mother’s drug-dealing and mean boyfriends, so organizers
guessed that his civic participation was helping him, as a form of therapy,
but no one could be sure of Raul’s reason for coming, and asking him
would be hurtful and extremely tactless.
Focusing on potential, by attributing more capabilities to them than he
or she currently has, is, as noted in the introduction, a normal part of any
good nurturance. In Empowerment Projects, however, this normal nur-
turance took a peculiar form. Caregivers’ normal, gracious, gentle, barely
perceptible tact transformed an organizational mandate, with high nan-
cial stakes and many spectators watching as organizers doled out all the
not-yet-quite-well-deserved praise. Here, the stakes were not just about
the individual’s feelings of self-respect, but the program’s survival. Pro-
grams publicly had to demonstrate that they had made the volunteers
more independent, within a short time frame. Others were watching as
well; there were youth volunteers who were there not for the purpose of
preventing themselves from becoming problems, but to solve problems
outside of themselves. Those volunteers, who were usually in the “non-
disadvantaged” category, were supposed to be equals to the disadvan-
taged youth. The non-disadvantaged youth were not supposed to be
using civic participation as a form of therapy, and had to learn that dif-
ferent rules applied to the disadvantaged youth. They had to learn to hear
lavish praise of the quiet, inactive volunteers like Raul and lter it through
this unspoken knowledge, in order to understand the organizers’ habit of
attributing independence to disadvantaged youth when it was not true—
at least not yet.
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22 • Chapter 2
Tactful, wise organizers were skilled at marching through youth volun-
teers’ resolute silence; such organizers patiently waited for months and
even years till the curative effects of civic engagement caught hold, if ever.
In the meantime, these skillful organizers let meetings keep going as if
youth participants were already active civic volunteers. For example,
after one year’s annual Martin Luther King Day celebration in January,
several disadvantaged youth still wanted to keep meeting through the
winter. This puzzled but pleased adults, so they complied with the re-
quest, even though the youth volunteers who had begged to hold the
meetings then proceeded to sit in stone silence at the meetings that they
themselves had requested:
Sheila [adult leader of Martin Luther King Day planning committee
this year]: Do you want to do a community service project? (No one
answers.)
Emily [the much-beloved Community House leader]: What’s the
weather gonna be like? Does anyone know? (No one answers.)
Emily: What do you think about doing a community service day? (No
one answers.)
Sheila: Should we do something on April 8, like last year? What day is
that? Is it a Saturday? (No one answers.)
Emily: Do you want to do a project?
Kid: Like a walk-a-thon, bowl-a-thon, slide-a-thon?
Another kid: Or a bike-a-thon, or that kind of thing? Like we did last
time?
Emily: Yeah, or a run—we’d just have to gure out which and reserve
a space and get sponsors. So what do you think, guys, should we do
something like that? (Kids say yes, whispering.)
After another meeting like the one with the Doritos tower, Emily
told me:
A lot of my kids couldn’t follow the Regional YEP meeting at all. In the
car on the way back [she drives kids in her own car], they were asking,
“Huh, what happened? What did we decide?”
NE: I’ve heard the same thing after other meetings. But it’s hard to
make those meetings do all things for all kids, because some kids just
whizz so quickly, I can’t even follow.
Emily: Exactly! And most of my kids aren’t going because they’re re-
ally into it—a lot of them are going because they just don’t want to go
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 23
home. It doesn’t hurt to go, and I gure maybe something will rub off
on them.
Most organizers braved magni cent silences like Raul’s and the post–
Martin Luther King Day volunteers’—carefully not pressuring youth par-
ticipants into exhibiting any discernable reasons for attending meetings,
not prying into their mysterious reasons for participating. Some day in
the future, it may or may not become clear, but in the meantime, showing
respect required assuming that no one can fully know why anyone else
volunteers, and no one should ask. Not asking was the usual, acceptable
organizational style. To me, this seemed like a respectful way of harmo-
nizing the Empowerment Projects’ crisscrossed missions of promoting
civic engagement and helping the needy.
Some organizers, however, made volunteers’ active, verbal, articulate
participation mandatory—a disrespectful violation of the graceful orga-
nizational style. For example, Miracle, an African American girl, had
never spoken in a meeting. At a Regional YEP meeting one day, she said
something!
Cindi, another teen volunteer: Erin, that should go in the minutes that
Miracle said more than ve words!
Davey: Hey, are you making fun of her??
Tandy: She never talks and she’s so nice.
Erin [this year’s paid adult organizer]: She is sweet.
(Miracle burrows deep into her hooded sweatshirt and looks down, as
if she is about to cry.8)
At another Regional YEP meeting, Erin asked for volunteers to head a
committee. When no one stepped forward, Erin clumsily “volunteered”
Miracle, saying, “You’ll have to do it some day. You’ll have to say some-
thing in a meeting some day. What do you think, kids, doesn’t she?” Once
again, Miracle scrunched up her long neck and burrowed her head into
the oversized hooded sweatshirt that she always wore. Erin’s goal was to
make Miracle into a “leader,” but Erin got the organizational style wrong.
She was being too direct. Rob Strauss, Erin’s boss who often attended
meetings, scowled, as did several youth participants.
Non-disadvantaged Youth: We Are Here to Help Other People, Not Ourselves
At every meeting of the socially diverse Regional YEP, organizers told
participants that they were doing community service just by coming to
meetings. This message did not make sense to the non-disadvantaged
Eliasoph.indb 23Eliasoph.indb 23 1/5/2011 10:47:34 AM1/5/2011 10:47:34 AM
24 • Chapter 2
youth. In one meeting, the group was planning a fundraiser, and the ques-
tion was what to do with the funds they hoped to raise. A county agency
had also already given the group some money. Erin said, “You could ei-
ther give it to yourselves, to raise money to put on a party for yourself—
that’s a kind of service, you deserve it. Or you could donate the money to
a charity that you would pick.”
At another meeting, Erin said: You’re doing a huge community service
just by being here. You guys are a bargain. Paragon County gets a lot of
wonderful things out of what you’re doing here. [This was right after
only two kids had shown up for a major volunteering event that the
group had planned and promised to host. What are the wonderful things
that Paragon County gets from the group?” I wondered: Bene ts to those
present? free food for the needy once a year? raised consciousness? good
role models for other youth?]
At another meeting, describing a project that another youth group was
doing, Erin says to her kids, “It’s making kids [she meant the teen volun-
teers in the room] feel good about what they’re doing, which is the
purpose.”
For non-disadvantaged youth, the idea of just turning the government
money straight over to a charity, as Erin suggested, did not make sense,
because they wanted to add something. They did not assume that their
alternative to “just being here” would be taking drugs and committing
crimes, so they did not imagine needing to be “impacted,” as prevention
programs put it, but to have an impact. For example, the usually calm VJ
got angry when many members of the Regional YEP volunteered to go
the Pediatric Hospital, claiming to be excited by the project, and then
only four showed up. The hospital visit took place on a raw, cloudy day.
In most rooms, pale, still, young children lay propped up in beds,
watching frenetic daytime TV. Faint winter sunlight slanted across the
bare walls of their rooms, while parents sat in chairs lined up on the
walls. “Could anything in the world cheer them up?” I wondered,
gloomily, wondering which children were terminally ill, and feeling
chilled and randomly lucky that I am not in those parents’ position at
this very moment.
In one bustling room, about twenty busy volunteers were coloring
posters from the current Disney blockbuster How the Grinch Stole
Christmas, and cutting out paper and plastic decorations to hang on
the bare walls and ceilings. Most volunteers were from the University
and had not met before this one-day event that they had found listed in
a “volunteer opportunities calendar.” All volunteers were warmly
greeted by an extremely cheery hospital employee who said her job
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 25
was to “coordinate the social and psychological aspects—like coordi-
nate volunteers and do activities.”
I was sitting at the big table near VJ and Teeyen, who was not a
member of the group yet. We joked about how much easier it would
have been to buy decorations, how making them “really sloppy” would
make them look more “handmade,” so that it would really look like
“someone cared,” as VJ put it, half ironically.
After our afternoon’s labor, shiny Mylar candy canes and stars dangled
from the reproof ceiling, lights and tinsel hung next to the intake forms
on the reception desk; our posters lined the walls, between the re alarms,
safety warnings, biohazard boxes, and medical instruments. I wondered
if it was cheery, and wondered how a sociologist could measure that.
Afterward, I sat with VJ and Teeyen in the bright hospital basement caf-
eteria, eating frozen yogurt. Teeyen was a new volunteer in the “disad-
vantaged” category, since she lived in a housing project, was not white,
and was very poor. From her adoring gaze at VJ, it was obvious that one
of her motives for volunteering that day was that she had a crush on her
tall, handsome Pre-Calculus tutor. After this day, though, she began at-
tending meetings, thus illustrating an entry route that I never heard dis-
cussed, and would have been hard to promote, though it is probably one
of the most common routes.
VJ fumed that other members of the Regional YEP were coming just to
pad their resumes, or meet people, or feel important, not to do the work.
VJ: Only four people showed up! Jenny and Joey came for about a half
an hour yesterday. They said they were gonna come from 11 to 3 but
they left at about 11:30! Then today we were the only ones. People say
they’re interested but then they don’t sign up to come.
Teeyen: It’s like the community service project at school. People come
to meetings but no one signs up to do any of the projects.
VJ: It should be like Honors Society—You have to do three commu-
nity service projects a semester and if you’re absent three times, you’re
out. People want to just be able to say they were on the Regional YEP
for their vita. We got all this money—$2,000. How are we gonna spend
it? What about buying books and toys for kids in the hospital, and
distributing them? Would that be a way to spend it?
NE: I don’t think that’s what people had in mind—more like, putting
up posters to get other people to donate something, or use the money
to make something else happen, not just to buy stuff for people.
VJ: Yeah, but how many posters? $2,000 is a lot of posters.
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26 • Chapter 2
Teeyen: T-shirts? Some of it is going for t-shirts. But that’s a lot of
t-shirts. I thought the money was for giving ourselves parties and doing
things for ourselves, to reward ourselves for doing things in the
community.
VJ: Yeah, but that’s still a lot of money and besides, we haven’t done
anything in the community yet.
NE: I have a friend who teaches at Washington Middle School who
said a lot of kids want to go but don’t have transportation.
Teeyen: There’s a van for that.
VJ: But I don’t know if we’d have to pay the driver for miles. Is it
worth it? I mean, if someone’s way out there, is it worth it to send a van
all the way there to pick them up?
NE: Well, I guess if you’re the person all the way in Rutherford or
something, you might feel kind of isolated.
VJ: I mean, would it be cost-effective to y someone in from Los An-
geles, California to come to the Regional YEP meeting? I mean, people
come to meetings but they don’t do anything else. What’s the point?
[a few more backs-and-forths] . . . we haven’t done anything yet. Peo-
ple just come to meetings, and don’t do anything, or they sign up and
don’t come—like for the Sun Corp fair, people signed up but only two
people came.
Backstage, youth volunteers had conversations like this, puzzling over the
meaning of the public monies and the value of volunteering, but when
adult organizers were present, the discussion ended quickly with excla-
mations like Erin’s: “Of course you’re worth it!”
To VJ’s mind, spending the money on his own mental health was not
“worth it,” since VJ did not consider himself to be “a potential problem,”
but rather, as a “potential solution to someone else’s problem.” The fact
that public money was spent on volunteering gave non-disadvantaged
teens like VJ a sense of urgency to make sure the money was well spent.
In this way, they were learning to make civic decisions, to ask, “Is this a
good way for our society as a whole to be spending its money?”
Hidden Damage: Helping Non-disadvantaged Volunteers
Since non-disadvantaged teens like VJ wanted to give help, not receive
it—to help sick children, old people, poor children, animals, or plants—
they reserved their wrath for participants whom they perceived as being
like them socially—white and/or not poor—who did not help others, and
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 27
worse, who might be trying to pad their resumes. VJ never expressed
anger about volunteers like Raul, with the Doritos bag. VJ assumed that
Raul was in another category.
Non-disadvantaged but troubled volunteers could easily fall through
the cracks, then, since they neither visibly deserved help nor gave help.
Two active, non-disadvantaged volunteers, VJ and Jenny, invited everyone
to eat at Hardcore Pizza to discuss this problem: the Regional YEP had
begun in September, and by December, the group still had not done any
service projects. Only ve members came, all in the “non-disadvantaged”
category. The pizza dinner became a venting session, with teens com-
plaining bitterly about some other (non-poor, white) members who dis-
rupted planning meetings, or signed up to do projects and then did not
show up. As Jenny put it, the group should “have some standards, some
requirements, not just be open to anyone”:
Jenny [describing two white, middle-class kids in the group]: “They
only count for half a person each! Just half, not a whole person! . . .
There could be a rule that you have to do two service projects a year or
something.” This idea was repeated three times that evening; another
time, Jenny said the group should have “higher standards for enroll-
ment.” VJ and Jenny had discussed it many times before.
“The meetings are already too big—the bigger they are, the more out
of control they’ll get” [Jenny said this several times, too]. Getting more
people isn’t the problem, but getting them to do something other than
go to meetings is.
They said that if volunteers like Davey were not performing—a word
usually reserved for a salesperson or worker who is not meeting a quota—
he should be kicked out. From VJ’s and Jenny’s perspective, therapy for
non-disadvantaged, disruptive participants like Davey was not worth
funders’ money: Davey did not have an “excuse,” as they put it.
It would have been hard to turn Davey’s neediness into a public issue.
Since he was not, on the face of it, a member of any disadvantaged cate-
gory, publicizing his neediness would inevitably have to be personal,
about his family, about his psychology, maybe about his body (and there
was, indeed, some discussion about how skinny he was). Nothing could
be said to clarify the mystery. At a mid-day gathering of youth workers,
Erin and Ju, an Urban League employee, discussed Davey:
Erin: It’s hard, because you don’t want to tell people to leave, but
that’s what we’ll have to do.
Rob Strauss (just entering): What happened? Someone was disrupting
the meeting last night?
Erin: Let’s keep it positive.
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28 • Chapter 2
Emily said that she has that problem with her kids too. She said, “It’s
hard to get them to focus. That’s part of why I want them to participate:
to learn to concentrate.”
Organizers knew, theoretically, that misery, suicide, violence, and drug
addiction are not limited to the poor or the non-white; that people with
hidden problems need protection, too. They sometime reminded each
other that nearly all of the perpetrators of big school shootings have been
white, middle-class boys. A speaker at one event told a long story describ-
ing a neglected, alcoholic teen whose uncaring parents drove an expen-
sive new Volvo, contrasting him with a teen whose parents were desper-
ately poor but loving. His point was that the rst teen had a worse
problem than the second. He insisted on it, as if it were a surprise, a coun-
terintuitive revelation that certainly did not go without saying. Similarly,
when organizers were talking about white volunteers from a village out-
side of Snowy Prairie, who had disrupted some meetings, one said:
A lot of little towns have a big drug problem—it’s not just all cute and
storybook there. Who are we to tell these kids what to get out of the
program? What would they be doing instead? (puzzling aloud) It’s
gotta be doing something for them, or they wouldn’t keep coming back.
However much the organizers cared about non-impoverished kids, pre-
venting their misery was not the main public justi cation of most pro-
grams’ funding. There was a bit of funding for programs in impoverished
villages, but programs’ survival did not depend on funding for helping
youth whose parents drove Volvos, no matter how neglectful their par-
ents were.9 There was no form to ll out about it.
Still, organizers had to allow everyone to come, even youth like Davey,
even if for unfathomable reasons. There was a practical reason, which
was that programs had to be open to all possible volunteers, and the
larger the numbers of youth, the better, so even if organizers had wanted
to throw Davey out, it would have been hard. But beyond that, kicking
him out would have violated one of organizers’ most emotionally com-
pelling dreams, of protecting even those youth whose injuries are mysteri-
ous and hidden.
For Non-disadvantaged Youth: Nervousness about Self-marketing
The non-disadvantaged youth volunteers worried that they, or their peers,
were using volunteering instrumentally, to beef up a resume for future
college admissions; they scrutinized themselves and each other for signs
of this motive, teased each other about it, and sometimes grew angry with
each other because of it. While they could not discuss this motive overtly,
they indirectly made its importance obvious when, for example, they
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 29
made very sure that their volunteer hours were always accurately re-
corded. At the pizza dinner just described, a new member, Andrew, asked
VJ if the group kept “records” of what it did. VJ just naturally assumed
that Andrew was asking about getting credit, but Andrew had actually
been asking about how to learn from the past:
VJ, the experienced youth volunteer: No one is keeping a record for
the group, but individually, you send in your hours, on those sheets. If
you need them signed, you can go to Mary, if you’re working in the
hospital.
Andrew: No, I meant is there a record for the future, so you can go
back next year and look at what you did and how it went and how you
got there and who to contact.
Though it offended teens like VJ, adult organizers had to emphasize
this motive, because one of their missions was to level the playing eld,
by giving disadvantaged youth access to information about how to get
into a good college, by telling them directly what teens like VJ had al-
ready absorbed in more indirect ways.10 Erin, as organizer of the Re-
gional YEP one year, was an especially enthusiastic proponent of the
plump resume. She repeated messages like this at every meeting:
Being on the Regional YEP is important for when you’re putting to-
gether a resume for colleges. They really look at that kind of thing. The
President’s Award is really huge. It tells them you not only work when
you have to; you work when you want to. Coming to these meetings
counts—when you’re sending in your sheets with your hours [spent
volunteering] on them, count these meetings. It’s so much fun you for-
get that you’re doing a good deed.
Different Opportunities for Pride and Risks of Shame: Visible
Public Support versus Behind-the-Scenes Support
Independently Helping Others
Non-disadvantaged youth could feel proudly independent when they vol-
unteered, knowing that they had freely chosen to help others. The Re-
gional YEP held a food drive one Martin Luther King Day. Standing in an
upscale grocery store next to the fresh ower display one frigid winter
day, behind a shopping cart semi-full of donated Cheerios, canned mine-
strone soup, and toilet paper for the food pantry, Siobhan, who was not
disadvantaged, smiled at the food that she had bravely coaxed out of
busy shoppers. “I feel really great! I feel like I really did a lot of good
work today.”
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30 • Chapter 2
Non-disadvantaged youth volunteers could also feel more independent
than disadvantaged volunteers; their support was less publicly visible.
Caroline, for example, beamed with pride at an awards ceremony for
teen volunteers; her mother had driven her to all the Regional YEP meet-
ings; made sure that Caroline had sent in documentation of each hour she
worked; driven her to each volunteer engagement, made sure she had
made “good choices”; and made sure that Caroline had felt free in mak-
ing all of her choices. The fact that her mother was doing all of this work,
funded by her own family income, was not up for public scrutiny; her
mother’s expenditure of time, fossil fuel, and effort was not a public, po-
litical issue on which anyone would need to vote or justify in public. In
fact, part of what made her mother’s care so good was that it seemed so
freely and happily given; she made it seem not to be “work” at all. She hid
in the crowd so that Caroline could shine for having helped other people,
in her own spare time, fueled by her own inspiration. Such pride could
blossom when a caregiver provided quiet, invisible support, subtly clear-
ing the way for the youth volunteer to feel autonomous and thus, eventu-
ally, to take responsibility.11
Outstripping the Odds, and Being a Good Representative of One’s Category
While they rarely spoke of taking pride in helping distant others, dis-
advantaged youth volunteers had other sources of pride. First, if they
were “minorities,” they could feel like proud representatives of their ra-
cial or ethnic category. As Marisol put it in another of the many publicity-
oriented questionnaires that Community House youth lled out about
their civic involvement, she worked as a volunteer in order “to show that
our community is not as bad as its reputation.” In contrast, in various
questionnaires, non-disadvantaged white teens wrote that they hoped
that their volunteering would show that teenagers were not as bad as the
reputation of teenagers.
Second, disadvantaged volunteers could feel proud for having beaten
the odds. Knowing the grim statistical predictions for people in their so-
cial category, disadvantaged youth assumed that using civic engagement
to give themselves a boost made perfect sense. Samia, for example, frankly
stated in meetings that she was using her volunteer work to get what she
knew she deserved: a scholarship to college. When the local newspaper
gave them yet another questionnaire, the teens at Community House
crafted their responses together:
Samia (laughing): Would it be arrogant if I said, “I volunteer to get
money to go to college?”
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 31
Emily: Maybe you could put it differently, like “I volunteer to work
toward future possibilities for myself?”
Nancy [employee of United Way]: Say, “I volunteer to secure a place
for myself in the future.” Or no: “to secure a scholarship.” Or no: “I
volunteer to secure a place in college.”
Samia sets to writing: “Secure a scholarship?” What did you say I’m
saying? What were your words again?
[Nancy repeats what she had told Samia to write]
The resulting newspaper article mentioned the volunteers’ ethnic and ra-
cial backgrounds, and said where they lived, thus making it clear that
they were poor. These youths’ motive—using volunteering to get money
for college—was worth cheering, when coming from someone who was
as smart, motivated, and in need of money as Samia was. Samia was sup-
posed to use volunteering to earn the money, through her own hard work.
Volunteering could lessen her feeling of, and appearance of, dependence.
The result was another harmonious, possibly respectful reconciliation of
the Empowerment Project’s missions of promoting civic engagement and
helping the needy.
Three years later, Samia did indeed receive a small scholarship. An-
other news article reported on this triumph, thus boosting Community
House’s already good public image even more, demonstrating to poten-
tial funders that their money would be well spent.
Pride in Independence for Disadvantaged Youth: Incessant Bake Sales,
Car Washes, and Lemonade Stands
Another common solution to the problem of disadvantaged youths’ con-
spicuous, publicly displayed dependence was to make the youth partici-
pants raise the funds for their programs themselves. Earning the money
was supposed to make them look and feel more independent. This resolu-
tion of Empowerment Projects’ tensions was much less harmonious than
the one just described, however, because the fundraising never raised any
signi cant amount of money, and what money it did raise was unreliable.
As moral and economic education, Community House’s constant spa-
ghetti dinners, burrito dinners, car washes, rummage sales, and other
fundraisers gave members potentially good lessons in self-suf ciency, cre-
ativity, counting change, and tallying pro ts against expenses. They were
like the American family tradition of the Sunday lemonade stand in the
front yard—the lemons, sugar, cups, and ice cost more than the earnings,
but if the parents can afford it, it can be worth the sociable entertainment
Eliasoph.indb 31Eliasoph.indb 31 1/5/2011 10:47:36 AM1/5/2011 10:47:36 AM
32 • Chapter 2
and the lessons in economics and arithmetic. It was the same in the youth
programs—projects like those were sometimes great fun, but, as an orga-
nizer joked at one meeting, “the forty-seven dollars our bake sale raised
paid for the ingredients. But the cookies sure were good!”
If the children do not raise enough money, nobody says that a family
should collapse, but in a program like Community House, the urgency
and relentlessness of the fundraising made collapse look like a very real
possibility. This made it hard to avoid thinking of the goal as being
money, rather than a lesson and a fun afternoon activity. Instead of feel-
ing like a solution to inequality, a route to empowered self-suf ciency, the
endless fundraising became yet another kind of deprivation. Disadvan-
taged young people had to raise funds for their own upkeep; their wealth-
ier counterparts did not.
At one meeting among adults, Emily suddenly grew angry when she
thought that the young people’s fundraising strayed from the lemonade
stand motif:
Emily proudly told the Board of Directors [a group of volunteers, mostly
older women, that meets monthly, in the evening] that a local pizza
joint, Hardcore Pizza, offered to donate a dollar for every whole pizza
customers bought, if they mentioned Community House’s name. Trium-
phantly, she added, “It was the KIDS who went and asked Clementina
(that’s the owner’s name) themselves! They really took initiative!”
We all exclaimed about how great that was, that the kids were so
self-reliant.
Emily added, “That’s what I keep teaching them—to be self-reliant,
take initiative.”
We all agreed enthusiastically that that was important, just what kids
need, etc.
Emily abruptly changed key, to a distinctly minor one, saying, “All the
kids ever do is fundraising—all our workshops are on fundraising, how
to write grants how to get money. There’s like no cultural enrichment
or music or arts programming or anything.”
She continued, in the resentful tone of a mother who cannot provide the
best for her children, to describe the stimulating, expensive art, music,
and theater school that wealthier children attended. Another time, she
said it was “unfair” to make her kids raise funds for their own care, while
non-disadvantaged youth automatically have more “options,” more room
for personal “inspiration,” as Empowerment Projects promise, to choose
chemistry or ceramics, cooking or bassoon. Emily’s complaint was not
a sign that she favored “hand-outs” to the poor, as some might imagine.
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 33
On the contrary, she very strictly and frequently told participants that
they should “not expect something for nothing,” neither from adult vol-
unteers nor from anyone else. When, for example, adult volunteers cooked
with participants, Emily made sure that the young people cleaned the
kitchen themselves.
Then, on top of it, after participants had succeeded in making this clever
fundraising deal with Hardcore Pizza, the pizza place went bankrupt! The
lessons about self-suf ciency had to have very low stakes; the program’s
fate could not depend on funds raised in lemonade stand–like lessons.
Most funding agencies recognized this and did not actually expect youth
volunteers’ fundraising to make the programs entirely self-sustaining, but
the nonstop fundraising sent youth participants a different message.
In a twisted way, the unspoken message that they perceived was very
correct: the programs’ existence did, in fact, depend on kids’ nonstop
fundraising, because the fundraising worked as a symbol for funders who
thought that becoming self-propelled volunteers who plan fundraisers
would help prevent disadvantaged teens from becoming social problems.
Here again, while volunteering was supposed to equalize the two sets of
youth, the incessant fundraising ampli ed a certain, speci c kind of in-
equality between them.
Different Uses of Abstract Knowledge
Learning about Experts’ Statistics as a Form of Direct Experience for
At-Risk Youth
To feel proud about having beaten the odds, disadvantaged youth had to
know what the odds were. For that, broader sociological knowledge was
necessary. When, for example, African Americans were asked to speak
“from their own personal experience,” they often presented statistics. At
one Juneteenth celebration (Juneteenth celebrates the freeing of African
American slaves in Texas; the news of freedom did not arrive in Texas
until two years after the Emancipation Proclamation), for example, a
thirteen-year-old black school boy stood on the podium and said:
Most blacks can’t control themselves because they have such low ex-
pectations on them. There is a 50 percent dropout rate, so the commu-
nity makes it tough for black males like me. It’s very tough to get off
that thing they set up for us.
Learning about dropout rates can help someone like this boy see how he
t into the world. Even though he spoke of himself as a “black male,”
with the clinical scent that the phrase bears, at least the statistics gave him
a sense that he was not alone.
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34 • Chapter 2
Messages about statistics and inequality were emphatically not the
messages that most white organizers hoped to teach. They hoped instead
for youth to leave the past behind, and for all races to treat one another
as already equal. When speaking out publicly, youths’ words were sup-
posed to be “from the mouths of babes.” But participants in the Empow-
erment Projects eagerly read the unspoken signs, so they could know
where they stood.
African American adults who addressed youth Empowerment Projects
also often started their speeches with heartfelt lists of grim statistics:
dropout rates, incarceration rates, poverty rates, unemployment rates, il-
literacy rates, single parenthood rates, teen pregnancy rates. They ended
the speeches with rousing calls to boost graduation rates and voting rates
among “our youth”—implicitly meaning blacks, though they could not
say it directly—no matter who the audience was. At one annual Martin
Luther King Day event, for example, an African American speaker de-
voted half of his blazing, furious speech to statistics. “There are exactly
201 black males in ninth grade in the Snowy Prairie public schools. Based
on these statistics, only ten will graduate with college degrees.” At the
end, he ominously declared that if you wanted to learn more about racial
inequality, you could read a book, and he held one up. This speech made
it clear that when he discovered statistics documenting the depth of these
racial inequalities, it was, itself, a shocking, direct, personal experience,
an external veri cation of his personal intuitions, and a trumpet call to
civic participation. In contrast, whites could not give such speeches with-
out risking sounding like they were condemning blacks; and when whites
heard such speeches, they considered them to be abstract descriptions of
blacks, as we will see more directly in a few pages. Learning about oneself
through statistics, and as a member of a category, can certainly be a route
to empowerment, though it is de nitely not the kind of empowerment
that Empowerment Talk promises.
At the same time, disadvantaged youth tended to minimize the prob-
lems that poor people face; they needed to prove to themselves that depri-
vation is surmountable and does not inevitably lead to needy dependence,
because they, themselves, were often the unspoken referent. They did not
necessarily feel damaged, did not want to feel damaged, and certainly did
not want to publicize any damage, if there was any. For example, Domi-
nic’s mother dealt drugs and sometimes took drugs all night long. Land-
lords evicted his family from one apartment after another. They moved in
with relatives, sleeping on their sofas, but nally, the relatives also threw
them out. Dominic was unking school, for reasons that Emily said were
“obvious,” enumerating the list I just gave. But her youth group judged
Dominic culpable anyway, still holding him responsible for his choices,
since his home life was not much different from many of their home lives.
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 35
Community House participants rarely talked about politics in the sense
of “public policy” or elections, but when they did, their conversations
were like their discussions of statistics: rather than imagining “politics”
as a far-away thing that affects someone else, politics seemed close and
personal. One was about the election of President Bush; one boy ex-
claimed, “He’ll take away our rights!” Emily, once again, had to take the
other position, reassuring them by saying that there were many checks
and balances to prevent him from taking away all their rights. In their
very personal, passionate treatment of statistics and politics, it was im-
portant for someone to take the position that the danger was somehow
not insurmountable. It was a game that had to reach an equilibrium:
when Emily did not take the opposing viewpoint, the young people did;
when the young people did not, Emily did.
Since disadvantaged youth were often physically lumped together, it
was easier for them than for non-disadvantaged youth to see themselves as
members of categories. At the Prairie Restoration Project for elementary-
age children, for example:
The kids from Echo Park [a program like Community House for disad-
vantaged kids] don’t have their names on the attendance roster. They
all come in a pack in a school bus, and they all got free yellow t-shirts
with the name of their program on it, so they’re all wearing the same
out t.
In contrast, non-disadvantaged children’s individual names appeared on
an attendance roster, they wore varied clothing, and they trickled into the
room individually, after having been dropped off by their parents. Each
morning, one parent or another described to me the long, fascinating,
funny, or poignant conversation they had had on the way to camp, with
the detail and wonderment that comes with love—intimacy that Empow-
erment Project organizers hoped to democratize, even to youth whose
parents were not so loving, or were in another country, or dead. Through
hundreds of little, tiny reminders like these, the participants in the unique
shirts appeared as individuals, while participants in the uniform shirts
appeared as members of categories and representatives of “their commu-
nity,” as Marisol had put it.
Apolitical Structure Talk: Non-disadvantaged Youth’s Relation to Politics
The non-disadvantaged youth had a very different relationship to politics
and political problems. They used what we can call “Apolitical structure
talk” to speak abstractly about distant others’ problems, often exaggerat-
ing them with a dramatic ourish. Apolitical structure talk demonstrates
that the speaker understands politics rationally, coolly, dispassionately,
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36 • Chapter 2
without taking any of it personally or applying it to anyone he or she
personally knows. People who use it can sound sophisticated, piling on
evidence to depict a hopeless political world, making it easy to feel as if
there is absolutely nothing they can do until structural conditions change,
and that the hopeless conditions have nothing to do with their lives. By
“exempting”12 themselves from the hopeless world, the speakers come
out clean and blameless.
While making posters for the Regional YEP’s food drive, wielding a
paintbrush loaded with gloppy yellow tempera paint, sixteen-year-old VJ
masterfully performed an arms-length analysis, as if he was already imag-
ining himself as a potentially powerful policy maker. He was chatting
with the other teens at his table, casually describing an essay he wrote for
his Advanced Placement English class. He had argued that the murder in
Native Son, in which the poor black servant possibly accidentally kills the
white mistress girl, was absolutely inevitable given the servant’s social
conditions. From his panoramic perch, showing that he understood the
effects of social conditions was a way of saying, “I am compassionate,
broad-minded, and smart. I can paint a completely coherent picture of
society.”
Many university students who came to volunteer in the after-school
programs also sounded like this. Keith, a white volunteer homework
helper, was a Political Science major who came to Community House for
a few months. He eagerly told the elementary school children that their
textbooks were full of absolutely nothing but lies, and that the whole
society is racist from top to bottom. It was clear that he was proud of his
new knowledge, but had not quite gotten far enough to ask himself how
his proud display of solidarity might undermine the third graders’ faith in
their homework or in their teachers—or in him.
Different Ideas for Volunteer Projects: Drawing on
Separate Experiences
Organizers continually asked youth volunteers to identify problems that
affect all youth, not just some youth. Despite organizers’ best intentions,
the non-disadvantaged volunteers’ ideas sounded more universal to orga-
nizers. These youth often felt more comfortable speaking in front of a
group. It was as if their ideas were pre-formatted for easy insertion into
the public arena. As a result, their suggestions more often became the
kernels of the groups’ projects. This created another kind of hidden
inequality.
For example, the purpose of one Regional YEP project was to make
sure that teenagers who drove from town to town at night were subject
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 37
to the same laws in each town. As it stood, in some towns, it was illegal
for sixteen-year-olds to be outside after 10 o’clock; in others, the age or
hour was different; in others, night driving was illegal for teens, but walk-
ing was not. The Regional YEP wanted uniform rules throughout the
county. It took me months to notice that the most active Community
House participants were surprisingly uninvolved in this project. In eld
notes, I chastised myself for being so oblivious:
It was only when I heard Marisol [from Community House] rolling her
eyes and muttering to Samia about how she “didn’t care, didn’t know,
had never been to New Stockholm [one of those towns with the early
curfew rules],” that I, terri c sociologist that I am, noticed that the
whole issue was for kids who drive! It was for kids who drive from one
suburb to another at night; kids who have cars and live in suburbs, not
in Snowy Prairie’s dense public housing projects where most of the
Community House kids lived.
After Marisol said that, I realized that I had never heard of some of
these hamlets, either. There would be no more reason for Marisol or
Raul to go to one of those snowy all-white villages at night than for I,
and no way for them to get there, even if they wanted to. How could I
have not put this together before hearing Marisol grumble, six months
into the project?
Community House members did not have drivers’ licenses. Why had they
not objected sooner? It would have sounded too much like a personal
complaint and would have rudely dampened enthusiasm. I never heard
any organizers noticing that the project made sense only for teens who
drove. Erin had told me earlier that year that many participants did not
have cars, but in this situation, she forgot, probably having been carried
away with enthusiasm for the youth leadership that she hoped to build.
The point is not that the adults did not care about inequality; it was
just hard for them to notice it in this case, as it was for me. When they did
notice that a proposed project bene ted only non-disadvantaged youth,
they slammed the brakes on it. One Regional YEP meeting opened with
the question of what project to do next. VJ and Jenny suggested telling the
high schools to put AP13 grades on a 5.0 scale.
VJ: UCLA demands a 4.3 average!
Jenny: By putting it at 4.0, students don’t challenge themselves enough.
Putting it at 5.0 gives incentives to take harder classes.
Erin agrees: Someone who is taking auto shop might get A’s. Some
student senate/congresses are already doing that [putting grades on a
5.0 scale].
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38 • Chapter 2
Rob Strauss, the head of county youth programs, was usually extremely
enthusiastic when teens made any suggestions at all, or took any initiative
at all. He strongly believed in the principle of participation, as a good in
itself. This evening, he just sat silently, with a slight grimace. After the
meeting, indirect criticizing the project, he told me that he wanted proj-
ects to include all youth, not just a few, not just those who were already
leaders and at the top of their classes. Probably, he was imagining a cer-
tain race and class of youth in those AP classes, but he could not say that,
even behind-the-scenes to me.
Usually, the fact that youth had gotten together to do something was
all that mattered to adults, regardless of a project’s substance, but in this
case, Rob Strauss’s conspicuous silence made his disapproval clear, though
he never gave the youth volunteers any hints to explain it. After VJ and
Jenny suggested the project a few more times, the Regional YEP still did
not take it on. Eventually, lacking any enthusiasm from these usually en-
thusiastic adults, VJ and Jenny dropped the proposal.
Different Maps of the City
Even deciding on a meeting place indirectly revealed inequality between
youth volunteers. There was no socially neutral space to meet. For a
while, the Regional YEP met at Community House, but some organizers,
and most non-disadvantaged, suburban youth, said it was dirty and in-
convenient, since it was not near their neighborhoods or any highway
exits that would make access by car easy from the city’s green-lawned
periphery.
By day, Community House basement rooms house a program for
sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who had been kicked out of high school.
The dirty walls are covered with their infantile projects—crayoned leaf
prints, lumpy collages about pop music stars of the past, “reports” on
other countries like, “Life in Britten” with a picture cut out of a maga-
zine of a queen and a castle (one of the suburban YEP kids joked,
“Britten: rhymes with ‘kitten!’”)—projects like those a seven-year-old
might bring home.
So we moved the meetings, to the bleak gym of the Prevention Cen-
ter, way out in the outskirts of town. This was more convenient for the
suburban youth because it was right off the six-lane highway they took
to drive their cars into downtown Snowy Prairie from the various sub-
urban neighborhoods and towns. Glaring ceiling lights, which one youth
member described as “interrogation lamps, like in a torture scene,”
made us all look as if we had blank eye sockets. Some older men,
all black, had a GED class [“General Equivalency Degree,” that helps
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 39
people who have not nished high school to graduate, sometimes 20 or
30 years after they dropped out] in the next room down the grim hall.
The scene alone, and the dif culties in choosing a place to meet, says
something: The PC Building made volunteering seem somehow clini-
cal, a prescription, a vaccination.
So, the group voted to move the meeting place a third time, a couple
of months later, this time about twenty minutes away, to a posh of ce
building with cushioned swiveling armchairs, plush carpeting, framed
prints and original art on the walls. But that was too far from Commu-
nity House; the Community House kids—who had all voted against the
move—would always be late, since they would have to wait until Emily
closed up Homework Club at 6, to drive them to the meetings that
started at 6 across town. So, the meetings moved a fourth time. There is
simply no neutral common ground in segregated cities like this!
The two sets of volunteers even seemed to hold different maps of Snowy
Prairie, literally making it hard for them to give each other directions to
local addresses—especially when disadvantaged youth tried to describe
where they lived. If, for example, a disadvantaged member usually took
the bus and a non-disadvantaged member drove, they had different ideas
of time and distances. They had different landmarks: the library, univer-
sity, or upscale mall for non-disadvantaged youth versus the disadvan-
taged youths’ internal maps that focused on the bus transfer center, free
health clinic, and the Burger King in front of the hidden Buckingham
Estates housing project. Buckingham Estates could be found only if one
knew that the sole entrance was through one particular Burger King
parking lot. The housing project was hidden behind it, with no city street
connecting it to another city street. Everyone could locate the rst list—
the library and the mall—even if it was a little hard for the disadvantaged
youth. Non-disadvantaged youths’ maps simply did not include places
like Buckingham Estates, and more generally, the lives of the disadvan-
taged members were opaque to their more af uent counterparts.
Sometimes, the baf ed non-disadvantaged teens puzzled amongst each
other over interactions that they did not understand. But if they intuited
that the mystery was somehow related to other youth volunteers’ poverty
or ethnicity, no one gave them the tools to nish making the connection.
For example, VJ told Jenny and some others, in a small meeting of some
YEP members, that Bonita and Marisol sometimes gave the same phone
number on contact sheets, and sometimes gave different ones. He said
that when he tried to call Bonita’s house (or apartment—he was not sure
which, he said) (which was apparently only sometimes also Marisol’s, he
said) to remind her of a meeting, some guy answered who asked, “Bonita
who?” and practically would not let him talk. VJ speculated that the guy
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40 • Chapter 2
was not her dad, because the next time he called, some other guy an-
swered. He could not gure out why there were so many phone numbers
and so many guys and why they were so worried about his talking to her,
but he could not ask these questions—especially not to Bonita herself—
without being impossibly rude. I silently wondered to myself if the num-
ber of guys and the quickly changing addresses had something to do with
her parents’ and uncles’ stream of migration in and out of Mexico. If you
want to make sense of families that are different from your own, one way
is to ask questions, but since adult organizers had not designed a way to
make the questions seem less rude, posing them was awkward (and pos-
sibly could reveal legal problems, in this case, if the relatives did not have
green cards, though the non-disadvantaged youth may not have known
what a green card was).
Organizers and disadvantaged youth could each talk about inequality
to their own groups in a concrete, local way. It was only the non-
disadvantaged youth who could not decipher it. Bringing people together
as equals was hard in these baf ing conditions, but organizers assumed
that talking about the differences might have taken too much time, or be
uninspiring.
Trying to Ignore Inequality
These Empowerment Projects existed partly because of social inequality,
but did not have enough time for a complex, potentially explosive discus-
sion of it. They could not scare away any needy, fragile youth who might
be healed if they became volunteers, and organizers assumed that discus-
sion would scare them away. So, developing an organizational style that
could smooth over inequality without having to discuss it was urgent.
One approach was simply to minimize the inequality, or change the
subject. After one Martin Luther King Day event, Liz and I were with
some middle-schoolers who had to conduct a “service” project because
they had broken a school rule. Liz, their music teacher, had gotten roped
into leading the group.
We were walking through the icy parking lot to Liz’s new, sparkling
teal-blue minivan. Liz was going to drive us to Community House, to
sort books for a charity drive. Liz is white and the kids are all non-
white. They are relentlessly quizzing her about how she can afford such
a large vehicle, teasing her, asking her where she lives, how big her
house is, comparing her neighborhood to theirs.
She kept answering that it was not so big, not so expensive, not so
fancy, not very different from their car, home, neighborhood. Rather than
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 41
acknowledging the differences, she was trying to be egalitarian by mini-
mizing them, but it was obvious to all that she is in a different class
(partly because they know that her husband is a lawyer).
Evading the question made sense, however. The dif culty of explaining
inequality in Empowerment Projects was driven home to me when the
Urban League, an organization for the promotion of African Americans’
rights, held its annual Martin Luther King Day Pancake Breakfast in a
high school cafeteria. Most of the two hundred or so people who came
were non-white, but a few white social workers, teachers, politicians, pro-
gram leaders like Emily, and government of cials like Rob Strauss always
attended, probably making it Snowy Prairie’s most racially diverse public
gathering. Most of the event was a ceremony for minority youth who
received awards from various NGOs for having outstripped all odds. The
premise of the event was impossible to explain to non-disadvantaged,
white audience members:
A few of the middle-class whites [the politicians, teachers, social work-
ers, many of whom I recognized] attended with their own children. One
white kid—maybe seven years old—ruminated to his politician father:
“Why do they get awards for playing ute and getting B’s? What’s so
great about that?” The father whispered a response; it was very short
and I couldn’t hear it.
How could the father realistically explain this event to his son, who did
not consider playing ute and getting B’s to be very amazing? It would be
impossible without offering a whole sociology class and lots of statistics,
directly addressing poverty and racism’s grave effects, if there are any, on
the everyday lives of children. Discussing it would have required a whole
semester’s worth of sociology classes!
The programs’ usual solution was absolutely no discussion of inequal-
ity, so knowledge about it came oozing out of the seams where the “civic”
and “protection of the needy” sides of the programs were loosely stitched
together. For example, the youth-led celebration of Martin Luther King
Day became an inspiring symbol of interracial unity in Snowy Prairie.
The local community television station played the event over and over
again for weeks, displaying the diverse youth audience as a symbol of
hope for racial harmony and the spirit of volunteerism. But up close, the
symbol wobbled under the weight of big social divisions between the two
sets of youth.
While waiting for the morning speeches to start, the non-disadvantaged
teens sat at their tables talking about their cars, talking about where
they parked their cars, about what kind of repairs their cars needed,
about where they were driving after the event, talking on their cell phones
(this was several years ago, when few people in Snowy Prairie had them),
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42 • Chapter 2
buying the conference center’s overpriced coffee, bagels, fruit, and jam.
Meanwhile, the disadvantaged kids arrived in big clusters, in community
center vans or city buses. They could not afford the food, so they had to
wait to eat for four more hours, when free pizza and soda was distrib-
uted. Age differences overlay race and class differences: the event was de-
signed for kids ages twelve and up, and indeed, all the non-disadvantaged
youth were in their mid-teens. In contrast, the disadvantaged youth were
of all ages, down to age four, because, as organizers sometimes remarked,
their working parents needed a free, safe place to send them, on this day
off for schools that was not a day off for most workplaces. The non-
disadvantaged youth had only themselves to take care of; the disad-
vantaged youth had to worry about their younger brothers and sisters.
Physically and socially, the two sets of young people came on different
routes, and rarely mingled.
The event’s theme of universal, unconditional love, equality, and unity
took on a strange avor in this setting. Every year, all participants were
given folders with this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. inscribed
on them:
Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to
have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and
your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Ar-
istotle to serve. . . . You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated
by love.
Speakers echoed the theme of grace and service, of moral wholeness re-
gardless of your station in life. One said, for example, that “if you serve,
you are blessed, regardless of your I.Q. or socioeconomic status” (leaving
me to wonder if some kids thought, “Oh, good, so even though I’m dumb,
I can serve!?”). Inspiration and civic engagement could, according to this
message, cure you; you are helped when the spirit moves you to help oth-
ers. The spoken message, however, was nearly the opposite, aimed at the
importance of doing well in school, going to college, being sure that your
subject and your verb agree.
Implicitly, speakers imagined the African Americans as the audience for
this spoken message, and this message, aimed at one set of youth, trans-
formed as it entered another set of youths’ ears. One speaker, the black
president of the local Urban League, pitched a message aimed straight at
the African American youth:
Achievement matters. One out of two African Americans will drop out
of high school in Snowy Prairie. . . . [He gives more statistics about
the awful dropout rates among blacks, and then adds some about
Latinos.]
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 43
And at another Martin Luther King Day event, the same speaker said,
after offering similar statistics:
If we don’t start taking achievement seriously, we’ll continue to get
what we’ve got [here is that implicit “we” again], and that’s unaccept-
able. They’re the next group of people that’s gonna take care of us in
the twilight of our years. I’ll want someone who got B’s, not D’s, taking
care of me, who was there when the lesson was taught about how to
take care of people, not out on the street or having a party. I’d want
someone who !
So, you might not need to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve, but at
least you need pretty good grades! Participants overheard stories that
were intended for others. In order to make sense of these interactions, the
non-disadvantaged youth had to know that getting B’s was a good goal
for someone else, but not for them; as we heard earlier, their aim was a
higher-than-A average achieved through AP credits.
These messages, aimed at one set of youth but overheard by another,
further divided the already racially segregated audience in this segregated
city. In the rst speech, the speaker went from citing statistics to scolding
a knot of black boys who were dgeting and laughing in the back, point-
ing to them and saying to them—and to everyone else, of course—
“There’s the problem right there.”
When one audience was not separate from another, one story split in
two. They heard the same message, but got very different things from it.
Both sets of youth knew what social categories were relevant, and who
was the intended audience, or the speeches would have been gibberish.
They could not mention knowledge of their differences, but they had to
use that knowledge, anyway, just to decipher speech and action in Em-
powerment Projects. Empowerment Projects’ diversity and blending made
accidental crisscrossings of messages frequent. Youth volunteers came to
recognize this strange new form of inequality, when they kept interacting
on predictably unequal footing.
Jokes about Inequality: The Baby-Blue Cardigan with Pearlized Buttons
However taboo it was to mention inequality, it was impossible to hide,
and so, an element of organizational style developed: the disadvantaged
youth volunteers produced a constant undertow of jokes about their non-
disadvantaged counterparts. At one Regional YEP meeting, Marisol,
from Community House, got up and announced, loudly and proudly:
All members of the Regional YEP will get a shirt to wear at events: A
light-weight, baby blue cardigan with pearlized buttons!
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44 • Chapter 2
She triumphantly held up the model sweater and grinned. Before the meet-
ing, the Community House girls giggled among each other before any of
the white kids had arrived, saying that it was “the ugliest sweater you’ve
ever seen.” The whole thing was a joke.
But at Marisol’s announcement, the meeting room lled with alarm.
Jenny, baby blue eyes blazing with fury, demanded, “What will the
boys wear?”
Siobhan [the studious white girl with whom I gathered groceries, who
was bound for an excellent private college in the fall]: I would wear
that kind of thing!
Lisa (another white kid from a suburb): I would, too!
Another white girl, sounding really worried: But what would the guys
wear?
A fourth white girl: They’re not pink, they’re blue. That’s why they’re
blue!
The Community House girls did not let on that it was a joke, and kept it
a oat over months of meetings. Finally, they had to apologize, clarifying
that it was just a joke, based on a dirty sweater they had found at Com-
munity House.
The sweater in question was just the kind of thing Jenny wore. When-
ever she spoke in meetings, usually about her full schedule of tennis, eld
hockey, and other sports, or about her car, her thin face glowing white
and pink above her baby-blue clothes, the big, dark Community House
girls sat (somehow, always behind her) like the Greek chorus, clad in
black and red, slick or sexy but never pastel-colored or femme, making
silly faces. At one Regional YEP meeting,
Jenny bounced in, looking nervous and tennis-y, blond hair and braces
gleaming. You had to laugh at the contrast, and Marisol and Samia did
[though I didn’t!]. They mumbled to each other, “Oooh, they have ten-
nis at Sandstrom High. Ooooh, tennis at Sandstrom High. Well, gotta
go get into my game of tennis.” Jenny didn’t hear, but I was sitting right
next to Marisol, so I did.
At another meeting:
Marisol, Bonita, and Marie were arranged in a semicircle behind Jenny,
and when she announced that everyone should come to Sandstrom
High’s tennis game, the Greek chorus behind her started giggling, seem-
ingly out of control. Marisol hid her mouth in her hand and looked
down after a while, but her eyes were crinkled up into a big giggle.
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 45
Covertly, they had made the baby-blue cardigan with pearlized buttons
into a symbol, signi cant only to them, agging the differences between
the two teams.
What I had not put together, until scrutinizing my eld notes a year later,
was that a very similar baby-blue cardigan had appeared at a meeting once
before. A charity used part of this Regional YEP meeting as a focus group,
to get ideas for its upcoming Holiday Gift drive (nonpro ts and charities
often used the Regional YEP as a focus group). Erin suggested
a V-neck like yours (looking at VJ). VJ, always the fashion model, gets
all his clothes from Abercrombie and Fitch.
Someone else added: Baby-blue cardigans like the one Jenny’s wearing
[from the Gap, which was relatively expensive at the time, compared to
other local clothing stores].
Of course, the Community House girls snickered, and it may have been
here that their joke about the baby-blue cardigan with pearlized buttons
began (though the one that the girls found at Community House looked
very much like Jenny’s, it must not have been, or she would have been
happy that they had found her long-lost sweater).
Samia, Bonita, and Marie often joked about racism when they were
hidden from their non-disadvantaged, white counterparts. The three girls
were in one of the basement rooms at Community House, doing their
homework, with the door closed. A meeting was about to begin in the
room, and I entered early, inadvertently bursting in on their privacy. There
was a parody list: “Marie’s Favorite Things to Say,” on the blackboard:
“I’m not a racist—I don’t care what color you are!” (mocking teachers’
standard line at Snowy Prairie High School. Marie, venting to me a
year later, repeated that pious line, saying it was part of her reason
for hating school, almost dropping out, and doing poorly her last
year—which was a shame considering how smart she was).
“I (heart) Jesus and you should too.” (mocking Christians)
“Snowy Prairie is the best place on earth.” (mocking everyone)
Also backstage (when Emily and I were the only adults there) were the
standard American jokes about different kinds of race traitors and con-
formists: caramel apples (brown on the outside, white on the inside), ba-
nanas (yellow outside, but white inside), etc., that most Americans know.
Very young or inexperienced African American volunteers sometimes
spoke directly about wealth and poverty in front of non-disadvantaged
youth and organizers, but quickly learned to stop, to put their comments
backstage, or to transform them into low snickers. The Martin Luther
King Day planning committee decided to send participants to work in
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46 • Chapter 2
soup kitchens, but then discovered that soup kitchens would be closed on
the holiday:
A black volunteer: We could do it in someone’s house, if it’s reeeeally
big. (Turning straight to the two white sisters in the meeting) You’all
have a big house?
One of the white sisters: No, but there’s a mansion nearby.
I saw the repressed knowledge of differences between the two sets of
youth burst into outright con ict once, in an evening meeting to plan the
year’s Martin Luther King Day. As in other meetings of the civic engage-
ment projects, disadvantaged volunteers introduced themselves by nam-
ing the programs (like Community House, Urban League, or the Boys
and Girls Club) through which they had come. Non-disadvantaged youth
introduced themselves by saying more varied things about themselves, as
individuals: what schools they attended, or that they liked to volunteer,
or what issue concerned them. As usual, the non-disadvantaged youth
had come alone, in their own cars, not in groups, in community center
vans. As usual, the non-disadvantaged volunteers were all teenagers, while
the disadvantaged youth ranged in age, from age seventeen down to six.
All together, about thirty youths and ve adults sat at folding tables in the
Teen Community Center, a storefront drop-in center with windowless
walls decorated with murals portraying faces of racially diverse teens in-
teracting joyously.
I was at a table with a group of black elementary school students who
were in an after-school group organized by the Urban League. By about
9 o’clock, they were getting overtired and dgety—most had not been
home since 7 a.m. Their organizer, an affectionate, petite white Ameri-
corps volunteer, kept gently saying, “Are you listening?” and “I don’t
want you hurting the table” to a tired-looking eight-year-old who kept
writhing in his seat and hammering on the table.
Finally, Denali, the daughter of two lawyers, exploded in frustration,
chastising the writhing, hammering, dgeting, inattentive crowd. She said
that if kids were really going to organize the event and not leave it to
adults, then they had to take it seriously and pay attention. Usually, the
organizational style de ected such outbursts.
Conclusion: Being a Problem, or Solving Other
People’s Problems?
Empowerment Projects prescribe civic volunteering as a method of grad-
ually overcoming inequality, step-by-step, by working together, shoulder-
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Participating under Unequal Auspices • 47
to-shoulder. The process helped youth like Samia, the Community House
participant. She beat the odds, became a proud, effective, and dedicated
volunteer, and eventually won a university scholarship. Focusing on
hopeful potential, they acted as if Raul might very well become a dedi-
cated volunteer some day, though he was not one yet. In the meantime, it
kept him safe for the evenings at least, and possibly coaxed him into be-
coming an active volunteer some day. At its best, this process not only
helped someone like Samia win the university scholarship; it also some-
times helped disadvantaged youth learn how they t into the bigger pic-
ture and to see that their outstripping the odds was itself an achievement
about which they could be proud.
While some volunteers like Raul might grow into the high expectations
that organizers had for them, the process did not make social inequality
vanish. Bringing diverse youth together also created a kind of inequality.
“Being” a problem is nothing new for African Americans: “How does it
feel to be a problem?” W. E. B. DuBois famously asked at the turn of the
twentieth century (1998 [1910]). It is not new, but was playing out here,
in organizations in which participants had to speak as if they were equals
when everyone knew they were not, and when they knew that they were
together because of programs that existed for the purpose of preventing
some but not all of them from becoming problems.
To understand how racial or class inequalities come to feel real in Em-
powerment Programs, we have to examine how participants enter the
scene, for different purposes, with different invitations in hand. The two
different sets of youth enter the civic engagement projects on different
routes, riding in on different trajectories from different pasts and toward
different predicted futures.14 In Empowerment Projects, their trajectories
momentarily crossed, and they were supposed to leave those pasts and
futures behind, to bond as equals, new and fresh and untainted by past or
current conditions. Their unspoken differences—differences that every-
one recognized anyway—drove a wedge between them. However orga-
nizers tried to resolve the perplexities of “showing respect” in such so-
cially diverse groups, their answers did not obliterate inequality, but
incarnated it in new ways. Participants ferreted out the reasons for their
own participation, and for their organization’s existence, no matter what
organizers said explicitly to the contrary. Learning to do this was, in it-
self, a valuable lesson, though not the intended one.
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CHAPTER 3
“The Spirit that Moves Inside You”: Puzzles of Using
Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer’s Problems
“Being Willing to Fail Every Day”: Public Speech about the Spirit
that Moves Inside You
A favorite speaker at Snowy Prairie’s volunteer events was a Jamaican
musician, a born-again Christian, Ezeky’el. At one event, his assignment
was to describe the inspiration for volunteering and tie it to the day’s
theme of “leadership.” Pacing across the school auditorium’s stage, build-
ing up a sweat, tossing his clean dreadlocks, he said:
Leadership. That’s what they want me to talk about. It means taking
risks, joy and pain, risking getting lost. You have to know what it is to
be lost. How many of you have been lost?
(enthusiastic shouting from the audience, as if at a prayer revival
meeting)
So you know how it is to be lost. Leadership: It’s failing. Failing every
day . . . Leadership: It’s sharing—some days it feels like give, give
give . . . it’s a spirit that moves inside you. Nobody can see it, but you
know it’s there.
“What a moving message,” I thought to myself. “This is why volunteering
is so important! You recognize the unfathomable mystery of each other;
‘nobody can see it, but you know it’s there.’ What is respect, if not awe
before this human mystery?”
Empowerment Talk suggests that volunteering is good because it is soul-
changing, and organizers embraced this mission. To ful ll this mission of
deeply inspiring and transforming the volunteers, volunteering would be
hard. To ful ll the mission of helping needy volunteers themselves—youth
who were “not the usual leader type,” who lacked con dence—however,
organizers had to make sure volunteering was easy.
These two missions came into possible tension with each other, and
with a third: helping others, which usually requires knowledge, or even
expertise, not just inspiration. There was a possible three-way dissonance
between inspiring all of the volunteers, helping the needy volunteers, and
having the expertise or know-how to help other people. These possible
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Volunteering as Therapy • 49
discords, and their various resolutions, harmonious and otherwise, are
the topic of this chapter.
Soul-Searching and Inspiration versus Easy and Accessible Help for
the Needy Volunteer
Youth Empowerment Projects in Snowy Prairie never did those kinds of
soul-changing projects that Ezeky’el proposed. It would be too hard and
would scare off potential volunteers. The contrast became clear when
youth participants divided up into smaller groups right after his speech,
when Samia, Bonita, Marie, and Marisol, Emily’s four most active volun-
teers, led a workshop that they had designed on “How to Start a Group.”
Marisol stood at the head of the classroom, in front of a group of
about thirty teenagers, many resting their heads on their desks, looking
pale, tired, and grumpy—grumpy because it was early morning on a
school holiday, and many were there because their parents had made
them go, so that they would not be home having sex and taking drugs.
The day’s slogan, written on folders and posters, was: “It’s a Day On, Not
a Day Off,” but many participants would have preferred a day off.
Marisol: How many of you have ever volunteered? (Lots raise hands.)
Marisol: What did you do?
Voices from audience pitch in:
Concessions stand at a soccer game.
Cleaned litter on a highway.
Volunteered at Snowy Prairie Festival.
Blood drive.
Volunteered in my church.
Organizer of a rural Youth Center, turning to the kid who said he
cleaned a highway: Is it a lot of work, or not too bad?”
Youth participant: It’s a mile stretch, you go 3–4 times a year; it’s not
too bad.
Next, there was a long discussion about how easy it was to pick up high-
way litter, about dates, and about how you did not have to do it in the
winter.
These easy, half-day activities did not easily mesh with the unfathom-
able, mysterious good that was supposed to come from sel essly serving,
buoyed on the vast internal ocean where Emerson said that the most
personal meets the most universal. Programs needed to attract as many
youth as possible, by making it sound easy, comfortable, and fun, not
risky, terrifying, or “failing every day,” as Ezeky’el put it. The needy young
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50 • Chapter 3
people whom organizers most wanted to reach were those who were al-
ready failing, and organizers guessed that they would not want to set
themselves up intentionally to risk even more failure. And so, all youth
participants knew that their volunteering was almost never full of “risks
and pain.” You could not get “lost.”
Of course, having the litter picked up is better than not, but that was
not the groups’ main point. Their hope was that just having a taste of
volunteering might whet a few participants’ appetites for more serious,
soul-changing work. Organizers spoke about the projects such as litter
cleanups as if they were just like the kind of self-directed, soul-changing,
soul-threatening work that Ezeky’el described.
The Regional YEP’s visit to the Pediatric Hospital was typical of the
tension between doing something soul-changing and dif cult, doing some-
thing easy that could help them overcome their own problems, and help-
ing others. At the group’s meeting, VJ, a non-disadvantaged volunteer,
described in a proud but humble voice:
I went to Disneyland over spring break and there was this family that
had taken their child there. She was terminally ill, and going there was
her one big wish. She was so skinny and pale, but she was so happy to
be there! They let me go around with her one day—I’ll never forget
it—I was just so—I mean, I couldn’t go to work for four days after
that. I couldn’t leave the house without thinking of this little girl and
everything she was going through. I wrote about it for my college en-
trance essay and gave it to my English teacher. He really liked it—he
said it was so touching, it actually made him shed a tear.
His story evoked the heartbreaking, spiritual ideal that Ezeky’el’s speech
had evoked—something life-changing, frightening, touching one’s soul,
coming straight from a common humanity, personal, fervent, direct. Such
experience was rare, and to be treasured (in VJ’s case, it also turned
out to be good for the college application, as the English teacher’s tear
attests).
The youth group was excited by the idea, and thought of throwing a
party for the sick children, but it turned out the hospital had rules about
visitors. A party would be too much work for the hospital: it would ex-
pose both volunteers and patients to unpredictable germs, and each in-
gredient of each brownie and cupcake would need approval, for patients
who were on special diets. So the volunteers decided that reading to the
sick children would be good. But then, they learned that volunteers
younger than eighteen years old required intense supervision, and that
would have demanded a large investment of the hospital staff’s time—too
large, unless the youth group could pledge to volunteer weekly for a year
or more, which was a promise that the volunteers could not make since
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Volunteering as Therapy • 51
turnover in the group was too high for that. Something more than inspi-
ration was needed; expertise that might develop in the course of a long
time commitment was also needed. Without that, there was almost no
possibility of direct contact with the patients.
VJ reported to the group, “This policy might change soon, especially if
the Regional YEP shows itself to be responsible. So, in the meantime, the
hospital suggested helping decorate the walls for Christmas.” Fellow vol-
unteers eagerly approved the new plan.
When the time came, only four of the twenty or so Regional YEP teens
participated, along with about fteen local university students, who had
also come for a one-day, plug-in volunteering opportunity through their
own service-learning program. Still, the original inspiration was so per-
fectly in harmony with Empowerment Talk, Regional YEP members and
organizers often retold the tale of the hospital visit for at least three years
(minus the part about only four Regional YEP members coming).
Some easy, non–soul-changing projects were so appealing, they at-
tracted too many volunteers who gathered too much stuff. In a meeting
of the Community House Board of Directors, we talked about the annual
rummage sale, which always included hundreds of pounds of books. The
director said, “The guy who donates used books runs a used book store,
and can give as many books as we can take in our car