Give ‘Em a Hand

So you didn’t rush to enlist when President Clinton asked America to become a nation of volunteers?

Don’t feel bad--neither did your neighbors.

In fact, since the president’s April plea from the “Summit for America’s Future,” the response from local would-be volunteers has been . . . silence. In dozens of interviews with heads of Southern California groups who use volunteer workers, almost all said they had few or no recruits as a result of Clinton’s exhortation.

Surprisingly, most of these authorities believe the reason so few individuals answered the summit call is because so many are volunteering already. There are about 1 million volunteer workers within L.A. city limits, estimates Karen Wagener, director of the city’s Volunteer Bureau. (The figure comes from a 1995 study by Independent Sector, which represents nonprofit organizations.)

The rest of the people don’t have time, can’t decide what to do or haven’t the foggiest notion how to go about applying. And most are probably not aware of the vast array of jobs, odd and otherwise, available to those who request payment only in satisfaction.

Soon, some people will be able to volunteer through their jobs; the summit meeting spurred 500 corporations nationwide to start programs in which employees can participate to help young people. At the same time, an intensive debate percolates behind the scenes about how to best use unpaid labor in a fast-changing world.

Here is a look at a composite day in the whirlwind volunteer life of Southern California. And at a downsized society, in which volunteers are so increasingly essential that they may someday have to be conscripted.

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Midnight, Los Angeles: “Is this guy a crank, or what?”

If he’s not, the man on the phone will blow himself up within minutes.

The suicide hotline volunteer huddles hurriedly with her supervisor. Almost instantly, they locate a card on file that matches the conversational MO of the caller. Tonight it’s his left leg that was shot off in Vietnam; last time, it was his right leg. It’s a crank, not a crisis, they decide. They send help anyway, just in case.

The volunteer, 26, is one of 80 who work 24 hours a day, answering 40,000 calls a year at the Didi Hirsch suicide hotline, the only 24-hour volunteer hotline in L.A.

Most callers are not cranks. One recent night, a woman who’d already swallowed a lethal dose of pills called to say she’d changed her mind. Paramedics arrived in time to save her life. “She didn’t want to die,” says the attorney, 51, who volunteers and took the late-night call in the small windowless room where three hotline phones are answered. “She wanted help and a sympathetic ear.”

4:30 a.m., Westwood: In the eerie predawn light, Joseph Choi walks from his dorm to the UCLA Medical Center. His job: to wait in the gray concrete underground parking lot for early-morning surgery patients.

This is no mere ambassadorial task. A few years ago, these patients would have been admitted the night before to prepare for major surgery. But with medical cutbacks, even the very sick and elderly must prepare at home, then drive or be driven to the hospital.

“Many have never been here before. They’re scared and tired, and have no idea where to go until I show them,” says Choi, 20. He is one of 1,200 volunteers working around the clock at UCLA Medical Center in almost every department, even the labs, emergency and operating rooms.

7:45 a.m., Santa Ana: If you’re a felon in Orange County, you might be assigned to probation officer Frank Swimmer. Watch out. This gravel-voiced guy can search and seize without a warrant, order you to school or therapy, tell you where to live or who to hang out with. Never mind that he’s 65, a retired corporate lawyer and doesn’t collect a cent for what some might call hazardous duty.

He spends one 12-hour day each week at the county office, and almost as many hours a day on the phone from home, watching over his 40 adult cases. Swimmer is one of 50 volunteer POs in a program that aims to relieve pressure on the overburdened staff.

Swimmer’s successes keep him going. “It’s not quick or dramatic. You work long and hard to turn each person around. The other day a guy called to thank me, even though I had to put him back in jail twice. He’s been clean and productive for over two years. It doesn’t get better than that.”

By this time, much of Southern California is on the freeways, rushing toward paying jobs, unaware of the city’s vast hidden army of unpaid workers, some of whom may be driving right alongside them.

The volunteers are headed to museums, shelters, the zoo, the dozens of meal preparation centers where food is cooked and delivered to the elderly and the sick, to libraries, schools, sports leagues, literacy and mentoring programs, the civil and criminal courts, probation departments, the Music Center and to all 33 departments of L.A. city government, where 22,000 volunteers each spend an estimated four hours a week helping firefighters, police, and the bureau of engineers, to name a few.

There are numerous opportunities for fantasy fulfillment. Betty Boultinghouse, for example, had dreamed of working with marine life for 70 years when she began volunteering at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. She stayed at it three days a week for the next 10 years. She became the aquarium’s all-time champion feeder. “Betty looked frail but had the energy of 10 when it came to feeding. She had a magic touch,” says Mike Schaadt, director of aquarium exhibits.

Boultinghouse fed the abalone (which reaches up and grabs seaweed out of the feeder’s hand, then “chews it” with the teeth on its tongue). And the sharks (which are nocturnal and have to be awakened at feeding time, which does not make them happy; then food must be placed in front of their noses with a long fork). And her favorite moray eel. She worked with the fervency of a registered nurse, Schaadt says, especially with the temperamental eel, which was finicky and frequently refused to eat. “Betty’s fork work was fantastic. She knew how to entice him. They were pals.”

Before Boultinghouse died last year, she was honored for her work and given “a gift fork that was taller than she was. If we could have afforded it, we would have had it made of gold,” Schaadt says.

The Volunteer Bureau’s Wagener estimates that 49% of all Southern Californians do some volunteer work each year, even if it’s only baby-sitting or baking cookies for a fund-raiser. The figure has been challenged because it’s based on the Independent Sector study, which includes all sorts of informal volunteering. But there is no debate that many more millions of Americans do volunteer work than most realize.

And there is much greatness in what they accomplish.

9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the Rampart district: Mitch Moore, 45, former studio vocalist, is in the equivalent of his castle--an unused portion of the huge Immanuel church. Moore gave up his day job for something he started here as a Saturday morning volunteer project to help inner city kids.

Now his HOLA (Heart of Los Angeles) program is one of the most respected ventures for at-risk youth in town. It’s open six days a week to 800 neighborhood children who drop in for a cavalcade of sports, art, piano lessons, play writing, computer lessons, one-on-one tutoring or just to hang.

Moore, who describes himself as a “Big Brother reject” (he was turned down by that organization when he applied), started the group in 1989 when he noticed the kids had no place but alleys and streets in which to play. And nothing to join but gangs.

In 1993, he opened HOLA’s doors full time. With a paid staff of six, and a volunteer staff of 90, Moore is on the cutting edge of a move in the volunteer world to de-emphasize big bureaucracy in favor of flexible, hands-on excellence. Gymnasts here learn from Russian national champion Olga Morozova. Those who crave college get SAT preparation from Emily Williams, who works for the Princeton Review and whose usual fee is $700 per student.

Williams is so impressed, she says, that she’ll stay and do her graduate school internship there. “The place really works,” she says.

1 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard: If it is the third Saturday of the month, you can see Eudora Russell of Baldwin Hills tending the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Russell also had a dream. The retired English professor used to drive down King Boulevard and imagine it beautified. Majestic. An artery as noble as the man for whom it was named.

“I assumed the city would do more than just change the signs when they changed the name. I was naive. I’d go to meetings and say, ‘Dr. King deserves better than this.’ For seven years I dreamed of planting the full length of King Boulevard with magnificent trees.”

Finally, Russell met the Tree People, which teaches community volunteers how to organize to beautify their own streets. Russell took their citizen forestry training course and found “wonderful people” who helped get the massive planting going. The result: Five hundred Canary Island pine trees now line the boulevard, forming the largest living memorial to Dr. King anywhere in the world.

Once a month, Russell and a little band of tree-keepers pick up trash in the tree wells, trim those that need it, and talk to the storekeepers and homeowners along the seven-mile boulevard who are the trees’ day-to-day caretakers. “We’ve had trees burned, cut down, hacked up. One week we planted 23 trees near the Coliseum, and the next week 10 of them had been broken off at the top by vandals. We trimmed them so they’d grow again. It teaches us patience. The trees are very forgiving.”

These people do not begin to describe the deep vein of generosity and unpaid hard work that flows through Los Angeles on a daily basis. Yet it is obviously not enough.

Crime, illiteracy, hunger, disease and homelessness have not disappeared. And many government programs to help combat these ills are slated to shrink even more. In the next few years, government downsizing will mean cutbacks to long-established social services that may not have solved these problems, but at least, say some experts, kept them at bay.

Who will take up the slack?

The president gave a big part of his answer at the summit. He asked volunteers to “turn the tide for America’s at-risk children,” to provide each of them with “a safe haven and a caring adult mentor.”

This is unrealistic, say some in the field. “It’s totally crazy,” says Essie Beck, a retired writer who spent a few recent years volunteering in a government agency “trying to clean up the mess that paid professionals created.” Volunteers are not a way to fix the system’s social failures, she says.

And in any case, there aren’t enough suitable volunteers for such a job. It is the young and the old who volunteer most. Each group has obvious limitations. The great mid-sector of adults is too busy working and raising children to devote much quality time to anything else. Any volunteer work they do often revolves around their children.

Plus, the age range of this group continues to expand upward. Two-paycheck couples now wait longer to have children; proposals to raise the age to collect Social Security mean these people may be working longer too. More significant, perhaps: The volunteer work people of any age want to do is not necessarily the long-term, one-on-one kind that is most needed. If someone wants to volunteer at a museum, even a presidential plea may not persuade him to teach reading to a disadvantaged child in his spare time instead.

“People volunteer in areas that touch them personally,” says an attorney who works at the Didi Hirsch suicide hotline. “I lost some friends through suicide, which is why I work here.”

Moreover, many volunteer jobs are not easy to get--or to hold. Some involve hours of training, intensive background checks and pledges from the would-be volunteers to stay on the job for a minimum amount of time.

The Orange County probation office mandates 44 hours of classroom training over a six-week period, and then 20 hours of on-the-job training before volunteer POs are assigned a single case. And that’s only after applicants survive the same stringent four-month background check as paid officers. Those who make the grade commit to a minimum 20 hours a month for one year.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, volunteers undergo an interview by a committee, then take three months of training, once a week for six hours. If they make the cut, they must pledge 100 hours per year at scheduled times. Volunteers don’t get fired, says the museum’s Robert Matsuda, “but if you see a pattern of a person flaking out, you have to ask them to leave.”

The truth is, many would-be do-gooders leave volunteer jobs of their own accord. The work is not always interesting or gratifying. Sometimes it’s downright upsetting.

Jane Smith (not her real name) was a Court Appointed Special Advocate for two years, assisting judges in placing children who are wards of the court. She had only two cases: Her first was a slightly retarded boy, 11, who’d been in the system since age 1 and was living in MacLaren Children’s Center when she met him. “After all he’d been through, he was still a loving, delightful child, who had fits of ‘acting out’ because of loneliness and frustration,” Smith says.

The boy’s social worker had found a good residential school that would take the child but never did the paperwork to transfer him. After Smith spent a year “full time” hounding the authorities, the boy still languished at MacLaren. The judge finally issued a citation against the social worker. The boy was transferred, and when Smith last visited him at his new home, he was skateboarding happily on a path overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Her second case had an abysmal outcome. A girl whose mother had abandoned her and her little sister had been shipped from place to place. The last foster home chose to keep only the smaller child. The devastated older girl, now a preteen, began living in group homes, where she felt increasingly despondent and abandoned. Smith resigned in “profound frustration” when she decided that “all the volunteers in the world can’t fight the system that is now in place.”

Other gripes sound more like sitcom stuff. An animal lover who volunteered at L.A. County pet shelters calls the experience “horrid. We were treated like maids by the paid staff, who gave us the dirty work, like cleaning poop and cages. They sneered because we didn’t have to work for a living.”

LACMA’s Matsuda says volunteers get turned off when they are asked to do “boring” things, like stuffing envelopes. Couldn’t they be done by students or developmentally challenged adults?

“Impossible. This is a county facility. Every volunteer must pass through the rigorous screening process and be a museum member,” he explains.

The problem is emblematic of many older, larger, less flexible institutions that depend more heavily these days on volunteers. Although society has changed drastically in the past two decades, the structure of many old-line, respected programs has not.

The president’s summit, for example, called for Americans to make a “historic commitment” to give “every young person access to an ongoing relationship with a caring adult [a mentor, tutor or coach].”

But what programs exist to provide for that? Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles, a distinguished organization, might seem like a good place to start. But the organization has only 510 adult mentors paired with children in need. And that’s an increase of 200 pairs over a year ago, when a concerted effort began to serve more young people.

Ruth Hollman, who in 1995 joined an advisory committee to study the situation, says Big Brothers is typical of organizations still “using 1950s methods of volunteerism in the 1990s. In the 1950s, only one parent worked; more time was available to make long-term commitments. Welcome to the ‘90s, where time is most precious, where people write into their schedules when they will play tennis. It’s harder now to find quality people with time to give. That means a total change in the way we recruit and make use of volunteers.”

Until recently, she says, there were no alternate Big Brother programs available for men not willing to commit to a minimum of one year. The cost of making matches, she figures, comes to $8,000 per match per year. Background screening for each candidate costs $2,500.

The whole structure seems antique to Hollman, a cultural anthropologist and executive director of SHARE!, a self-help and recovery exchange.

She and other sages of the volunteer world say the millennium requires a big turnaround in the way things work. Getting more people involved means having more available work for them to do on a short-term basis. And it means giving more consideration to their special talents, instead of fitting everyone into the same mold.

Lisa Bennett-Garrison, director or development at Big Brothers, says Hollman makes some good points. “We now recognize we can’t just do things the old way anymore. We’re also looking at different ways to mentor, not just one on one.”

It’s important to keep volunteers happy, says Evelyn Carter of the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park. “We have only 12 paid employees, and 170 volunteers, so you can imagine how hugely dependent we are on them.”

Dull tasks are still necessary, she says. “But more and more, we look to use the special talents of people who apply. An upholsterer is covering cushions for an upcoming exhibit; a professional photographer takes and develops photos for us; a USC librarian is helping update our library.”

Unfazed by these controversies, the army of citizen volunteers continues to fan out across Southern California every day.

4 p.m., Santa Monica Mountains: George Stevenson, retired toxicologist, is high in the hills, weeding. His mission: to save delicate native California plants from imported varieties that stifle them.

Out with the dreaded mustard seed, originally strewn along the paths of the Spanish padres; out with the offending castor bean plant, which would “take over all of Southern California if we let it,” Stevenson says. Tomorrow, he will scope out the Sepulveda Dam Basin for infiltrators and work on plans to rid Will Rogers State Park of aliens.

He is one of 400 volunteers in the Santa Monica Mountains chapter of the California Native Plant Society. “Humans can act as their own advocates and speak for themselves. Plants have no voice. They are helpless without us,” he says.

4:30 p.m., West L.A.: Foster pet parent and West L.A. artist Axelle Fortier bottle-feeds 10 motherless kittens. A volunteer for SPCA / LA, Fortier takes home animals too small, weak or sick to survive in a shelter. She nurses them to health, then helps find homes for them.

5 p.m., Mid-City: Doors close at the Braille Institute, one of five local sites where 5,000 volunteer workers teach blind students everything from computers to eating and swimming. And where they also record thousands of books on tape each year and emboss millions of Braille pages (7 million last year).

7 p.m., San Fernando Valley: Violet Hutchens of Van Nuys is on the road again, teaching folks to read. Not in groups, but in private, one-on-one lessons that last an hour and a half. She travels to homes, apartments, youth detention facilities, libraries, hospitals and churches.

Already this day, she has visited a Korean family in Van Nuys; a young, illiterate English-speaking mother of three in Hollywood; and from 2:30 to 4 p.m. she worked with a 10-year-old Spanish-speaking boy in Pacoima. Now she is heading for an evening session with a woman from El Salvador.

This literacy dynamo offers her expertise free of charge most weekdays, some Saturdays and evenings. She is a member of California Literacy, a nonprofit group, which has 400 members in its San Fernando Valley chapter.

In the 10 years since her retirement as a manager for Woolworth’s, she has also taught 1,000 volunteers to teach reading to others. Hutchens’ husband hardly gets to see her, she says. “But that’s all right. He’s busy as a ham radio volunteer for the LAPD.”