September 21, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
Americans may be volunteering in large numbers, but “the kind of volunteering most people prefer to do is, quite understandably, the convenient kind,” writes contributing editor Eric Alterman in Worth magazine (October). “A day at a soup kitchen here, an afternoon at the community center there.” So even though the number of Americans who volunteer has been going up, the actual hours they volunteer has been going down.
And that’s a problem, says Mr. Alterman, especially for Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush, whose “compassionate conservatism” plans depend heavily on getting Americans to become volunteers at religious groups and other charities.
“There will always be areas in which the need for help goes beyond the capacity of available volunteer resources,” Mr. Alterman writes. “Without government, the stuff that nobody wants to do just isn’t going to get done.”
While studies show that matching mentors with inner-city youths, for example, can help reduce school-dropout rates among teenagers, mentors make a difference only when they show up consistently, “week in and week out, with no excuses,” the article says. “Kids need to be able to depend on their mentors as they have so little else in their lives that has proved dependable.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Alterman concludes, many kids won’t be able to find such help. The era of “big government” may be over, he writes, but “the era of ‘big citizen’ is still in its infancy.”
The article will soon be available at http://www.worth.com.
