December 17, 1998 | Read Time: 2 minutes
For 22 years, Katherine Pener has counseled patients recovering from breast cancer. The 84-year-old resident of Miami Beach credits volunteering with lifting her into a ninth decade of life.
“The great feeling I have when I help cancer patients keeps me physically and mentally well,” says Ms. Pener, whose own recovery from a mastectomy 29 years ago led her to the task of helping others. “I even think volunteering helps your immune system.”
Like Ms. Pener, other volunteers profiled in Voices from the Heart: In Celebration of America’s Volunteers emphasize the importance of donating time regardless of impositions. Through first-person accounts and 75 black-and-white photographs of volunteers at work, the book puts across its central message that altruism is an escape from an insular life.
Brian O’Connell, founding president of the non-profit coalition Independent Sector, contributes chapters on the range of services provided by volunteers and on the importance of winning commitments from young people. Proceeds from the book will support a fund at Independent Sector to educate people about volunteering.
Mr. O’Connell is credited as the author. But most of the book consists of 25 men and women explaining why they started helping others and how volunteering has enriched their lives. Examples include a man who teaches yoga to prison inmates and an artist who teaches poor youths how to produce film and video projects.
The book also spotlights people who confront grief and death in the course of their volunteer work. A woman who trains guide dogs for search-and-rescue missions is brought on searches that sometimes result in the discovery of dead bodies; the director of a youth choir that tours war-torn countries is moved to tears by the many orphans who attended concerts in Nicaragua; and a Minnesota doctor providing medical services in Serbia finds herself enervated in the wake of escalating violence in Kosovo.
Yet the benefits of volunteering are manifest in even the most upsetting situations, writes Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, in a foreword. “One motivating reward for the volunteer is to discover the beauty and grace hiding beneath the veneer of suffering and deprivation.”
Mr. O’Connell concludes the book with a list of resources for those people who want to volunteer but are unsure of where to start.
And, if one is to believe Katherine Pener, it’s a good idea to begin that search before succumbing to ambivalence.
“Retired people who just sit around and play cards and eat lunch and shop — they start to complain about life,” says the cancer survivor. “Life loses its meaning.”
Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco 94104-1310; (415) 433-1767 or (800) 956-7739; World-Wide Web http://www.josseybass.com; or Chronicle Books, 85 Second Street, San Francisco 94105; (415) 537-3730 or (800) 722-6657; World-Wide Web http://www.chroniclebooks.com; 168 pages; $29.95, cloth, $19.95, paper; I.S.B.N. 0-8118-2115-3, cloth, I.S.B.N. 0-8118-2125-0, paper.
