TV Industry Plans a Big Week for Volunteers

For seven straight days starting on October 19, volunteers will be the toast of Hollywood.

Images of people doing good will fill America’s television screens, appearing on morning shows, soap operas, hospital dramas, cop dramas, situation comedies, reality shows, late-night talk shows, and local news programs.

In an unprecedented effort coordinated by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a leading Hollywood charity, more than 60 national TV programs have agreed to incorporate story lines about volunteers into their scripts, highlight real-life volunteers, air public-service announcements, or ask cast members to create a “tag” at the end of their show encouraging people to volunteer.

The weeklong blitz — which will include shows on ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, along with BET, the Disney Channel, Lifetime, MTV, Nickelodeon, and other cable networks — will serve as a showpiece for “I Participate,” the entertainment group’s new multiyear campaign. The goal is to use the power of popular culture to persuade more people to volunteer to help solve the country’s problems.

“As an industry that is really about storytelling, as communicators, how can we utilize our platform to reach Americans to make volunteerism and service a first-tier activity in this country?” says Lisa C. Paulsen, the group’s chief executive.

Sneak Peeks

Plans for the week of special programs are still evolving, but network executives give some hints about what to expect:

Several of the shows will involve actual charities. KaBoom — a group in Washington that helps build playgrounds and other recreation spaces — will play a role in the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, as Amy Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope, continues her quest to turn an abandoned construction pit into a community park.

Alison Risso, KaBoom’s communications director, says she began contacting the show’s production company as soon as she heard Parks and Recreation was going on the air last spring, thinking it might be in the market for some kind of partnership with a charity that builds playgrounds. The calls paid off after the Entertainment Industry Foundation drew up its plans for I Participate.

The show’s producer called KaBoom, and the charity’s founder, Darell Hammond, and other staff members have helped the show develop the episode, including sending two project managers to work with set designers to build a playground.

Ms. Risso says the portrayal of a KaBoom project manager in the script — which the charity reviewed for accuracy — is a tad, shall we say, exaggerated. But, she says, “it’s good fun. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we do take building playgrounds seriously. If the show can help raise the importance of play, we’re all for it.”

Some TV characters will work for fictional charities. Sheldon Hawkes, a member of the CSI: NY team, played by Hill Harper, will be shown working as part of the Manhattan Parks Volunteer Medical Unit, treating an executive who has been injured in a park.

What’s more, affiliates of the four broadcast networks nationwide will carry interviews and news stories about local volunteers.

Programs will direct viewers to the Web site Iparticipateusa.org, which will point people to volunteer activities in their towns.

Anxiously Watching

Among those who will be watching the week of volunteer programs with a keen eye is Susan Ellis, a consultant on volunteering. She has been monitoring how television portrays volunteers for decades, writing an article in 1979 that analyzed what viewers were seeing then. Some were good: A character in the soap opera Another World starts volunteering at a local hospital while trying to sort out her life, and declines a date because she is scheduled to work that night.

Some were bad: Buddy, the teenage daughter in the drama Family, is seen volunteering in a hospital, spilling water all over the hall, dropping two dozen rolls of toilet paper on her head in the supply closet, and sitting on the bed of a young male patient. “Just our luck to join a sorority where they make you do volunteer work,” she remarks to a fellow volunteer.

“This thing with the Entertainment Industry Foundation has the potential to be very exciting,” Ms. Ellis says. “And also very bad. It’s the right idea — it’s how it’s executed.” She worries that negative portrayals could turn people off, while unrealistic portrayals could confuse people.

Star-Studded Cast

In any case, it’s safe to say no other charity in the country could marshal the kind of resources the entertainment group is pulling together. Armed with a board that includes representatives of the four broadcast TV networks, movie studios, talent agencies, and the Screen Actors Guild, the Entertainment Industry Foundation is taking its boldest step yet to unify Hollywood around a charitable mission.

The Los Angeles group, which was created in 1942 to coordinate the charitable donations of movie-studio employees, has in recent years focused largely on raising money for — and increasing awareness of — health issues.

In its biggest joint effort before I Participate, it helped raise more than $100-million last year through Stand Up to Cancer, a project to funnel money to cutting-edge cancer research that enlisted ABC, CBS, and NBC to simultaneously air a celebrity-studded, commercial-free telecast.

Ms. Paulsen, who joined the Entertainment Industry Foundation in 1984 and became chief executive in 1990, says her interest in volunteerism spiked after she attended the ServiceNation Summit in New York in September 2008 — an event that drew presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain and a bevy of nonprofit, corporate, government, and military representatives who discussed ways to get more people involved in community and national service.

“I was really motivated by what was happening,” Ms. Paulsen says. “It was palpable, I could feel it.”

She says she proposed to her board that the group consider a major effort to promote community service because it was an issue that everyone could relate to. “There’s something here for every single show, every single actor.”

Mitch Metcalf, executive vice president of program planning and scheduling at NBC and an Entertainment Industry Foundation board member, says the board has been looking for ways to “put the organization on the map.” He adds: “Not to toot our own horn, it’s just a question of fairness. There’s all this great work being done by the Hollywood community, which is often a punching bag by sectors of the body politic regarding content and a number of other things.”

‘A Bipartisan Effort’

I Participate coincides with a big push by both President Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, to promote service and volunteerism.

The foundation is steering volunteers to the same general areas that the Obamas are promoting: education and children, health, economic development, conservation, and support for military families.

However, Ms. Paulsen is quick to say that her group is not acting at the White House’s direction. “Our industry decided we were going to answer the president’s call to service and volunteerism. Certainly we consider this a bipartisan effort.”

In preparing for the TV week, Ms. Paulsen’s group consulted ServiceNation, a coalition of groups that promote community and national service, which asked its members to provide real-life stories about volunteers to inspire Hollywood writers and agreed to provide tool kits for the I Participate Web site.

The tool kits, which will help people assemble their own volunteer projects, are one effort to answer concerns about whether charities will be able to manage a big influx of volunteers.

“We want to make sure everyone can serve in some way even if not through an organization,” says Greg Propper, managing director of Be the Change, the lead organizing group behind ServiceNation. Mr. Propper just opened a Los Angeles office to help the coalition step up its work with Hollywood.

Ms. Paulsen says her group will also award grants in 2010 to help volunteer and national-service organizations strengthen their ability to train and manage volunteers, although details are not yet final.

The Entertainment Industry Foundation and network executives declined to attach a dollar value to the week of donated air time, but it’s safe to say it’s enormous. When the Harvard Alcohol Project enlisted ABC, CBS, and NBC to broadcast content promoting the idea of a “designated driver” for four seasons starting in 1988, industry experts calculated it had received $100-million annually in air time.

The value of working a story line into CSI: NY? Says Martin Franks, executive vice president for planning and policy at CBS: “I would argue that’s priceless.”