Claude Neal picks up donations to City Harvest.
Giving: Of Time, Money, and Yourself
By Deborah Emin
Recently The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a woman stood on a corner ringing a bell next to a pot for money. She wore a hat that said: “GIVE,” while a man walking by wore a hat that said, “GET.” The stricture that you receive more by giving than by getting is true enough. But how do we find that place within ourselves where giving is something we practice?
As we all know and don’t need a sociologist to tell us, there are certain places, diseases, causes, and disasters that elicit in us a greater level of responsiveness than others. For example, some of the people who donated money and other aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in Southeast Asia may not have emptied their purses for victims of the earthquakes in Iran. How many of us really feel compelled to help alleviate famine in Africa or give to AIDS relief on that continent? One of the first lessons I learned about being a volunteer was choosing a cause or an organization that made me want to do this work despite bad weather or having a busy “to do” list for that day.
I can still recall the exact moment when I decided to volunteer for City Harvest. I was listening to its president listing on the radio a variety of services that that organization provided. None of it hit me in any particular way, but when she said that one out of every five children in New York City went to bed hungry at night, I woke up. In fact, my whole body woke up to the thought of one child sitting on her bed without enough food in her belly. I could picture her, I knew what hunger felt like, and this energized me to pick up the phone. This same inner voice that yelled at me then to “do something” has since inspired me to get out of bed on cold winter mornings and stand outside in Jamaica, Queens, to help to distribute food. We don’t always have a great deal of food to hand out, but what we do have is fresh, and the veterans and elderly grandparents I meet twice a month are extremely happy to see the truck.
When I first started going to Queens, I often returned home feeling distraught, disoriented, and grateful because it is truly a matter of luck that any one of us is on the distribution end rather than the receiving end of any food bank. Yet the process was distinctly familiar. When I was a child, my grandmother told me stories about how she and her friends gave up their bridge game to fold bandages for the Red Cross during World War II. Often, while my sister and I were napping, our mother used a small Braille machine to type out booklets for the blind.
I went to high school in the 1960s and badly wanted to make a contribution, although I didn’t know how. Fortuitously, an energetic English teacher organized a busload of students to travel weekly to the Cabrini Greens housing project to tutor young smart black children who were attending abysmal schools. These kids were more in love with learning than I was at the time, but I didn’t know how to get a real effort out of them because their only experiences with school had reeked of failure. How could I make them want to come to the community center badly enough to resist the taunts of the older kids?
The little boy I remember working with the most was tiny, way too tiny for his age. His name was Alvin. He had a bloated stomach, which I had no idea at the time was related to malnutrition. He always laughed when I walked through the door, and this made me feel less self-conscious about urging him to practice his multiplication tables. When I learned that Alvin wanted to play the trumpet, I found a way to use rhythm to help him focus on the progression of multiplied numbers, so that after a while we had a sense of playing in a small orchestra rather than just memorizing a list of numbers.
This first taste of freely giving away time made a deep impression on me. It altered my thoughts about the role of public schools and the severe inequity of services between inner-city schools and suburban ones. Having been raised mostly in white Jewish suburbs, it was easy to have what’s called a bubble mentality. Most of my friends were concerned with what movies were playing, who was dating whom, and what schools beyond our own were considered prestigious. Whenever I mentioned my volunteer work, my friends thought it rather admirable but that it would be a waste of their time.
Still, the 1960s and ’70s were a heady time, and the political work that so many of us did was a likely precursor to our current desire to give. We didn’t think about it this way then, but those who went South to register black voters, and those who walked in endless processions to integrate neighborhoods, and those who boycotted grapes and lettuce when the farm workers were trying to unionize, and those who counseled draft-eligible men to help them avoid the service – all that activity was the result of time given freely. Nobody expected to make any money at it. And yet, we were effective. We ended an illegal war, got black voters registered, and helped to integrate public schools. This massive volunteer force actually changed the course of American politics and shaped public discourse today.
So what happens when the ball is dropped? To say that it has been dropped, to me, is an understatement. Many continue to toil with the disadvantaged, but many more have retreated to the pursuit of their personal goals and comforts from the safety of suburban enclaves. Were this not the case, it wouldn’t have been news when Katrina hit and poor people from New Orleans and other parts of the South came trudging out to be helped, only to find that nobody was there to help them.
One longterm solution to this problem is to introduce children to the world of service and volunteering early on. While those who attend private schools are generally taught to be of service, most children do not attend private schools. Carol Weisman is the author of a book called Raising Charitable Children, which will be released shortly and is available for purchase on her Website: www.raisingcharitablechildren. com. She collected a number of useful examples of ways in which adults have interacted with their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and godchildren to teach them the value of becoming givers, not just takers.
A former social worker and now a professional consultant to nonprofit boards of directors, Ms. Weisman has commented on various occasions about the way kids are being raised. “People,” she says, “are especially aware, grandparents in particular, that many of today’s kids are brought up too materialistic and need to get their heads on straight.” Her fight against what she calls a “gimme” culture is only part of the reason her book will do well. Its whole approach is one of giving back and creating safe, exciting ways to learn about our responsibilities to one another.
My own experiences as a volunteer have been purely amateur. Yet for all the differences in how one may look at giving, certain conclusions seem to be true for almost everyone. I had an epiphany while discussing this with a friend. Together we saw that volunteering has nothing to do with meeting likeminded people. It is not a dating service in disguise. It doesn’t take away the question: Why are we here on earth?
Actually, it’s simple: Being involved with people in need forces you to connect with your own humanity. You become instantly aware of everything in life that is good and bad and in between. You see firsthand grace under fire, and you see the shit. You know that your stuffing of envelopes, or handing out baskets of food, or visiting people in a hospital, has given someone (and you) a terrific gift. We’re all here together, and that is just the fact. It is a feeling as omnipresent as breathing. It can be so painful you wish you could go and have a stiff drink, or it can be so rewarding you want to go again every day, and yet … unless you can understand that this too is just part of life, that we take and we give, there will be no balance to the experience, and thus all meaning may be lost.
You might ask yourself which kind of problem (this city is overflowing with all kinds of them) fills you with the need to do something. Believe me, it is the sense of needing to do, to act, that pushed me out of my complacency. I’ve worked on political campaigns for the same reason. I marched with a million other people after the accident at Three Mile Island. I spent the whole day in the cold and was chased by police on horseback in the month before the start of the Iraq War. All for the same reason – I felt I needed to do something.
The biggest difference, I believe, between feeling helpless and not feeling helpless is the disparity between sitting still and taking action. Every good aid agency will have you fill out an application, will ask for referrals, will have a good orientation process, and will not assign you to any physical labor for which you are unfit. Your job is to make sure that whatever you decide to do is right for you.
