An untapped resource - includes related article on community volunteers

An Untapped Resource

Over four decades ago, George Romney helped organize the nation's first United Way fund-raising drive, in Detroit. Today almost every city in the nation has an annual United Way campaign.

Now Romney is working to have VOLUNTEER-The National Center, an organization that he chairs, do for volunteering what the United Way did for fund raising. He envisions a highly visible, widely supported national network of Volunteer Centers that would put armies of volunteers to work on community problems.

"The most underutilized problem-solving method in the United States today is volunteerism," says Romney, 81, a former Michigan governor and past president of American Motors Corp.

A Gallup survey released last October provides the most complete assessment ever compiled of volunteerism in America. It reveals that 45 percent of adults in the U.S. volunteered an average of 4.7 hours per week to help charitable causes in 1987. That translates into 80 million people giving a total of 19.5 billion hours with a value estimated at $150 billion.

But the study, released by Independent Sector, a Washington-based philanthropic group, underscores Romney's point about volunteerism as an underdeveloped resource. It shows that many Americans are willing to volunteer but are not being asked. Three-fourths of the respondents believe that they should volunteer to help others, but half did not volunteer in the past year.

Romney maintains that all Americans could do more to support their communities, and VOLUNTEER strives to be the catalyst to make that happen.

At the heart of VOLUNTEER's effort is the growing number of Volunteer Centers, which act as clearing-houses for placement of volunteers with community programs and which provide leadership and support for volunteer activities. There are more than 380 private, nonprofit Volunteer Centers in the U.S. serving an estimated 100,000 private organizations and public agencies. But Romney isn't satisfied with their number or performance.

"Few of these [centers] are as strong and visible as they ought to be," he says. "We need to create as many Volunteer Centers as United Ways. We need people as badly as money."

The key to building a stronger national network of Volunteer Centers is business leadership, says Romney. There's no reason that business can't make Volunteer Centers as successful as it made United Way fund raising. At present, however, "too many business leaders conclude they have discharged their social responsibility by making and encouraging contributions of money. But the problems cannot be solved by money alone. Problems can only be solved by volunteers."

A 1987 nationwide survey commissioned by retailer J.C. Penney Inc. showed the impact of employer support on employee participation in volunteer programs. Sixty percent of workers encouraged by their employers to become involved in volunteer activities actually did so, compared with only 39 percent of the workers employed by companies that did not encourage volunteerism.

Companies reluctant to boost employee volunteerism should consider the bottom-line benefits, says Romney. Research has shown that "such programs improve [company] morale, reduce absenteeism, attract better employees, develop employee skills, and contribute to internal teamwork." Moreover, he says, "companies with employee volunteer programs acquire heightened public respect, and that helps sell products and services."

A book published by VOLUNTEER, A New Competitive Edge, Volunteers From The Workplace, describes how 15 large companies, including Levi Strauss & Co., Honeywell Inc., and Federal Express, derived such benefits from their volunteer programs. The book also devotes a chapter to successful volunteer efforts made by small companies. (See "Small Companies Make A Big Difference," on Page 52.)

Over the past decade, business has become the most important new source of volunteers. During this period, VOLUNTEER has assumed a leadership role in promoting and supporting work-place-based volunteer programs. It is the only national consulting resource for businesses that seek to encourage and assist their employees in community volunteer activities.

But volunteers also come from some unexpected places. VOLUNTEER has conducted successful pilot projects showing that the unemployed and the handicapped--people who typically need services--can make important volunteer contributions to their communities while gaining valuable skills.

In 1987, VOLUNTEER worked with five Volunteer Centers in various states to involve the unemployed in community work. The goal was to use volunteering as a useful retraining opportunity for workers who had lost their jobs through plant closings or corporate downsizing.

The program in Albany, Ga., involved 39 people who had lost their jobs when the local Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. plant closed. By the end of the nine-months project, 25 percent of the participants had secured jobs, 42 percent reported they had job prospects, 35 percent had returned to school, and 53 percent showed a significant rise in self-esteem.

All five pilot projects worked well enough to demonstrate that volunteering can be effective in helping the unemployed make the transition to a new job.

A pilot program for handicapped high-school students operated for three years, until the end of 1988, in five Michigan cities. Project Next Step combined community-service activities with summer jobs supervised by adult mentors. More than 800 disabled young people participated.

"The primary benefit was one that relates to self-confidence," said Maurice Wesson, a senior manager with the Detroit Center for Volunteerism. The project "allowed these youngsters to see how well they functioned in structured activities that they heretofore had been barred from." Many of the participants said they were grateful that they had learned what they could do instead of being told what they couldn't do.

It is through such activities that VOLUNTEER helps perpetuate the spirit of self-reliance that is uniquely American, says Romney. "America became great not primarily as a result of what government did for the people, but primarily as a result of what people did for themselves."

COPYRIGHT 1989 U.S. Chamber of Commerce
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group