April 22, 2004

Volunteer Week spotlights need for local involvement

Acknowledging every volunteer in Yellow Springs and each of the various services volunteers provide would be impossible to do in one news article.

Residents volunteer in ways ranging from helping children read at Mills Lawn to clearing trails in Glen Helen to evaluating the Village Zoning Code to better serve the population. And people volunteer for reasons ranging from having a service-oriented upbringing to having a passion about a cause to the all important “because someone asked me to.”

Organizers hope that spotlighting the merits of volunteering during National Volunteer Week this week, April 18–24, might help retain the local pillars of volunteerism that turn the gears of Yellow Springs.

Volunteers are important not only because dozens of local organizations depend on their services but also because the act of volunteering creates community, longtime volunteer Becky Eschliman said.

“If you want to preserve community then volunteering is important because it gives people a reason to keep those bonds growing,” she said.

When she was growing up in the village, whole families and entire neighborhoods got involved with holding carnivals and other fundraisers for the Yellow Springs Library Association. That was back when community was “happening organically,” she said.

But now communities have been pulled further apart and volunteering has become more “artificial,” Eschliman said. Planning is essential, background research takes time and volunteers have to be recruited and guided, she said. “The greatest challenge and the greatest failure, and the most important aspect of volunteering, has been drawing others in,” she said.

Faith Patterson has been volunteering with African American Cross-Culture Works and the Village Human Relations Committee for over a decade, and she also feels diverse volunteer recruitment is essential for effective community building.

Patterson’s philosophy about encouraging wider participation in the community is that people first need to get to know each other better. When people understand each other, they can work from a common understanding to accomplish common goals, she said. They feel more like a family, she said, and working together to make a better community becomes like second nature.

“I like to believe if we have a baseline in what we believe in and who we are, those with the same concepts about life will hook on and want to give the same effort to make a difference in life,” Patterson said.

Patterson has created many ways to bring people together through AACW-sponsored activities such as the annual Blues Fest, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Kwanzaa and Martin Luther King Day celebrations. She said she likes to involve not only people from Yellow Springs but people from her church in Xenia and others from neighboring communities.

Like Patterson, some people learn by watching their parents show that volunteering is an important and natural obligation. Her family expected her and her siblings to read and talk to the elders in Petersburg, Va., where she grew up, she said. “I was taught you don’t sit in a community and expect everyone to do for you, but you use the talents you have to do good, and you teach others,” she said. “I suppose it just passes on through the skin.”

Others, such as Eschliman, need to be asked to join by other volunteers. Though Eschliman’s parents were involved with the Lion’s Club and fundraising for a children’s hospital, she said she “wasn’t conscious of it until someone asked me, and I knew it was the right thing to do.”

Eschliman served on the Center Stage board for many years before being asked to join the boards of the Library Association board, Historical Society and, more recently, the Senior Center.

Dorothy L. Scott was asked when she was a student at Antioch College and expected to give two hours of service per week. After she graduated and had a family, she worked with the Parent Teacher Association, the Girl Scouts and the American Civil Liberties Union. After retiring in 1981, she spent half days reading and teaching at the Community Children’s Center and at Mills Lawn School and at the Glen Helen Nature Shop.

“People need to be asked,” she said. “It’s terribly important that people know they are needed.”

The Antioch Company has instituted a way of letting people know their volunteer services are needed and also valued. Employees are encouraged to take advantage of volunteer release time, Dollars for Doers and the sharing and caring committees. The release time program allows all company employees to use up to 16 hours of paid work time each year to volunteer for a local nonprofit, Antioch’s charitable program specialist, Andrea Lauer, said.

In the Dollars for Doers program, the company donates $100 to an organization for every 20 hours of personal time an employee volunteers there. The company also connects with local nonprofits and organizes collection boxes according to the needs in the area.

The history of sharing with the community connects to company’s founder Ernest Morgan’s values, which shaped Antioch’s corporate values of enriching lives by sharing resources, said Lauer. The Antioch Company benefits from the volunteering in the same way communities benefit from the volunteering, by building bonds between the volunteers.

“Not only does it help the nonprofit, but our company benefits tremendously,” Lauer said.

Community bonding is an important way to offset the political turmoil in international politics right now, Eschliman said. And volunteering here at the Senior Center, she added, is a way to acknowledge by proxy the help her aging parents receive in Florida.

If volunteerism has become endangered, then perhaps we don’t need all the organizations that serve us and community can be fostered in new ways, Eschliman considered. But she quickly doubled back to her original concern that organizations need volunteers more than ever now because of federal and state funding cuts to institutions such as the local library and the public schools.

“I wasn’t always in this core group of volunteers in the community, and I won’t always be in it,” she said. “The primary concern is to get more people involved. If you contribute your time to an organization, you never know what you may find.”

—Lauren Heaton