WORK DEFEATING VOLUNTEER SPIRIT

In early 1995, a group of West Side ministers went to the Amoco Foundation with a proposal for reaching out to teenage dropouts in the Austin and West Garfield Park neighborhoods. Gangbangers, drug dealers, many of them fathers before their time: What they needed were mentors in their lives.

Excited by the prospect of helping develop a cutting-edge social program, the foundation gave West Side Holistic Family Services a half-million dollars to recruit and train mentors.

The program, called Fishers of Men, quickly identified 48 troubled teenagers, but finding the adults was not so easy.

When it finally found 35 men willing to give mentoring a try, time became the issue. “The only time we could get them for training was Saturday,” said Millicent Lindo, the group’s executive director. “These people work, and they have their own families.”

Now, two years later, West Side Holistic Family Services is still trying to get the mentoring program off the ground. The group’s experience is paralleled across the nation as fewer Americans donate their time and money to charitable causes.

In an effort to lend some new energy to volunteerism, the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future will meet in late April in Philadelphia.

Mentoring, now the hot-button issue in the field, will be a centerpiece of the discussion.

Public service announcements are flooding the airwaves in an attempt to recruit more mentors for troubled youth and to boost volunteerism in general. Retired Gen. Colin Powell, who is co-sponsoring the summit, is making his own pitch to get more minority men involved in mentoring.

But experts in philanthropy are sounding a cautionary note on raising unrealistic expectations during the presidential summit about volunteerism.

“People would love to spend more time volunteering, but it flies in the face of what’s going on in the economy,” said Brad Goggins, director of the Center for Corporate Community Relations at Boston College. “People are working incredible hours. The culture of work today is neither family-friendly nor conducive to volunteerism.”

His assertion is backed up by recent surveys of American giving habits. Fewer American families are giving money to charity, and fewer people are volunteering their time compared with the late 1980s.

According to last year’s survey on giving and volunteering in the U.S., 68.5 percent of American households gave to charity in 1995, including contributions to their churches. That’s down from a peak of 75.1 percent in 1989. The survey was conducted by the Gallup Organization for Independent Sector, a consortium of 800 not-for-profit groups,

The average annual donation of $1,017 per household rose slightly from the previous survey. But in inflation-adjusted dollars, average giving remained nearly $200 below the high point of the previous decade.

The volunteerism picture is similar. A bit fewer than half the adult population, or 93 million people, gave time to nonprofit activities in 1995.

While that sounds impressive, it’s down from 98.4 million, or 54.4 percent of adults, who volunteered time in 1989. The total number of volunteer hours remained about the same, suggesting that those who volunteer are giving more of their time.

While people in the field blame the pressure-cooker economy of the 1990s for the decline in volunteerism, the public debate in recent years has been dominated by a different theme. Harvard University government professor Robert Putnam set off alarm bells that rang all the way to the White House in early 1995 when he published an article entitled “Bowling Alone” in the relatively obscure Journal of Democracy.

Putnam argued that the fraying of America’s social fabric could be blamed on the decline in organized civic groups like the Boy Scouts, the Elks Club and, in a phenomenon that gave him his title, organized bowling leagues. In a subsequent article in the liberal journal American Prospect, he blamed television for the change because surveys showed Americans had sustained a remarkably high level of membership in volunteer organizations until at least 1960.

Putnam’s bold assertions resulted in two visits with President Clinton for late-night chats. Next month’s summit is testimony to the impact of Putnam’s ideas.

The summit is being sponsored by the Points of Light Foundation, along with the government’s Corporation for National Service. It is being underwritten by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Putnam’s thesis has its critics. They see a change in the nature of volunteerism instead of a radical decline: Instead of Boy Scouts, there are soccer leagues, Nicholas Lemann argued in The Atlantic last year. They’ve doubled in size to 2.4 million members in the last decade. Membership in mainstream churches may be down, but evangelical denominations of all religions are booming.

For those hoping for a renewed burst of energy and idealism aimed at solving pressing social problems, however, this new pattern for volunteerism presents its own set of problems. It is a much more self-interested form of volunteerism than previous patterns of giving.

Before, a civic group like the Elks Club would help other parts of the community as part of its ongoing activities. But for Baby Boomers flocking to environmental groups or soccer leagues, the focus of attention is generally on one’s neighborhood and family.

The way people and corporations are giving their money is changing in directions that hold out scant hope that private philanthropy will be able to replace social services previously provided by government. Researchers at Independent Sector say donations to human service charities would have to jump 10 percent a year for the next seven years just to make up for government cutbacks.

In recent years, welfare-like charities have been losing ground to other forms of not-for-profit fundraising. Human services have seen their share of the charity dollar drop from 10.7 percent of all giving in 1989 to 8.1 percent in 1995. Total contributions have stayed virtually unchanged at $11.7 billion a year, a more than 20 percent decline over the same period when adjusted for inflation.

Where are American charitable dollars going? Religion remains the biggest recipient. Its share has held up fairly well during the 1990s. Churches, synagogues and affiliated charities received 44.1 percent of all donations in 1995 compared with 44.8 percent in 1989.

Education, the arts and the environment each gained in their share of charitable giving since 1989.

Much of today’s giving “is not what a lot of people think of as charitable giving,” said Ann Kaplan, research director of the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel, a trade group for private consultants who help not-for-profits raise money. “It’s not going to feed somebody, but to put another wing on an art museum. Not everyone cares about the same thing.”

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This trend toward self-interested giving is most evident in corporate philanthropy, where contributions have slipped from 2.1 percent of pretax profits in the late 1980s to under 1 percent last year.

“Companies used to give to a broad range of charities,” said Myra Alperson, a senior research associate at the Conference Board, a New York think tank that focuses on corporate activity. “Now they’re focused on issues where it feeds back something to the business.”

An increasing share of corporate donations to major educational institutions is in the form of targeted research and development grants in areas closely aligned with the company’s business. Some companies under assault from environmental groups fund not-for-profit think tanks to promote their own environmental agendas.

Lawrence Cimino, president of the Eli Lilly & Co. Foundation, said his company’s priorities began shifting about two years ago. While it still makes contributions to arts and education organizations in the Indianapolis area, it made its largest grant ever last year to the World Health Organization. The maker of Prozac gave the UN-affiliated organization $2 million to tackle mental health programs in low-income communities around the world.

“There’s a great trend in corporate philanthropy to justify to shareholders that the philanthropy adds to shareholder value,” Cimino said. “These (mental health needs) are true needs that overlap with our expertise and our passion, really. We can’t be all things to all people.

“Let the publishers deal with literacy, the food companies with hunger,” he said. “We’re looking at areas where there’s not only a need but where we can shape a market to long-term business success.”

Home Depot Corp. takes a similar approach. It focuses its philanthropy in three areas: affordable housing, the environment and preparing at-risk youth for the job market, all of which have a direct impact on its business.

The fast-growing building supply chain hires 500 entry-level people a week, which helps explain its emphasis on job market skills. It supplies building materials for organizations like Habitat for Humanity and conducts seminars on how rehabbing one’s home can conserve energy.

It also targets charitable endeavors in neighborhoods and cities where it is opening new stores. “We relate it to the issues in our business,” said Suzanne Apple, director of community affairs for Home Depot. “By doing that, we build the business.”

As the pressures of work and family have reduced the time available for volunteerism, a number of companies like Home Depot have responded by encouraging employees to get more involved in their communities. A few provide paid time off, but most organize activities on weekends or after work.

For many firms, it is seen as a chance to build work force morale as well as engage in some well-publicized good works. “The number of companies trying to get credit for their employees’ volunteerism is increasing,” said Craig Smith, a consultant and founder of Corporate Citizen, a well-read newsletter in the corporate philanthropy field. “Companies recognize they can get an image benefit from their employees’ involvement in the community.”

No company was more image conscious last year than AT&T Corp., which took a drubbing in the press after announcing plans to dismiss 40,000 employees. Last fall, the company offered every one of its 127,000 employees a day off with pay this year to donate time to their favorite charity.

But many charities need a lot more than one day from volunteers.

Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America, the nation’s oldest and most successful mentoring organization, spends from six to nine months recruiting, training and finally matching its volunteers with teenagers needing mentors.

Of 100 people who express interest in helping the program, only 43 actually apply when they find out what is involved. The group’s 510 centers maintain about 100,000 mentoring relationships, a number it hopes to double in the next few years as part of its pledge to the goals of the presidential summit. Its centers have 30,000 teenagers on waiting lists.

“We always have kids on the waiting list,” said Tom McKenna, national executive director of Big Brothers/Big Sisters. “We don’t have enough volunteers to meet these kids’ needs.”