Clotfelter, James

Law and Contemporary Problems : a Quarterly Published by the Duke University, School of Law

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JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00 9:25 AMENABLING PUBLIC SERVICEJAMES CLOTFELTER*IINTRODUCTIONAlmost everyone approves of the concept of volunteerism, at least in its un-stipended form.  The important questions are how do we make it meaningfulfor the volunteer; effective for society and the people being served; and afford-able for society and the volunteer?  The three articles discussed here addressthese questions, though none tries to answer all three.  The first article focuseson a 1960s experiment in stipended service that tries to answer the “meaning-ful” question but not the other two.  The second and third articles summarizewhat the authors know about the “effective” question, with some references tothe other two questions.  Together, they move us toward the point at whichscholars can address all three questions.IIKORSTAD AND LELOUDIS ARTICLERobert Korstad and James Leloudis in Citizen Soldiers in the War on Pov-erty have tackled a subject of considerable historical importance.1  The NorthCarolina Fund was an important social experiment, and we need to learn moreabout the Volunteers’ experience, for the light it sheds on service-learning gen-erally, as well as on the history of 1960s anti-poverty programs.The North Carolina governor, Terry Sanford, was a nationally prominentsupporter of creative approaches to social problems.  He encouraged the Fordfoundation to launch the Fund as an anti-poverty program.  The Fund, a prede-cessor of Lyndon Johnson’s Community Action agencies, had national as well* Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Planning, and Professor of Political Science,The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.I should make clear that, regarding volunteerism, I am not a scholar, distinguished or otherwise.Let me note the experience I do bring, so my biases can be recognized.  One of my responsibilities atThe University of North Carolina at Greensboro is for University/community partnerships, and mywork on one of those partnerships is relevant to the topic of this symposium.  With the assistance ofPresident William Friday and funding from Tom Lambeth of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, JimVan Hecke and I created the North Carolina Service Project.  With the cooperation of the Center forCreative Leadership and schools and colleges across the state, we also created a “young service lead-ers” program.  Shortly afterward, I worked with the faculty at UNC-Greensboro and Governor Hunt’snew Smart Start program to create the North Carolina Child Care Corps, the largest full-time Ameri-Corps program in North Carolina and one of the largest AmeriCorps programs in the United Statesfocusing on early childhood development.  Over the next three years, 100 young Corps members servedin childcare centers in 15 North Carolina counties.  My experience, then, is with what is usually calledstipended service.1. Robert A. Korstad & James L. Leloudis, Citizen Soldiers in the War on Poverty, 62 Law &Contemp. Probs. 177 (Autumn 1999).JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00  9:25 AM258 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 62: No.4as state significance.  Korstad and Leloudis, in this article and an earlier draft,make clear their enthusiasm for Governor Sanford’s leadership and for thepoverty-fighting potential of the Fund.  Sometimes this enthusiasm threatens tooverpower their scholarly intent.  For example, they may overstate the back-wardness of North Carolina, circa 1960, and thus dramatize the boldness ofSanford’s contributions.  The Fund was an important experiment, but, even if ithad succeeded entirely, it would not have transformed the state.The authors focus on the Fund’s 1964 and 1965 summer programs which in-volved 350 volunteers.  Scholarly study is aided by the presence of Fund Volun-teers’ daily logs and other records in the holdings of the Southern HistoricalCollection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.2The Volunteers were recruited from North Carolina’s college students, at atime when a much smaller percentage of North Carolinians of college age at-tended college.  Consequently, the Volunteer pool was an educated, largelymiddle-class group.  Yet, it was diverse for the time, with a significant minorityof African-Americans.3  The values of the Fund Volunteers appear to have been“liberal” when they started, though perhaps not the same brand of liberalismwith which they finished.  Even in 1963-65, there was a modest tradition of bi-racialism and volunteer service on college campuses, most notably at UNC-Chapel Hill, that the Fund tapped into, rather than inventing.The goals sought by the Fund are unclear, but creating only a “summer ofservice” seems designed to transform the Volunteers, and probably not thestate.  Yet transforming participants is an important part of any service-learningprogram.  The quotations from the Volunteers’ logs are immensely interestingand reveal that many of the Volunteers appear to have been deeply moved bytheir experiences.In later studies, the authors could make some rich comparisons between theexperience of the Fund Volunteers (and the Fund generally) and the experienceof anti-poverty organizations in other states.  Resistance from local officials inNorth Carolina was prevalent as it was elsewhere in the country in 1965-69.The post-1965 training of the Fund’s “nonprofessional” Community ActionTechnicians might deserve an article of its ownagain, with comparisons to theexperiences associated nationwide with the “maximum feasible participation”mandate of the Community Action Programs.The authors argue for looking beyond “direct service to poor communities”and for “power brokers in the public policy arena” to “confront and transformexisting social and economic relations.”4  They argue that the Fund’s “mistake”2. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was in North Carolina in the 1960s, as a student, a participant incivil rights protest movements, and a newspaper reporter.  I knew some of the people involved with theSanford administration and the North Carolina Fund, and I admired them even if I did not alwaysagree with them.3. Creating a corps that is heterogeneous in terms of class remains, in 1999, one of the most diffi-cult challenges.  I know of few examples of successfully bonding corps members across class lines.  Wesought to do that with the North Carolina Child Care Corps, and it was one of our most difficult tasks.4. Korstad & Leloudis, supra note 1, at 195-96.JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00  9:25 AMPage 257: Autumn 1999] COMMENT 259was “in setting that  goal against a sustained and robust program of student vol-unteerism.  With the shutdown of the Volunteers program, the Fund lost muchof its ability to build broad-based support for its work” by reducing the chancesfor “interracial, cross-class alliances.”5  These assertions could be evaluatedmore easily if we knew more about the impact and the costs of the Fund’s Vol-unteer program.  Were there efforts to evaluate or even measure communityimpact?  Perhaps we can conclude that the experience was transforming for theVolunteers, but was it transforming for the communities?  If this program wasto have been continued in the 1960s (or revived in the future), how much wouldit have cost?  How much was spent on training?  What was the staff/Volunteerratio?  What were the operating costs per Volunteer in the field?  Could theFund ever be the template for continuing organizations then or now?In the end, the Korstad and Leloudis article leaves questions unanswered.The study is valuable in its own right, however, as an historical portrait of amajor experiment and the lasting impact such experience has on the partici-pants.IIIGROSSMAN AND FURANO ARTICLEThe second articleas does the one discussed in the next sec-tionaddresses unpaid volunteers, rather than stipended “national service”workers, and this distinction affects almost every feature of the participants’ ex-perience, the staffs’ responsibility, and the programs’ impact.  Making this dis-tinction is made more difficult because corps programs, such as the NorthCarolina Fund, often call stipended corps members “volunteers.”Jean Baldwin Grossman and Kathryn Furano, in Making the Most of Vol-unteers, seek to identify the elements that must be in place to allow volunteersto be effective.6  Some social problems are too complex or acute to be ade-quately addressed by volunteers at all, but, in those areas in which volunteerscan succeed, the authors ask how success can be made more likely.  They iden-tify three areas as important: (1) screening; (2) training; and (3) ongoing man-agement and support.A. ScreeningAgencies screen for the level of skills possessed by each applicant.  Theauthors suggest that most programs choose a mixed strategy of screening forpeople who already have skills while recognizing they must devote time and re-sources to teaching volunteers needed skills.Every agency knows that, if it has volunteers with high skill levels, thosevolunteers will perform at a higher level.  For example, the Harvard student5. Id. at 197.6. See Jean Baldwin Grossman & Kathryn Furano, Making the Most of Volunteers, 62 LAW &CONTEMP. PROBS. 199 (Autumn 1999).JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00  9:25 AM260 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 62: No.4body will perform certain academic tasks at a higher level than the student bodyof most community colleges, independent of anything done by the faculty andstaff.  The question here is what is the purpose of the volunteer service?  If thepurpose is to provide a high level of skilled service, it becomes a financial cal-culation whether that service can be best provided by a paid staff of a given sizeor by volunteers supported by a smaller staff.  However, if part of the purpose isto transform the volunteersto affect their livesthen you cannot limit re-cruitment to Harvard students.  You must accept some volunteers without ap-propriate skills and train them.This is not the same as screening for attitudes toward the workwill they beconscientious?or doing background checks on applicants, both of which areappropriate for all organizations.  Similarly, ensuring that volunteers under-stand the time commitment is essential.  The authors note the significant rangein time commitment required in volunteering.  They present data on the dan-gers of having volunteers enter into a relationship with a “vulnerable individ-ual,” for example, a child while volunteering for Big Brothers or Big Sisters,and then fail to follow through.  Indeed, the importance of relationships beinglong and full argues for full-time service instead of volunteers for some kinds ofeducation and social service.B. Training and SkillsThe authors describe two types of training, content-focused and process-focused, suggesting that the latter receives too little attention.  Any college pr o-fessor who has supervised a student intern knows that one of the greatest chal-lenges to a successful internship is navigating the organizational setting.  Theauthors probably are correct in concluding that the same is true for agency vol-unteers.  In the North Carolina Child Care Corps, we devoted a great deal oftime to training.7  It was unsettling to realize that our Corps members, after onemonth of intensive trainingleading to a community college Child Care Cre-dentialhad more formal training than fifty percent of the child care workersin North Carolina.8C. On-going Management and SupportThe authors’ discussion of volunteer assignments and their examples aresensible.  They also report on the importance of supervision for the success ofvolunteer mentors.  This includes helping the volunteers deal with initial frus-trations, ordering materials, and handling tasks requiring specialized knowl-edge.  It would be interesting to see more data on costs.  At what point does itmake sense to hire more staff and rely less on volunteers?  What is the cost involunteer productivity of replacing staff support with non-staff support?  Giventhe supervisors’ frustrations, can a case be made for a high-cost, high-7. Supra text accompanying note 3.8. S. RUSSELL ET AL.  WORKING IN CHILD CARE CENTERS IN NORTH CAROLINA (1993).JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00  9:25 AMPage 257: Autumn 1999] COMMENT 261productivity strategy?  I understand there is a political dimension here that re-quires agencies to persuade someone to finance such a strategy.I am interested in projects exploring ways to have stipended corps memberssupervise unpaid service providers.  If this approach succeeds, it offers a lessexpensive approach than staff supervision, but it still requires good training andsupervision for the stipended workers.  If fifth graders can teach second gradersto read, as occurs in the Israeli/UNC-Greensboro program Reading Together,then perhaps stipended workers can provide that guidance for volunteers.The authors’ discussion of the importance of internal communications, theagency “buying in” to what the volunteers will do, and continuing support fromthe agency all are sensible.  The authors’ discussion of the costs of infrastructureis welcome, though we need to include other administrative costs as well.  Wewant to be able to calculate the total cost per hour served, or per task per-formed, and come to a judgment about the programmatic value of volunteers.The Grossman and Furano article, like the Korstad and Leloudis study, doesnot include information about the impact of volunteers or corps members.  Tosome degree, this is a problem of time.  Many of the results of such service oc-cur some time after the service has been performed.  For example, an environ-mental project to reduce the damage from floods cannot be evaluated untilsome time after the environmental group has finished its work.  Even whenlonger-term impact cannot be easily measured, however, some attempt shouldbe made to measure the results of training and subsequent service.9IVBRUDNEY ARTICLEFinally, Jeffrey Brudney’s article, The Effective Use of Volunteers: BestPractices for the Public Sector,10 reviews the relevant literature and then useswhat is described as a “marketing study” of volunteer programs housed in gov-ernmental agenciesas distinguished from non-profit agenciesto identifypractices correlated to the programs’ perceived success.  Brudney’s article isambitious and contains much that is valuable in terms of descriptive data andsuggestions for further research.  Volunteer programs in the government andnon-profit spheres will be organized and operated with or without good data onhow to make them succeed.  Brudney is correct that volunteer managers wouldbenefit considerably from having the kind of data he hopes to develop.The review of the literature is interesting, and extends far beyond what isneeded to inform the research.  The author identifies seventeen or eighteen“good practices” in volunteer administration.  With the possible exception of9. In the North Carolina Child Care Corps, for example, we videotaped a week’s worth of interac-tions between Corps members and children at two points during their service, to determine if the Corpsmembers were continuing to use what our trainers believed were developmentally appropriate teachingand discipline approaches.10. See Jeffrey L. Brudney, The Effective Use of Volunteers: Best Practices for the Public Sector, 62LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 219 (Autumn 1999).JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00  9:25 AM262 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 62: No.4annual evaluations for volunteers, all are practices that volunteer organizationswould be likely to endorse in principle, if not in practice.The author is gathering information in a complex area with considerablechallenges in defining populations and behaviors.  His “marketing study” isbased on a sample of volunteer programs housed in government agencies acrossall levels of government.  The sampling methodology is complex and multi-staged.  The method begins with identification of almost 5,000 volunteer pro-grams through telephone calls and follows with a mail questionnaire sent to asample of 500.  In the end, the author collects 188 usable questionnaires.  Un-fortunately, as the author acknowledges, the sample is not representative of anypopulation of government-based volunteer programs or program managers.Indeed, the author is straightforward in identifying several weaknesses in thesampling method.  In the literature review, we learn that “the great preponder-ance of volunteers to government assist[] local governments.”11  Brudney pointsout that his sample contains more federal programs than is likely to be true ofthe total population of public volunteer programs, and provides an explanation.If federal programs are indeed early adopters of good practices, then that couldbe a reason for focusing on them.Managers were asked whether their agency had listed “characteristics” ofvolunteer programs.  The author seeks to correlate the presence of these char-acteristics to the benefits the volunteer coordinators perceive have come fromthe volunteer programs.  Benefits are measured as the sum of the “yes’ answersto eleven questions, admittedly an imprecise method of measurement.  Themore troubling problem is the one the author identifies: to the extent thesequestionnaires were filled out by people for whom volunteer coordination is alarge part of their job, they presumably will have positive views of their volun-teer programs.  Both sides of the correlation involve the perceptions of themanagers, so we are correlating a coordinator’s perception of one thing with hisor her perception of a different thing.  Unsurprisingly, coordinators who devotemore time to volunteer coordination, and have budgets devoted to that pur-pose, are more likely to believe their programs are successful.Once the limitations of comparing perceptions are acknowledged, however,the study still provides a great deal of information about these programs’ char-acteristics.  The field is rich for further research with more focused samples andmixed objective and subjective measures of success.11. Id. at 228.JCLOTFELTER_FMT.DOC 06/22/00  9:25 AMPage 257: Autumn 1999] COMMENT 263VCONCLUSIONAll three articles address important subjects that need this attention, andmore in the future.Stipended service (as in the North Carolina Fund) has had difficulty gainingtraction since the great successes of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the1930s and the Peace Corps since the 1960s.  Stipended service is costly in termsof time, money, and inspiration, and it is always freighted with great politicalsignificance by both friends and enemies.  In the 1990s, AmeriCorps was soclosely associated with President Clinton that voting to delete funds for Ameri-Corps became a reflexive act of anti-Clintonism.It is possible that service-learning, the collection of practices associated withstipended service and many college internships, may have considerable cumula-tive effect on how college students (and some high school students and gradu-ates) volunteer.  This may occur without the United States having a single, high-profile service-learning organization.Non-stipended volunteerism, by contrast, has been seen as a non-partisansolution to many social problems.  The number of people volunteering and thenumber of hours volunteered are staggeringly large.  Here the challenge is toknow what to make of something that everyone claims to favor—and most peo-ple claim to do.Neither stipended service nor volunteerism can be defended successfullyunless we are seeking a mix of societal benefits and benefits for the volun-teer/corps member.  Neither can be successful if we are not willing to providethe support the authors discuss in these articles.

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