Were you forced to volunteer?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Yes.
Starting in middle school - and this was in the mid-80s. To graduate from my public middle school you had to do a certain amount of community service. And no one thought it was a big deal. And it certainly wasn’t leeching our precious time from otherwise helping out the economy. And it wasn’t siphoning away our job skills (we didn’t have job skills. Seriously. We were 12. What the hell else were we doing but tying up our parents’ phone lines.). I tutored.

The amount of overhead was your homeroom teacher keeping a log of hours that you turned in.

In high school, you got an extra star by your name if you did a certain number of hours. So, at my school, most of the students did those hours so they could get the star and put it on their college applications. Again, about an hour a week. We watched a little bit less TV. (Gasp. Horrors.) The massive overhead here was the high school secretarial staff keeping a log of the hours that the student turned in.

The conversation in the GD thread is bizarre.

42

I had to do 20 hours (I think) one semester for Chr. Morality- I too, went to a Catholic HS. And that was on top of the 50? hours per semester I did to qualify for the Honor Society.

43

Oh, and Leaffan, maybe you missed the scandal a few years back at UW. I forget the details, something about embezzlement and outrageously high salaries for the top brass.

44

When I was in school, if you made honor-roll for however many grading periods, you were automatically “inducted” into the National Honor Society. And if you were a member, you were expected to help out with both the school story (selling pencils, notebook paper, etc. before school and during lunches) and the after-school tutoring program. I suppose you could refuse, but mostly people didn’t.

And where I currently work, you are strongly encouraged to “volunteer” at one of our sponsored charities at least one day a year. And at my level of management, it’s kind of noticed if you don’t, and if you don’t provide opportunities for your associates to do so as well (on the clock, though, which makes a difference, IMHO.)

45

We had to volunteer for a political campaign for 20 hours when I was in twelfth-grade civics. It was OK, I guess. Mostly, I think what I learned was that the good guys don’t always win.

And count me as another one who finds the GD thread bizarre. This is SUCH a non-issue.

46

I had to do some community service at a nursing home as part of religious education while in middle school. We pushed old folks in wheelchairs down to church services and back. There was no explanantion or context or anything. At the time I thought it was just another useless hoop we were being forced to jump through, like so much of what passes for education, and that maybe we were supposed to learn to feel compassion towards invalids or something. Looking back now, it seems even more pointless. The staff were obviously able to get the old folks down the hall when we weren’t there. We weren’t helping the elderly do something they couldn’t do for themselves, we were doing a favor for health care workers by doing part of their job.

Not to get into GD territory, but while most of the charity-type work we are talking about here is usually done by genuine volunteers for free, it seems a bit of a stretch to call it volunteerism when the unpaid worker is coerced by the threat of witholding earned academic or religious advancement or by whatever it is that parent threaten kids with (Beatings? No food? A good talking-to?).

Obligatory United Way comment: in addition to obnoxiously pushing the rank and file to donate, my employer requires all managers to donate (one of them showed me some emails). The consequences of failure to give are not spelled out, but I’ve never heard of a manager not forking it over, even though some are pissed about it.

47

My high school required IIRC 15 hours of volunteer work our senior year, at either a retirement “community” or a soup kitchen. Making it mandatory wasn’t allowed so they basically skirted the rule by making the volunteer work 30% of your grade.

Luckily my last-period teacher was one of the most despicable teachers of the 20th century and filled out time sheets for a few of us so we could sit with him playing briscola and tressette.

I’m still ashamed of myself for missing what could have been a valuable life lesson(which I desperately needed at that age).

48

If you are required to do it, it isn’t volunteering! It may be unpaid service required for a class or whatever, but it isn’t volunteering! Arrghh!

Sorry. That one gets me.

49

For my government class, we had to do 20 hours for a political campaign. My friends and I wound up doing it for the local Republican party because we found out that the local Democratic Party would have us making phone calls.

We wound up having to go door to door putting fliers in people’s mail boxes. The funny part was that after we were done one day, we found out that they had sent us to the wrong neighborhood. The entire thing felt underfunded and poorly planned. I wasn’t surprised when that candidate lost.

50

[QUOTE=Freudian Slit]
. … Green Chimney for wayward or abandoned youth, …
[/QUOTE]

Hey, I know that place. I’ve visited several times.

51

[QUOTE=Sunspace]
If you are required to do it, it isn’t volunteering! It may be unpaid service required for a class or whatever, but it isn’t volunteering! Arrghh!

Sorry. That one gets me.
[/QUOTE]

Thank you! Yes, that gets me too.

I remember when I was at college, I had a scholarship that included a community service requirement. My fellow scholarship recipients and I had it drilled into our heads that we were not “volunteering.” When we contacted local non-profits, we had to be very clear that we were seeking “community service opportunities” not “volunteer opportunities.”

Now that I think about it, understanding the difference between community service and volunteer service is one of the most valuable things I learned from the experience.

52

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
Oh, and Leaffan, maybe you missed the scandal a few years back at UW. I forget the details, something about embezzlement and outrageously high salaries for the top brass.
[/QUOTE]

At the cost of extending this hijack…three incidents in particular stand out in my memory.

The William Aramony scandal is the first. This is a retrospective article written years later; you can google much more. My recollection is that Aramony wasted large quantities of charity money on hookers & blow, then claimed his “brain had atrophied” as a legal defense. The linked article says he went to prison; my memory wasn’t clear on that point.

The second and more arguable incident was the departure of Aramony’s replacement, Elaine Chao. Current articles online that I’ve found paint a rosy picture of her “restoring public trust” in the United Way, but what these articles ignore or gloss over is the way she left UW. I distinctly remember being shocked. The Board of Directors bought out her contract abruptly and without giving any reason. When The Washington Post inquired why they had gone to such great expense if she was a respected reformer, the BoD’s reply made clear that they didn’t worry about the expense because it was charity money (i.e. someone else’s cash). The Post then questioned the buyout in an editorial, because it was not only illegal to use charity donations to buy out her contract, but also specifically the sort of illegality a Board is supposed to guard against. The next day the Board announced they had paid the entire contract out of their own pockets…once they’d been caught misusing the donations, that is. “All a misunderstanding.”

The Board dumping her prematurely, breaking the law to do so, and then, most tellingly of all, spending personal cash from the Board members’ own pockets to finish the job, did not, in my personal opinion, mean she was leaving on a high note of integrity and restored trust. But we do not know the details.

Then, although this was at the regional level and not the national level, came the Oral Suer scandal. I’m not talking about his name (although whether it’s pronounced Oral Swear or Oral Sewer, it’s funny either way). He also plundered the charity at will.

I seem to have totally forgotten some of the items on this list, including Norman Taylor’s being supoenaed by the FBI and the fact that businessman Anthony J. Buzzelli declined to serve after having been elected to head the Washington regional branch (presumably Mr. Buzzelli isn’t implicated in malfeasance but knew enough about the charity’s troubles that he declined to get involved). I also seem to have missed the NY regional leader, Ralph Dickerson, diverting a relatively penny-ante $227,000 to his own uses..

It’s this long parade of thieves, frauds, liars, mysterious buyouts, and questionable Board oversight – and the way so many wealthy, already-successful people have treated the fund like they were swimming in Scrooge McDuck’s vault of coins – that caused ME to lose confidence in the organization.

Other people just hate the peer-pressure-driven extortion, I guess.

Sailboat

53

Interesting. As far as I can tell though the United Way in Canada has no financial connections with the United Way in the U.S. I don’t know of any similar financial issues regarding UW Canada.

54

[QUOTE=phall0106]
But, didn’t every time you saw one of them think to yourself, “Hey, I did that”?
[/QUOTE]

Not really. I did it in a neighborhood where I had never been before that and that I never went back to again.

55

[QUOTE=muldoonthief]

All I really took away from the experience was a fervent desire to never be homeless myself, and a feeling that running a soup kitchen doesn’t help the homeless do anything but survive another day. I think I’ve matured since then (hah), but this small bit of forced volunteerism certainly didn’t make me feel more generous to my fellow man.
[/QUOTE]
You’re stating what I’ve observed on the street and I have no desire to have any contact with the homeless for the reasons you stated. I prefer to right a check and be done with it.

56

The first year our company was bought, the parent corporation had a huge push for a Volunteer Day, to the point that we were given nearly daily e-mail reminders and somehow IT rigged up a way for one of the Verrrrry High Ups at the company to leave a message on everyone’s voice mail about how important it was.

It got to the point that I mentioned to my boss that I was afraid if I didn’t show up, it would be “remembered.” I heard a rumor the entire IT department flat out told their boss they weren’t going, en masse.

Since then, although we still do the Volunteer Day annually, it’s been toned down considerably and cut to a half-day. The charity is a worthy charity, but I don’t like being told by my employer what to do on my day off. Yes, yes, I know it’s only one day a year, and I have gone three times, but that first time I felt forced.

57

I went to a Jesuit high school. Juniors were required to do about 40 hours of service a year. For seniors, “Christian service” was a big part of your life for 9 months. They gave us every Monday off to complete I-forget-how-many hours of service (but it was a lot).

They encouraged us to get our hands dirty, but I took the painless route and worked in the library at a public elementary school. The kids and the staff were all quite pleasant, and I had a perfectly fine time.

In retrospect, however, I wish I’d taken my mother’s advice and gone to work in a hospice. Easy for me to say now, I guess, but it’s true.

58

[QUOTE=muldoonthief]
…
At any time were in your life, were you forced, compelled, strongly encouraged etc. to volunteer your time & effort? How & why? What did you have to do? …
[/QUOTE]

Does “community service” (for a misdemeanor possession beef ) count? If not, please skip ahead to the last couple paragraphs of the following.

Sometime in the late 1980s or early '90s, I got popped for pot possession in Berkeley (oh, what a wretched little burg is Berkeley! but I digress) and was sentenced to work it off – 60 hours of community (so-called) service. I chose to do mine at a free meal program some church in West Oakland was running (which I chose because, having done my share of standing in line at soup kitchens, among other things in my time, I am very sympathetic to the situation of our homeless and impoverished fellow-folk.)

It was kind of awful. Everyone working there seemed more hardass than me and treated me like a fool; I was ordered about in a high handed and perfunctory fashion by the church personel and the other volunteers/conscripts alike, and it was more or less the same kind of work as a scullion-level employee at a restaurant has to do – hauling boxes of produce, food prep, dishwashing, swabbing tables, sweeping and mopping and like that. To my utter albeit unuttered disgust, there was also considerable praying and praise-the-lording involved. Plus with all due respect to the other toilers in the charitable enterprise, we apparently had nothing much to say to each other because I was pretty much ostracized other than being told what to do.

After a couple of days of this, the supervisor either decided she had had enough of me, and there was sufficient labor power that the kitchen could do without my own, or else she felt sorry for me. Whatever her motives, she called me aside and signed off my whole two weeks worth of servitude as having been completed. I waited an appropriate length of time, took my signed papers to the DAs office, and was sent on my way.

What did I learn from this? I already knew it’s a lot of work to put out a free meal and that the volunteers don’t sign on just for the fun of it. So I guess my lesson was merely not to get busted for possession of a controlled substance in --ugh!-- Berkeley, California again, not even for a misdemeanour amount.

Another time I went to the Ancient Ways Festival at a hot springs in NorCal, where the attendees were required (!) to do a couple of hours of volunteer (?) work on-site besides paying for the weekend. My SO at the time wqas one of those who actually liked playing with kids and felt that I should too so he signed us both up to do our shift of servitude as kid caretakers. Within the first hour I was expected to help change a toddler’s shit filled diaper, so afterward I limited my participation to sitting in a corner with a brat-repellent scowl on my face; my SO (long since occluded from my universe, thank badness!), knowing what I was like and anticipating what was likely to follow if I was pushed any further, deflected the attentions of his charges (and the other paying attendees) from me and let me wait it out. All I learned from* this *experience was that the festival focalizers were a devious and authoritarian lot who expected free labor from the same people who were putting money in their bank accounts, and that projecting the right attitude can help one out a lot in life.

59

Many many of us were forced to volunteer during the Vietnam War. We got our draft notice (for two years service in the Army) and were given 30 days before induction to join the service of our choice. The Coast Guard and the Air Force were full (or maybe that was the Coast Guard and the Navy)(or perhaps it was the Coast Guard and the Navy and the Air Force). Anyway, our actual choices were the Marine Corps for four years (I think) or the Army (((with a choice of MOS ( Military Occupational Specialty) (Job))) for three years. Our actual choice was to go to war or go to jail.
If we had simply allowed ourselves to be drafted for two years, we would have gotten the MOS 11B, Infantry. We would have gotten out one year sooner, but might also have gotten out dead with lots of bad Karma.
I chose the Army as a medic for three years, two years of that were in Viet Nam.
Draftees had a service number with the prefix “US”. Volunteers (even reluctant volunteers) had a service number prefix of “RA” (Regular Army). We were mostly treated identically. Once in a great while someone would notice and they would give a crappy job to a draftee rather than a volunteer based on the US/RA difference.

60

[QUOTE=muldoonthief]
All I really took away from the experience was a fervent desire to never be homeless myself.
[/QUOTE]

This sounds like a good thing to learn, to me.