OUR KIDS AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP
Wingspread Journal, Winter 1996

WHAT IF?...WE VOLUNTEERED AS FAMILIES

by Barbara Lohman

Five years and more than 10,000 families later, volunteering -- family style -- is proving a powerful way to help communities, young people, adults, and the family itself.

That's the conclusion so far from The Points of Light Foundation land-mark program called Family Matters. Family Matters rests on a powerful principle: a volunteering family, regardless of how it is configured -- whether two-parent, single-parent, or intergenerational -- benefits the community, benefits itself as a family, and benefits the nation at large.

Launched in 1991, Family Matters began modestly with a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to find out to what extent families were volunteering together and if volunteer-dependent agencies thought of families as a resource. Virginia T. Austin, Points of Light vice president for nonprofit outreach, created Family Matters and headed the study.

"We began exploring family volunteerism as a resource with the potential for enormous gains to society." Austin says. "The idea was that a family reaching out to others also strengthens the relationships among its members."

The study revealed that volunteer families come from all racial and socio-economic groups.

It is estimated that more than a third of all American adults do volunteer work with their families. Family volunteering is not always easy, however, with coordination of schedules within families presenting the greatest challenge. Many projects and programs are also geared to individual volunteers rather than to families and it is not always easy to find projects appropriate for a variety of ages.

According to Austin, most compelling were the stories of the volunteer families who were "discovered" during the study. Mary Ann Barron and her 13-year-old son Brandon, for example, bring smiles to the pediatrics department at Hermann Hospital in Houston by playing games, reading books, or just talking to the children. Mary Ann is committed to volunteering because she believes that young people take cues from their parents.

"Our children may not always listen to their parents -- you can talk until you are blue in the face," says Mary Ann. "But our children watch what we do and follow our example." Sharing love is the example Mary Ann sets for Brandon. In turn, volunteering together has helped mother and son develop a stronger relationship. "Now we are closer and happier with each other," says Brandon.

Ilona Polivchak and Jeanne and Leila Erlandson are three generations of women bound together serving their community. Their comments beautifully summarize the special benefits of family service: "We have three levels of maturity and experience, each valuable in its own right," says Jeanne. "Our ages cross the decades so it's the past and present working as one when we volunteer together."

Following the study, and with continuing support from Kellogg and Lutheran Brotherhood, a fraternal benefits organization, Austin, her Family Matters paid staff, and volunteer leaders on her advisory committee created six pilot sites. Volunteer centers in New York City, Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Los Angeles, and two nonprofit organizations in three rural Kentucky counties host the Family Matters program. Each site is testing a variety of ways to recruit families as volunteers, and to break down barriers that some organizations have erected because of concern over liability issues.

One of the other obstacles families may face are organizations that are reluctant to put youth volunteers in challenging roles. Young people are looking for meaningful ways to volunteer and need to feel the importance of what they are doing. Rashida Johnson has been volunteering with her two younger brothers for most of their lives and she knows how important volunteering can be to a young person's sense of self-worth. "If young people can't take charge and express their opinions, they get turned off by the experience," Rashida warns. Organizations trying to encourage family volunteering need to be aware of the needs of young people as well as adult volunteers, and offer the support and additional training that can make the difference between success and a bad experience. The rewards can be substantial: getting youth involved in community service can be the first step in recruiting the entire family.

Family volunteering may be an option for middle- or upper-income families, but isn't it a luxury for a family fighting to put food on the table? Mac Goldberg, Family Matters program director in New York believes that the economically disadvantaged family may have the most to gain through family activities that assist others.

"When you're in a stressful situation, you have to pull yourself off the treadmill and take one day at a time," says Goldberg. "In addition, financially pressured families often feel an acute sense of isolation, as though their backs are to the wall and they're the only ones feeling this way." Family volunteering may help break through the loneliness and despair and empower the family to work toward its own healing.

In three rural counties in Kentucky low-income families have proved that volunteering need not be limited to middle-class suburbanites. More than 700 families have been working for the past three years and have established a family, volunteer-run business and teen center as a "hang-out" for young teens and families. They have also distributed seedlings, and offered literacy training, breast cancer counseling, and livestock education and in the process given more than 50,000 volunteer hours to their communities.

Such results from the Family Matters test sites have demonstrated that family volunteering works "because the families have told us it does."

"You know you're on to something important when families tell you that volunteering together keeps them together," says Austin. "Values are created when people volunteer together. We learn what our responsibilities are to our communities, our families, and ourselves. We learn compassion, tolerance, and hopefully a sense of duty to respond when people are in need. I can't think of more important lessons to be passed from adult to child.

"We didn't invent this idea, but it would sure be wonderful to help make the idea of families as volunteers part of how we revitalize our communities." With careful planning and preparation, a family volunteering movement presents an important, largely untapped human resource for the nation's volunteer engaging organizations.

"Our challenge now is to craft a program that propels the idea all over the country," says Austin..

Ways for our Families to Volunteer

Family Matters has lists of suggestions on how you can volunteer as a family. Family Matters recommends you begin by focusing on the issues in your community. Pick an activity that interests you, then, after you start volunteering, talk about your experiences at family gatherings, such as at the dinner table, and reflect on what you've learned.

Here are some suggestions for how to get started:

• tutor children
• provide meals for a homebound neighbor on regularly scheduled days
• read to children or the elderly at your community hospital
• create bridges across racial divisions by organizing multicultural volleyball or softball teams
• provide free baby-sitting to parents struggling to work and/or attend school
• organize environmental projects in your neighborhood such as tree-plantings or recycling awareness drives
• work with other families to clean up a nearby park, beach, hiking trail, or other public area
• organize a community garden to beautify an unused plot of land
• develop a family-to-family relationship with those in a homeless facility

Find Out More About Family Matters

For more information about Family Matters, or for volunteer materials, contact The Points of Light Foundation, 1737 H St., NW, Washington, DC 20006, telephone, 202-223-9186, fax 223-9256.

Family Matters has a brochure, poster, and family volunteering ideas.