What Makes People Volunteer

READING ONE

Read the following citations about charity and comment on their meaning.

Starter activity

Answer the following questions.

Listen to the interview another time and explain the following statements.

Listen to the interview with Mrs. M. Thatcher carefully and do the following tasks.

You will hear an interview with Mrs M.Thatcher. Before listening study the following vocabulary.

Listening comprehension

Victorian values	Викторианские моральные ценности
haves	имущие
have-nots	неимущие
to encompass	заключать

· make up a list of Victorian values that Mrs. Thatcher admired;

· speak about the improvements made in the standards of living during Victorian times.

· every person should be a man/woman of property (why is it so important?);

· most kinds of advantages are only offered to the haves, not to the have-nots;

· life would have been very much different for many of our old folk if the money they’d put aside had kept its value (inflation, force majeur circumstances).

· What does Mrs. Thatcher refer to Victorian values?

· What negative aspects of life did Victorian times encompass?

· How does Mrs. Thatcher describe an excellent society?

· Does Mrs. Thatcher sound sorry about the unemployed?

· What does inflation cause?

5. Discuss in groups of 3–4 the following questions and present the results of your discussion to the other groups in class.

1. What empowers us to change the world?

2. What are the challenges of moral re-armament?

3. How much have Victorian values changed? Are these changes applicable to your society?

4. How much different are moral values of the youth from those of the older generation?

5. Who should impart moral values?

Section 2. The Role of Charity in Moral Re-armament

How much do you know about charity? Have you ever participated in any charity work? (Tell us about it.) Is voluntary work a positive feature of any society? How is it related to moral re-armament?

· Charity is never lost: it may meet with ingratitude, yet it ever does a work of beauty and grace upon the heart of the giver. (Conyers Middleron)

· Goodness consists not in the outward thing we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be is the great thing. (E.H.Chapin)

· How seldom we weigh our neighbour in the same balance with ourselves. (Thomas á Kempis)

· Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others as by self-examination thoroughly to know our own. (Fenelon)

· He has the right to criticize who has heart to help. (Abraham Lincoln)

· We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children educate us? (Mrs. Sigourney)

Voluntary work, the things we put our heart into without asking for reward, is a priceless asset to any country. Most voluntary work is fitted into people’s spare time. But sometimes a grave need in national and global affairs calls for unusual steps and people abandon paid work to make new perspectives possible. Religious bodies through the ages have been upheld by such risk-taking people with a sense of vocation. And the current programmes of Moral Re-armament are sustained by a partnership between people in a wide variety of jobs and others who make themselves wholly available. Moral Re-armament seeks to liberate the initiative, creativity and depth of relationships that could make the world work. It takes all one’s skills, stretches one’s abilities and show up one’s mistakes, sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously. Yet it is satisfying to try to alter the fundamental motives of society.

Deep changes of attitude can never be prescribed. Nor can a fee be charged.

Voluntary activities range from rattling collection boxes in the streets to sitting as a Justice of the Peace, from improving wildlife habitat to manning telephone helplines for children or parents. Besides tens of thousands have found in voluntary work new perspectives on an extraordinary range of issues, from the healing of relationships between colonialized peoples and their former masters to the future of Eastern Europe or values for industrial and artistic life.

So what makes people volunteer?

Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) publicity quotes one crew member: “One day you’ll be battling with fog for 22 hours, looking for survivors. Just as you're frozen stiff and giving up hope you spot them. Just the look on their faces when they realize they're not going to die. That's enough.”

For Jakarea Islam, 23, from Luton, it was the desire to “put something into the place where I was living” that led him to get involved with the Bangladesh Youth League (BYL). He became a full-time volunteer seven years ago, while he was still living at home. Now he has part-time employment. He has helped run a number of youth clubs around Luton; organized seminars on racial harassment, community relations and drugs; advised adults on issues such as housing and employment; and helped young people prepare CVs and application forms and advised them on interview techniques. In 1995 he was the youth winner of the Whitebread Volunteer Action Award.

Islam explains that the BYL was set up around 1979 because of the problems, faced by young people. Today, 90 per cent of League members are ofAsian origin. “When I was 14 or 15 facilities were not available”, he recalls. He wants to create a good environment for teenagers inthe most deprived area of the town. He enthuses about the Centre for Youth and Community Development which they are “creating on a half-acre site and their flag ship project”, a four-week summer school held every August. “The unique thing is that the young people who participate organize it the following year.” They spend the intervening 11 months raising the necessary funds.

“We ask schools if we can use their premises as well as our own centre so that we can occupy young people's time,' Islam adds. Otherwise you get boredom and anti­social activities, and 'it will lead to people saying, that's a bad area”.

Chris Baddock visits housebound people under the Haling Link Scheme in west London in order to give the main carer a break. Seeing that his mother's last years were not as good as they could have been opened his eyes to the need. So when he happened to notice Ealing Volunteer Bureau he offered his help. He visits three couples most weeks, for two or three hours at a time. Echoing the feelings of many volunteers, Baddock says, he gets a great deal out of volunteering: “It's nice to know you're bringing a little bit of happiness into someone's life and putting something back into the community.”

Joan Caden worked in the City of London as chief accountant of a merchant bank. Now she chairs the executive committee of David Gresham House, a residential Abbeyfield extra care home for elderly people in Surrey. It started when someone she had met on a commuter train invited her to a cocktail party where she was asked to serve coffee at the Abbeyfield home once a week. Later she took on the management of 30 paid staff and became more and more involved.

“I'd been a busy soul,” says Caden, “and there was no way I could see I’d be happy just looking after my home, playing golf and going to coffee mornings. As an accountant you don’t see any result from your work, except a balance sheet. You get pleasure out of feeling that you are making life more pleasant for people, particularly the elderly.” She feels that it pays to know what you’re good at. Her forte is administration.

Felicity Dick's Catholic faith has been one of the motives behind her increasing involvement with voluntary work. She is Chairman of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, who visit asylum-seekers held in detention while the government decides whether or not to admit them to the UK as refugees. She also does bereavement counselling. Voluntary work takes up most of her time apart from the odd half-day's tennis or bridge.

“It was all terribly unplanned,” she says. Having spent ten years building up a career as a freelance business consultant, “I just took on too much.” She gradually dropped the paid work, no longer needing to earn. “Women of my age have spent years bringing up their children and suddenly you're not needed. Then you discover that there are 150 detainees the same age as your children who are lost, lonely, confused. I suppose it's a continuation of that mother role.”

Felicity Dick enjoys working with like-minded people, and finds it “amazingly interesting” to learn about the detainees' countries. But the work can be harrowing too. If you've befriended someone and seen them every week for a year, it's incredibly distressing when that person is suddenly deported.”

There is no doubting the commitment of many volunteers, nor the value of much of their work. Yet goodwill alone is not enough to ensure the smooth running of a group. “I find voluntary work as stressful as paid work,” says Felicity Dick. One factor is that it is ill-defined. “When you do paid work you are appraised. Someone says, “You need to go on a course,” or, “Well done.” The great danger is to think, “I'm only a volunteer, I'm not paid to do this, so I cannot be expected to do it well. That is not so. You’ve got to perform as well as you can.” Relying on volunteers can have its problems, she points out. Occasionally a visitor will fail to meet their commitment, saying they are too busy. You are not in a position to threaten them with dismissal. All you can do is to be careful who you select in the first place.

At the grassroots there is some disquiet about the changing culture of voluntary work. Jackie Goodwin, who organizes the scheme for visiting the housebound says that the smaller voluntary organizations are “close to the ground,.know the real needs and often come up with innovative ideas on how to meet them”. Working for local authorities along lines they prescribe could make the voluntary organizations lose what made them special in the first place.

Kenneth Noble. For a Change. 1998

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