Abstract
Making Volunteers: Civic Life After Welfare’s End provides an in-depth treatment of an emerging organizational form in the world of voluntary organizations: the Empowerment Project (EP). This type of voluntary organization, Eliasoph argues, is ultimately oriented around transforming and empowering volunteers and recipients of aid by tapping into their latent civic and leadership potential. Much of the volunteer activity of these groups will undoubtedly look similar, at first glance, to the types of activity carried out by more traditional volunteer groups. The key difference, however, is not in the differing domains of organizational activity but rather the organizational telos. Helping others meet needs is not an end in itself for EPs but rather a means toward the self-empowerment of everyone involved.
EPs are complex organizations. They juggle multiple missions for multiple audiences. They primarily engage in short-term projects that require numerous and hybrid sources of funding. They emphasize an egalitarian, multicultural, transparent, flexible, and future-focused organizational culture and try to avoid the bureaucratic, hierarchical, abstract, and depersonalized components that characterize many traditional voluntary organizations. The sociological task that Eliasoph sets out for herself is to disentangle and document the on-the-ground outcomes that emerge from the complex confluence of these organizational traits. These competing missions and audiences generate an “organizational style” (pp. xii)—a patterned and tacit set of rules that govern ordinary behavior within an organization. The organizational style of EPs, in turn, generates a number of unanticipated consequences for participants. The primary substance of the book is the documenting of these consequences.
To accomplish this, Eliasoph spent nearly 5 years participating in EPs in a moderately sized city in the Midwest (pseudonym Snowy Prairie). The majority of her time was spent in a city-sponsored after-school youth volunteer program she refers to as Community House. However, she also attended other after-school youth programs, regional volunteer programs for youth, and adult planning meetings for those working in Snowy Prairie’s youth programs.
The book is split into three sections, each focusing on a different set of puzzles and problems that arise in the day-to-day functioning of EPs. The first section focuses on the unintended consequences that arise when EPs attempt to eschew authority, hierarchy, and bureaucracy and try to generate an atmosphere of equal participation, shared decision making, and in-the-moment inspiration. While these appear to be noble ideals, in practice she finds they often end in unintentional lessons for participants. For example, Eliasoph documents the interactions between the disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged youth who, although equivalent-status participants according to the egalitarian ideals of the program, participate in the program for very different reasons. It was well known, although almost never publicly discussed, that the disadvantaged youth participate to help transcend conditions of poverty, unstable home life, crime, teenage pregnancy, drug use, and so on. The nondisadvantaged youth mostly participated to help others (and perhaps beef up their college resumes). This reality colored the interactions between these groups, the types of projects youth proposed, and even the ideal meeting location. The motivation behind these interactions was to teach young people the lesson that all people are equally capable, no matter their background. In an ironical twist, Eliasoph argues that the unintended, but far more powerful, lesson gleaned from these experiences concerns the intractable nature of inequality in our society. Other chapters in this section take up some of the difficulties associated with using volunteering as therapy in the organizational culture of EPs, the challenges of raising funds from outside agencies while simultaneously being spontaneous and flexible, and the purposeful removal of the political implications of their activity.
The second section shifts focus to the environment of intimacy and safety that EPs desire to create. She notes a number of puzzling situations and ironies that arise in the actual organizational style of EPs. For example, she is critical of the adult volunteers that drop in temporarily to help with the after-school programs. These adults often desire a transformative experience (perhaps the very essence of EPs) but want it on the cheap. This desire to bond, but without the investment of time, undermines a setting of intimacy, stability, and safety that these programs are trying to provide to the youth. The internal tension between the value of a spontaneous, transformative experience on one hand, and the desire to create a certain type of environment for youth on the other, leads to this type of predictable trouble.
The final section of the book presents an analysis of the organizational practices surrounding racial and cultural diversity in EPs. Although diversity is a shared value in EPs, embracing multiculturalism does not necessarily mean a thorough knowledge and appreciation of the complexities of cultural difference. Rather, these terms were typically applied to situations where certain cultural groups (primarily people of color) and certain aspects of cultural difference (food, clothing, language, but not religion or the less savory aspects of one’s culture) were conspicuously on display. About once a month, the youth EPs would hold a public celebration that invariably displayed this type of multiculturalism to the community. Once again, the lesson that young people actually learn is likely different from what is intended: culture is something we wear lightly, and our differences are mostly shallow.
Eliasoph concludes her book by pointing to the silver lining in EPs. Although she is doubtful that these organizations can fulfill their lofty ideals, participants learn, often unintentionally, certain real-world skills as they navigate through these institutions. The EPs that Eliasoph studied are complex organizations that require young people to think abstractly, to understand how government, grant-making organizations, and other nonprofit agencies actually work, and to tactfully (if only shallowly) navigate cultural difference. She concludes with suggestions that emphasize bringing the organizational style of EPs more explicitly in line with the realities she documents.
The detailed documentation of the organizational style of EPs, along with the ironies of the intended versus actual outcomes, would not be possible without the ethnographic depth Eliasoph brings to the project. This is a real strength of the book. It is hard to imagine similar insights being reached through surveys or semistructured interviews. This insight comes at a cost, however. While the methods she applies to her project lead her to some important conclusions (and even a few practical strategies), they also make it difficult to contextualize where the EPs she studies fit into the broader landscape of voluntary associations. A reader interested in EPs as a phenomenon will be disappointed to find virtually no history of their rise, their prevalence, or an adequate engagement with existing literature on this organizational form. The lack of a wide-angle lens on EPs will also probably lead readers to wonder how typical these specific youth EPs are and what the important similarities and differences are to other EPs. Which of her findings, for example, apply to EPs in developing countries whose goals are to spur economic development? To her credit, Eliasoph does spend about six pages in the final chapter considering this type of question, but it is a cursory and ultimately incomplete treatment. Despite this shortcoming, Eliasoph’s skillful exposition of the culture of EPs makes this book an important contribution to our understanding of this relatively new type of organization. For those who research and work within EPs or organizations that share similarities with the youth programs she studies, this book will be indispensable.