Six Month Reflection

Saturday will be my VISTA six month mark, and I think that warrants some reflection. I don't know if this is the most important thing I've learned so far, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how to stop treating potential recipients of donations as hypothetical people.

I used to say that everyone at some point should be required to work some awful job in the service industry, maybe even with periodic temporary reminder sessions, so that nobody forgets that people behind counters are real people, too. I'd like to add that everyone should spend at least a day processing charitable donations, because a donation bin is not a dumpster with less guilt. I've treated it that way, and I'm going to stop and think before I donate. There are real live people who receive these things, and real, live people who handle every item.


1) I'm going to stop donating unwearable, unrepairable clothes to Goodwill. Somebody who sorts that stuff will throw it out if I don't. Their dumpster is no better than mine, and it's not like I don't know a million ways to recycle a pair of jeans.

2) Furthermore, I'm going to give thought to where my donations go. I know a VISTA whose position was designed partly because disorganized Katrina relief meant that in response to requests for clothes, several truckloads of winter coats made their way to the Gulf Coast. This was way more than a mere inconvenience for volunteers and recipients.

3) I'm going to follow the rules and write something worth reading when writing letters and greetings through some kind of service. I sorted a ton of Holiday Cards for Heroes yesterday, which involves reading every message on every card, blacking out contact information and sorting out questionable messages. Programs like this is not an appropriate venue for shameless promotion of your youTube channel or fanatic proselytizing. On the other hand, write more than just your name. What would you want to read from a stranger if you were in Iraq?

4) I will never again designate a cash donation. It is not easy to earn unrestricted funds of any kind, and the indirect operating costs (salaries, building utilities) are just as essential as direct expenses (program materials). If I trust and admire an organization enough to donate in the first place, it makes no sense to decide that I know more about what is needed than the people who actually work there.


That's it for now, I guess. Charitable donations can be neither when they're poorly planned, and it's too bad that telling donors that is such a sensitive issue. If you've never waited tables, you may not realize that it's easier to deal with an even $5.00 than a tip for $5.34 (at least in my opinion). If you've never had hundreds of completely useless magazines from the seventies crowding your office, of course you won't think about what happens after you drop off all the stuff you found in the attic of your relative with the hoarding problem. Philanthropy is no good without some logic behind it, and more people need to start thinking about what they don't know.

it's another thing to see it on through

The past six weeks or so have been all about realizing how short a year actually is. I love what I'm building here deeply, so it's difficult to cope with the realization that I will have to be satisfied as the architect of the foundation and not the whole skyscraper.

I realize now that I've been coping by being hyper-critical of myself as if being a perfect person and perfect VISTA will somehow translate into a perfect evaluation plan for the next few decades. This sentiment is ridiculous, and I officially acknowledge and release it.

It's okay to be one person. I matter as an individual in lots of ways. That's more important than these trepidation benders.

The post that ensures I will never be linked to in the VISTA enewsletter.

Blog Action Day is here. On Blog Action Day, bloggers are supposed to tie whatever they normally write about to a certain topic to generally raise awareness. Last year it was the environment, so a participating food blogger would have talked about sustainable farming.

This year the topic is poverty, which is sort of weird for me. I suppose that this blog is technically a record of the year I've committed to fighting poverty, but I subject whoever might read this to my external processing on a large-ish, somewhat disjointed pool of topics. (Or I did...)


Side story for just a moment:
My work is in evaluation. I'm building a system for this organization to take an honest look at how well they do what they say they do. At a meeting earlier this week, someone called a nascent evaluation point I'm working on a "dangerous question." This, of course, makes me feel like a real, live researcher.

The point of that story is that in the spirit of asking dangerous questions, I am going to ask myself a dangerous question (or at least uncomfortable) about VISTA and poverty. So here it goes.

VISTA income is below the poverty line, and we are prohibited from having any other employment/income. In training and orientation materials, there are two justifications offered for this. One is that that a more comfortable total income would somehow separate us from the communities we serve. Do I feel more connected to impoverished people in the Indianapolis communities I serve because of my modest living allowance?

Let's start answering this with a financial example.

I live in a pretty nice three-bedroom duplex that costs almost exactly the median monthly rent for the area. My rent is 48% of my living allowance and food stamps income. A household is considered cost-burdened if more than 30% of income goes to rent. About half of Marion County households are cost-burdened, so I'm probably connected to more neighbors this way than I know.

Well, never in my life have I had a complaint-free conversation about rent(not that I would ever talk to anyone my organization serves about housing). Also, I knowingly chose this rent ratio because it means that I live in a safe neighborhood, save gas because it's a mile from where I work, and it's big enough that I don't need to worry about storage. So, I guess I resent that these three fairly simple criteria mathematically indicate that I am somehow living beyond my means.

Is that the basis of a connection between me and impoverished girls in central Indiana? I seriously doubt it. Virtually any example I could use would be this ambiguous. Yes, I went through the paperwork to get on food stamps. But I'm qualified for way more than I would be if I was not a VISTA, and I certainly would never talk about this with the girls we serve.

There are strict limits on direct service where I would have the chance to interact with the girls, but it's probably more important that poverty is not limited to a lack of financial resources. Girls Inc. programs focus on every singe poverty-related resource listed in my VISTA handbook:

emotional stability and control
mental capacity and critical thinking skills
social capital and support systems for times of need
role models
financial assets



Look at that list. Obviously, poverty means more than an outdated math problem. It would be ridiculous to go about connecting with any community through only one of these routes.

And let's not kid ourselves. I won't walk away from this service year with a particularly robust story about a lack of financial resources because I am so rich in other resources. (Thanks for the toilet paper, Mom! Thanks for mailing me your old clothes, Caitlin!)


So I guess the point is that I don't blog much about poverty in my VISTA blog because that subject would make me a big, fat liar. I love what I do, and I believe that I am changing this city for the better, no doubt. But 1/3 of the way through my year of service, I'm the same privileged chick from the suburbs. I just have less money.

That alone does not prevent a connection to any community, impoverished or not. Sitting at a computer all day does.




Edit: I'm worried that this comes off like me making a crass blanket statement about VISTA or the poverty experience of others. I'm not. I'm making a crass statement strictly about my own experiences.

Probably just graph-obsessed.

While I'm not sure that I like being on food stamps better than I would like a higher living stipend, it certainly is enlightening to see that system from the inside.

I got a letter yesterday from the Marion County Department of Family Services, and I was almost afraid to open it. I'm in the process of switching banks and I thought that maybe I had to notify my caseworker and it was going to be a huge headache convincing them that I'm not trying to cheat the government. Turns out monthly benefits are being bumped. Mine are going up by $13. My income is completely disregarded for food stamps, so I get the amount that an adult who makes no money gets. I don't know what the increase is a different income levels.

Federal minimum gas mileage reimbursement (not a social service) went up by about 8 cents in July. Maybe I'm graph-obsessed, but I think it would be interesting to see a layered line graph of how these have increased over time. Is this a typical lag? Throw in a line for inflation and highlight different administrations over time, and I'm in graph heaven.



I finally got an invite to beta test Daytum, if it's not obvious. Click here to see me satisfy my quantitative urges.

I'm back. Promise.

I know I broke my promise to post more pretty much as soon as I made it.

Whatevs. I'm pondering the plural of VISTA. It stands for Volunteer in Service to America, so the full plural is Volunteers in Service to America, right? But the way I generally abbreviate it is VISTAs, which logically is Volunteer in Service to Americas, which always bugs me. I suppose it's less annoying than VsISTA, though. Oh well. I'll be damned before I start using an ugly apostrophe.



Oi. I think I've been spoiled too much these past few weeks to post about anything interesting. Got loaded down with just about my weight in swag and free food at Speaking of Women's Health on Friday. Today our CEO, who I adore for her affinity for (always good) surprise meetings, took the VISTAs for a picnic and hike at Eagle Creek Park. So, it's been a charming few days.

the autonomy of service

One of the documents I stumbled across on the common drive here at work was this paper on the history of national service in the US. VISTAs had to read it for last year's national conference. Lots of it is exactly what you'd expect: Civilian Conservation Corps roots, Volunteers In Service to America was pushed through congress in the name of Kennedy's ghost, Regan slashed at VISTA funds like Jason slashes at promiscuous campers, Clinton merged VISTA with his new AmeriCorps and so on and so forth. There are a couple points I'm still musing on, though. Ready?

VISTA has been attacked on practical levels, and that's not totally unreasonable. Just few thousand people are "Fighting poverty with a passion" each year. Factor in how very few people (especially legislators) understand the difference between direct service and capacity building and we wind up basically paddling upstream. So are we really making a difference? (Although, I must say that I totally lucked out on my fantastic state office and work site. My assignment is by-the-book, I anticipate tangible results, and the state office is totally supportive.) I can accept that there are practical criticisms of VISTA. It should come as no surprise that I think periodic evaluation of the program is a great way to sustain it.

Still, I just can't wrap my head around the ideological attacks on national service. Well, maybe I can. What I really mean is that I totally disagree. (Shocking, right?) The basic argument is that since I receive a living stipend and other benefits while I am volunteering, I am not acting autonomously and am therefore besmirching the name of volunteerism. Also, the feds pay my stipend and Big Government = apocalypse or whatever. But this reciprocity business is one of my biggest pet peeves about my own culture.

Despite what Precious Moments greeting cards and forwarded emails with too many .gif files have told you your whole life, random acts of kindness don't really exist. Human culture is based on reciprocity, and that's not good or bad. It just is. Parents don't hemorrhage time and money into kids because it feels good after 18 years. I didn't occasionally pick up my roommate from her night class when it was raining because it made me feel superior. No one donates to charity for no reason. Everyone needs something from someone at certain points in our lives. Parents expect children to make grandbabies and scope out decent nursing homes. I never had to hesitate to call my roommate when I was the one stranded on campus without an umbrella. If 1,000 years from now, North America has gone totally Mad Max while Wal*Mart and SUVs thrive in Africa, you bet we'd expect a "Do They Know it's Christmas at All" or two.

Does that make my parents selfish? Does that invalidate my relationship with my college roommate? Does that mean that Bono is less than sincere? No. It just means that we've created a whole mess of false compartmentalizations. To experience true autonomy, I'd have to make sure that I didn't know who I was helping or how I was helping them to ensure no one feels debt, entitlement, or a sense of karma, and then suppress the chemicals that stimulate my brain to feel good about it. Of course we don't do it that way! Being human means being connected to pretty much everyone in one way or another. When we ignore or simplify the implications of this, we create expectations like "true autonomy" that are unappealing and impossible to achieve.

So no, I absolutely would not sit here at Girls Incorporated of Indianapolis from 9-5 every day for a year without compensation, the benefit of experience, and the connections I will make. But I refuse to believe there's anything wrong about that. The government supports AmeriCorps, and in return AmeriCorps enhances the stability of American society, which means the government can continue thrive. Furthermore, the experience and connections I gain this year will eventually be transferred in to the work force and non-professional volunteerism, so who knows how many people will benefit from this year over the course of my lifetime. This is not nearly as simple as just subverting the purpose of the government.

Oh, holism!

So, I've been reading just about everything I can get my hands on at Girls Inc., and I've come to realize that I need to write to organize my thoughts way more than I initially thought. I thought I would just be reading lots of sometimes/always/never and strongly agree/agree/neutral/disagree/strongly disagree-type surveys all day. Instead, I've found that everything at Girls Inc. is super-interconnected. The right hand knows exactly what the left hand is doing, may have helped plan the activity, and probably volunteered to help. And that makes sense. Girls Inc. programs are supposed to be for the whole girl (mental, emotional, physical). They hired an Evaluation Specialist with a holistic perspective. So of course the organizational structure is anything but compartmentalized! And my job is WAY more fun this way.

I'm in this weird situation where I need some initial interviews with people before I can work independently much more, so I think the next few posts will be me working through ideas I have and opinions that I need to clarify. Here's a short list, mostly for my own memory.

1. Is AmeriCorps VISTA effective/neccesary? Is my year of service morally valid?
2. How does Girls Inc. fit into my own beliefs about gender? What will I say to people who doubt that gender-specific organizations are neccesary?
3. Why do I like my job so much? Is it because of the heavy ethnographic component or because I like working in nonprofit?
4. My own top 5 educators, top 5 role models, etc.
5. Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy