Volunteers at the core

For the second morning in a row, Mary was off to some meeting pertaining to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools Special Needs Advisory Council, on which she's been serving for some time now. She volunteers in a lot of other contexts, and she takes it seriously. She gets anxious before meetings, worried that she won't come off at her best.

A woman who serves on a board with me, and who has served on many and has very good instincts, said at a meeting not long ago that she had been thinking a lot about the extent to which many organizations -- and by extension much of our society -- was propped up on female volunteer labor. One of my first, if not quite my first (OK, maybe my first) instincts was to say to myself "hey, I volunteer a lot too," but then I realized it was not all about me and I didn't say anything aloud.

But I was thinking just now about the overall health of high-performance school systems like ours may be partially explained by the presence of a lot of volunteer hours filling in with little or large touches to support this or that activity or initiative that the school system itself doesn't have the institutional agility to support. And that he absence of this pool of volunteer labor -- whether because less affluent working moms have to participate in the labor force at higher rates and work more hours at shittier jobs, or because they weren't imbued with as intense a sense of responsibility for or influence over their kids' educational outcomes by the models of displayed to them by their parents -- might play a big role in the challenges of school systems in lower wealth areas.

Maybe.

As counter-examples, I remember one time going to an orientation meeting about how non-profits could volunteer for shifts to feed people at a homeless shelter, and I was impressed more than anything by the fact that the upper middle class was significantly under-represented, whereas there were a lot of people from working class churches etc. there. Also by the fact that the working class -- whatever its political persuasion -- really seems to show up big time in disaster recovery efforts after hurricanes, etc, in a way that the chattering class does not. Which is to say that our volunteerism is arguably more self-serving, driven as it is by an urge to protect our interests as a class. Which is one of the things others hate about us.