Volunteers Find Muck and Meaning in Service
By: Dan Barry
The New York Times
September 6, 2009
North East, Maryland
On a late summer morning so muggy that merely standing constitutes a workout, nine young adults in drenched T-shirts clear a trail in Elk Neck State Park. Three of them buzz expertly with chain saws through drooping oaks and pines, while six others haul the downed limbs deep into the woods.
Horseflies and mosquitoes conspire to thwart their labor, but it is the bees, disturbed from a nest, that succeed. Sadie Stone, 24, clearing brush, takes a sting for her country. Then Hilary Griffin, 23, cutting with her chain saw, takes three. The work stops, but only for a moment.
In the last few months, the combined experience of this team has also included cleaning up the muck after floods in West Virginia, building houses along the hurricane-pummeled Gulf Coast and working with children of low-income families in southern Georgia — all for about $80 a week and $4.50 a day in meal money, and a $4,725 educational award once they have completed their 10-month hitch.
None of them is from Maryland. Ms. Stone, of Northborough, Mass., Ms. Griffin, of Arkport, N.Y., and their colleagues belong to AmeriCorps, whose roots in the American experience deepened a few months ago when President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act to reauthorize and expand the corps and other national service programs.
Critics say that these bipartisan programs provide little more than busywork for volunteers; some even see dark forces at play. Michelle Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, cautioned that they might morph into mandatory “re-education camps,” while the conservative commentator Glenn Beck recited the AmeriCorps pledge (“I will get things done for America,” it begins) on television while wearing lederhosen — to make either a strained analogy to National Socialism or a daring fashion statement.
But these critics are fighting a rising tide. According to AmeriCorps officials, applications have nearly tripled in the last year. From November 2007 to August 2008, the agency received 67,283 online applications; from November 2008 to last month, it received 200,682.
The increase has been so great that AmeriCorps has a prepared statement divining the reasons: the recession, of course; something called the “Obama effect”; and what it describes as a “strong altruistic streak among today’s young adults.”
Agency officials say that many young people have used the catastrophes of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina as calls to action. Social networks like Facebook have simplified organizing around a particular cause. And high schools and colleges are frequently incorporating community service into the curriculum.
In describing why they had joined AmeriCorps, these young people clearing a forest trail in work pants, not lederhosen, do not refer to Mr. Obama, or Hurricane Katrina, or the Kennedys. But the reasons they give echo Mr. Kennedy, with a postmillennial flavor. As one of them, Travis Sackett, 24, put it: “I’m all about community service.”
His means of service comes through the National Civilian Community Corps, an AmeriCorps residential program for people 18 to 24 years old that specializes in disaster response but also in conservation efforts like their trail work here. It is partly modeled after the long-gone Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal initiative that trained millions of the unemployed to preserve the nation’s national resources, fighting fires, planting trees and building campgrounds.
Several months ago, Mr. Sackett and his colleagues mustered with 150 other young people on the sprawling grounds of the V.A. Medical Center in Perry Point, Md., where the corps operates one of its regional campuses. The young people — each of whom costs the government about $22,200 — were divided into teams and assigned to run-down houses from World War I that stand a few dozen yards from the Chesapeake Bay.
Roughly one-third of those enlisted have four-year college degrees, one-third have some college experience, and one-third have completed only high school. Their ranks are overwhelmingly white — a concern that the corps says it is addressing by intensifying recruitment efforts in the cities its teams work in.
The recruits were instructed to keep in shape and to work and live in teams of about a dozen. They were advised to pool their $4.50-a-day meal allowances for groceries, to eat family style, and to work out any interpersonal problems, because there is not a lot of “personal space” in the corps.
Once training was completed, the recruits stuffed their N.C.C.C.-issue red duffel bags with N.C.C.C.-issue shirts and pants and steel-tipped boots, and waited to be dispatched to somewhere in America, to help.
Take wiry Alex Green, now dragging away another downed branch. Growing up in Topeka, Kan., he says, he dabbled in drugs and alcohol and had enough run-ins with the law that “I saw community service as punishment.”Thanks to a nudge, or a shove, from his mother — she basically signed him up behind his back, he says — Mr. Green joined the corps a year out of high school and straightened out his life. He built houses in Waveland and Gulfport, Miss., worked on a children’s garden in Camden, N.J., and cleaned up after flooding in Hanover, W.Va. Now 20, he is the leader of this elite team of certified firefighters and trained sawyers.
He hopes to join another AmeriCorps program, because he likes the outdoors and helping people. “Mother knows best,” he says of his changed life.
The crew breaks before noon for the lunch bought with their pooled $4.50 a day. They sit in the bed of a pickup, or on the hot ground, wood chips and leaves flecking their damp arms. They eat leftovers in Tupperware, some nuts, some fruit. The smell of chain saw fuel hangs in the air.
Here is Laura Dierbeck, 23, from Milwaukee, a college graduate who a year ago was a clerk at a Blockbuster store, and hating it. So far this year, she has worked at a boys-and-girls club in Brunswick, Ga. (where she slept at night on the pool table), and demolished and built houses along the Gulf Coast. She also learned to operate a chain saw, a tool she had never held before.
“I wanted to say I’m a girl and I can do it,” the small woman says.
And here is Mr. Sackett, the one who is all about community service. Tall, with long brown hair flowing from under his construction helmet, he is from the upstate New York town of Batavia. He enlisted in the corps shortly after earning a college degree in business administration, and so far he has ripped out ruined sheetrock in flood-damaged parts of West Virginia, put up no-dumping signs above sewer drains in Gainesville, Fla., and been surprised by how much he enjoyed volunteering at a New Orleans soup kitchen.
They all seem aware of how goofy it may sound to say, simply, that they want to help their country. But they say it anyway. Ms. Stone, a graphic designer who discovered that she did not like spending her days in front of a computer (“Funny how that works,” she says), returned from an eight-week tour on the Gulf Coast and promptly got a tattoo.
That tattoo is legible on her right arm now as she sits on the ground, eating. “Be Selfless,” it says. “Stay True.”
Lunch ends, and nine young Americans go back to work.
