For Goodness' Sake

By NANCY GIBBS

Kenny spent his first two Christmases in the Harlem hospital where his mother abandoned him, in a roomful of babies with AIDS. His third Christmas he spent in an Albany children's home. There he had the luck to meet his first angel.

Gertrude Lewis spent her days driving a city bus and, every other Saturday, volunteering at the Albany home. "I saw this boy with these beautiful eyes," she recalls, "just looking up and smiling." She was 47 years old, had never married, never had a family of her own. She decided then and there she would become a foster mother.

Now Kenny lies in his crib upstairs in her home, in a house she shares on a tree-lined street, where her heart prepared him room. This nursery is merry with orange walls and pictures and 27 watchful stuffed animals. "It's going to be hard to lose him," says Gertrude.

What are we to make of a woman willing to take to heart a baby she knows is likely to die? Surely, she confounds all descriptions of the roaring '80s as a morally chintzy stretch of history, where such problems as Kenny's are greeted with more petulance than pity. In an age of toxic cynicism, Gertrude is a Samaritan: a woman who, in the spacious privacy of her life, went out of her way to help a child who needed her. She is not running for office, not running charity balls and not running away. Perhaps she seems a rare heroine at an end of a decade when the rich got greedier, the poor got needier, and everyone else tended to his own shiny self-interest.

But the redeeming truth, to our own surprise, is that Gertrude is in vast company. Last March, Independent Sector, a Washington research and lobbying group, commissioned a Gallup poll to plumb the depths of our charity: What do we give, and why, and who does the giving, and how much? It turns out that almost half of all American adults offer their time to a cause, an astounding figure even allowing for the number of people who lie to pollsters. And most are giving more time than ever. These are commitments, not gestures. The average volunteer offers nearly five hours a week, for a total of 19.5 billion hours in 1987 -- the equal, roughly, of 10 million full-time employees. There is something infectious about mercy.

And so it is that George Bush, the heir-elect, looks out over the nation and raptly muses about a thousand points of light, savoring the phrase, if not quite understanding it. He did not add that the lights are shining into corners that have grown bleak and dim in the past eight years. And he got the numbers wrong. Out of sight of the Rose Garden, something like 80 million individuals are doing whatever they can to address the problems that politicians are fleeing.

Try to draw a profile of the typical do-gooder, and the only thing certain is that it is probably wrong. Volunteer work is not the sole province of the housewives holding Christmas fairs, the idle rich sponsoring benefits and the young selling cookies. The aggressive, entrepreneurial cast of much modern charity reflects the fact that the largest number of volunteers, according to a J.C. Penney survey, are between the ages of 35 and 49.

Certainly the most eager and conspicuous new recruits are the yuppies. Since they absorb much of the blame for the moral defoliation of the '80s, / they deserve some recognition for their redemption. "We're trying to break the cycle of you get up, you go to work, step over a homeless person on the way to the subway, go to the gym, go to the sushi bar, go home and fall asleep," says Kenneth Adams, executive director of New York Cares, a sort of charitable clearinghouse for yuppies that has recruited 600 young volunteers to tutor dropouts, serve in soup kitchens, renovate housing and visit the elderly. "The Me generation is dying," says Adams, "and New York Cares is one example of how it's being put to rest." Call it yuppie love.

But even that is not the whole story. For all the flood of new professionals into charity work, more than a quarter of all volunteers still come from households with incomes of $20,000 or less. Families earning less than $10,000 a year give more of their income to charity than individuals earning more than $100,000. Since the less rich families in this country rub more intimately against its sores, they are often the first to offer their money and time. "You feel the pain, you feel the hurt," says Wilfred Schill, a North Dakota farmer who with his wife counsels couples who fear foreclosure. "It gives you the greatest incentive to do something like this."

Gallup's evidence defies our low expectations. We are, perhaps, a little better than we think, though maybe not as good as we'd like. If 80 million adults are volunteering, then there may be 80 million impulses for doing so -- whether political, professional, spiritual or personal. The precise mixture is measured from needs within and needs without. In the end, the decision to volunteer usually occurs at a crossroads, where moral indignation and moral responsibility meet.

In both the cities and the farmlands, the indignation of the moment is palpable. The Reagan Administration did not invent the poor, but it has largely ignored them. "We've dug deep pits in this country in the past eight years," says Tanya Tull, a Los Angeles housewife who founded Para Los Ninos, a family-service facility on Skid Row. "People are falling into them -- and we've taken away the ladders too." Reagan's policies, argues Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, have "created a set of social problems that simply were not there in 1980. We're going to be paying for them for a long time."

Hence the sheer volume of volunteers: an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that charities are needed more now than they were just five or ten years ago. In New York City there are about 35,000 people living on the streets, compared with 500 a decade ago. AIDS, which alone has pulled thousands of people into action, did not exist. Crack, which has perhaps done more to ruin children than any other drug, did not exist. "Volunteerism is as old as the nation," says Winifred Brown, executive director of New York City's Voluntary Action Center, "and it's as new as today's headlines."

But it is not just that the needs are greater. In the minds of many Americans, the weight of moral responsibility shifted, publicly and dramatically, somewhere between Jimmy Carter's "malaise" days in 1979 and the Hands Across America hoopla of 1986. "Government has a lot of money but doesn't know how to take care of people," says banker Peter Flanigan, founder of the Student/Sponsor Partnership, which helps shepherd poor kids through Catholic schools in New York City. "That revives the latent feeling in people that they should do it themselves."

Democracy does demand shared responsibility, not only for our governance but for our welfare as well. Yet each generation weaves its own mythology of philanthropy. Ours in the '80s owes most to the lessons of the 1960s and the heady afternoons of the Great Society. For a time it looked as though Washington would take care of everything: it was government as governess. Caseworkers trooped through the ghettos and housing projects promising advocacy, access and opportunity for the dispossessed. For many, it was a dream that came true. But too often the army hunkered down into an occupying, rather than a liberating, force.

The lasting accomplishments of the Great Society have been challenged by some who believed in it deeply. But beginning in 1981, the very premises of activist government came under attack as Reagan lashed the "welfare queen" and extolled "neighborliness." By the time Charles Murray published Losing Ground in 1984, his argument that the War on Poverty had wounded more people than it had saved was poised to become conventional wisdom. "Whatever our political persuasion," says Independent Sector president Brian O'Connell, "we all understand the practical limitations of Big Government, and very often that means setting up alternative organizations."

In place of a waning welfare state, Reagan promised that enterprise freed would bring prosperity for all. A surging economy with low inflation and high employment would do more to help the poor than a raft of welfare programs. As for solving the particular problems of the poor, that was best left to states and towns and, above all, individuals who knew better. This transfer of responsibility camouflaged the neglect of vital programs, particularly subsidized housing and programs for children. "When voluntary action is translated to national policy, it assumes that communities have the ability to pull themselves up by the bootstraps," observes Barry Checkoway, professor of social work at the University of Michigan. "Some of them don't even have boots."

One reason Reagan got away with the cuts was that he so cannily persuaded people that they could do it better themselves. And indeed, individuals began to step in the minute government backed off. "My personal motivation," says Talmage Newton III, 44, a St. Louis advertising executive who chairs Operation Food Search, an organization to distribute food to the poor, "was a belief that any citizens' group can perform any function better than any government, with the exception of national defense."

Reagan's vision of America not only altered what Americans expect of government; it also played deftly on what we expect from ourselves. We are all to some extent tending to our character, trying to turn efforts of will into habits of mind in the hope that generosity will one day come easily. People of all faiths find in charity a chance for thanks, praise and obedience. "What doth the Lord require of thee," asks Micah, "but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" To borrow from the Quakers, many volunteers believe that when the worship is over, the service begins.

To be sure, there are also plenty of self-serving reasons to serve: glamour seeking, resume padding and networking. "There is usually an opening in your life when you decide to volunteer," says Core Trowbridge, 26, volunteer coordinator for TreePeople in Los Angeles. "Young people come here, treating this as a singles' scene. Old people who've retired but not run out of energy come." But when researchers inquire further into motives, the most common reason cited is a desire to do something useful. To comfort a child, succor a patient, rescue a school or salvage a neighborhood gives volunteers a sense of success that few jobs can match. The chance to create and control a daring solution is irresistible and restorative. Attorney Tom Petersen is on leave * from the Dade County state attorney's office to establish, among other community programs, Teen Cuisine, which teaches culinary skills to teenage mothers. "We discovered almost by accident," he says, "that creative economic incentives can be much more effective in changing the girls' behavior than traditional counseling."

That sparkle of individual ingenuity sets many new volunteer efforts apart from the huge corporate rescue missions that define much American charity. While the United Way, the American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society serve vast needs and do great good, they are to charity what GM is to industry. Charity too needs its entrepreneurs, dreaming on a different scale, and perhaps genius ripens most fruitfully in a free and private space. That may explain why 105,000 new service organizations were born between 1982 and 1987. "Volunteers are now expected to solve problems," says Jerri Spoehel of the Volunteer Center of San Fernando Valley, Calif., "not just stuff envelopes."

When, as now, there is hope ready for harvesting, excellent ideas become especially fertile. The examples of some national heroes -- Candy Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving; Bruce Ritter, father of Covenant House for kids in trouble; and Eugene Lang, whose I Have a Dream program has spawned innumerable imitations -- all proved what extraordinary good can be reaped from one person's crusade. Faced with a desperate need, many new volunteers see not only a moral challenge but also a tactical one: to do as much as possible with as little as possible, and then share the idea, to allow it to spread.

Take Chris Renner, 26, who helped create Food Partnership Inc. outside Los Angeles. It troubled him that food banks were spending a fortune in transport fees to collect donations. With the help of the California Trucking Association and United Way, he worked out a method for trucks to transport food between donors and food banks when they were returning empty from a long haul. So far, the program has carried nearly 4 million lbs. of food and saved the food banks $55,000 in trucking fees.

Or Pedro Jose Greer, a Miami physician who found his calling not only in hospitals but also under bridges and highways, where many of the city's homeless live. Four years ago, "Dr. Joe," 32, opened a clinic next to a shelter called Camillus House. He now has 130 volunteer doctors and medical personnel working on 40 patients a day. "There is so much talent among the poor, we must help them no matter what," he says. "We lose so much when we lose the people from the inner cities." At the University of Miami medical school, where he is a fellow in hepatology, there is a three-month waiting list for the "homeless elective" for medical students.

Or Suzanne Firtko, an architectural historian in New York City who invented the Street Sheet, instructions that direct homeless people to the nearest soup kitchens and clothes banks. She persuaded Du Pont to donate waterproof, tear- resistant paper, and designed the sheets with easy-to-understand graphics so the disoriented and illiterate could use them. The entire operation that first year cost $1,800. "Projects like mine become very expensive when they're done by established agencies," she says. "It's very cheap when you're doing it at your kitchen table."

The efforts of American Samaritans, in short, reflect a new frame of mind in which sympathy complements competence but does not replace it: wide-eyed but hard-nosed. Private charity cannot and should not replace public policy. It can, however, set standards, set priorities and set an example for the best use of resources. Throwing money at a problem may be just the easiest way to attack it, not the wisest. The more effective forces, it seems, are harder to marshal: vision, tenacity, patience and courage.

In the Bible, Samaritans were viewed with contempt until Jesus' tale of how one of their community showed great mercy to a stranger redeemed them for history. Perhaps the generation that closes the millennium will find the same vindication. The unheralded gestures of gracious individuals may in the end outlast and belie the labels hung on the Me generation. And government, in the meantime, could take some lessons from the most creative of these very private enterprises. Good ideas need money and leadership as well as light and oxygen to brighten and spread. In the process, we might even discover that this is already a kinder, gentler nation than we ever imagined.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York and James Willwerth/Los Angeles