A Win-Win Situation
McCarthy, Colman
A Win-Win Situation The real benefits of volunteerism BY COLMAN McCARTHY ON THE EVE OF THE NATIONAL SUMmit on volunteerism in Philadelphia, A. Franklin Burgess Jr., a District of Columbia...
...Sometimes, Eric Speigel wrote: I left Garrison feeling that I was wasting my resources...
...For poor inner city kids, baseball is unaffordable: Families have little money for gloves, balls, bats...
...Baseball is a game passed from fathers to children...
...The current debate about teaching values in school might be resolved if more schools demanded community service and service learning programs...
...Anthony often came late to tutoring, let himself be distracted, and preferred to talk about sports...
...We are so intent on cramming theories and abstractions into their heads that they leave us idea-rich but experiencepoor...
...Before enticing high school and college kids to cure the ills of society, those doing the enticing could use some instruction on accountability...
...John offered a simple, but persuasive case for why members of the court bench should come to the bench at the ballfield: Get into the lives of at-risk kids now in a positive way as mentors, he argued, or you may be in their lives in 10 or 15 years in a negative way as you’re dispatching them off to jail...
...Burgess has been mentoring the youngster for the past three years...
...After all, we are here to fill one of the many voids in their lives and satisfy their needs, not worry about own needs...
...Is there no linkage between the money wasted on militarism and the money now wanted for social uplift...
...The experience opened up a whole new area for me, and perhaps I will go into teaching in the future...
...The goal is to recruit more than one million literacy volunteers for elementary school students to ensure that every child learns to read...
...We lie to the students...
...That was the first treat for Taylor...
...There have been lunch dates in the judge’s chambers, at least two outings a month, and regular attendance at Anthony’s baseball games...
...W e must demonstrate, teach, and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken...
...The second came after the game when he and Burgess went to a restaurant for dinner with a friend who brought along some players from the Keys and Blue Rocks...
...John was invited by the Garrison principal to organize a baseball program...
...Still, there are no guarantees...
...Few had an adult who pushed them educationally outside the classroom...
...Colin Powell was a ranking part of the Pentagon establishment that saw the United Sates bankrupt itself through military spending...
...There have been times when I’ve wondered if I could have made a bigger difference [if paired] with someone who accepted and appreciated my efforts...
...The benefits are as obvious as they are unsentimental, even if the way my students express themselves is still tentative...
...I gained an enormous amount from the teachers at Garrison as well...
...The after-school reading tutor for Anthony Taylor last fall was Eric Speigel from my Maryland class...
...An Ulterior Motive One of the main reasons that I’ve been pushing my students to get out of the classrooms and into the lives of people in pain is to lessen the intellectual damage that we teachers do to our students...
...Still, I wanted and received a realistic experience...
...A Win-Win Situation The real benefits of volunteerism BY COLMAN McCARTHY ON THE EVE OF THE NATIONAL SUMmit on volunteerism in Philadelphia, A. Franklin Burgess Jr., a District of Columbia Superior Court judge, traveled to Frederick, Md., with Anthony Taylor, a sixth grader at Garrison Elementary School in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington...
...I can see and feel everyday how I have been changed by him-the way he reacts to things and the way he sees things...
...Students given chances to care for the victims of economic and social injustice will likely develop a value system that questions the people in power who let that injustice persist...
...Kids can come from the most poverty-smcken background and [not] have mentors like me and still...
...There were so many other kids that I had gotten to know and like...
...I may be teaching him that mental solutions are better than physical ones...
...More than 90 percent of Garrison’s students live in fatherless homes...
...Those who stayed after school to tutor genuinely cared for their students...
...I know him to be more sociable, less withdrawn...
...I may be changing some stereotypes for him-that Spanish people aren’t the only ones to play soccer...
...Only one state-Maryland-does...
...She described him as “dynamic, smart and smart-mouthed, fun-loving and handsome...
...Dedication entails commitment through the good and bad...
...I may be showing him that higher education is a thing to strive for...
...rise above it and...
...In filling some of the potholes and pitfalls in their own road to the future, we can only hope that it will one day be as smooth a ride as our own...
...But I don’t think he realized his gift to me...
...In volunteer work,” Burgess says, “we’re not dealing in solutions to large-scale problems...
...By the time of the Philadelphia summit, Elementary Baseball-supported by foundation and federal funds-was matching more than 60 adults from the court with Garrison children...
...Reshape it...
...But on this roller coaster ride, next week could be a great one...
...After four years of observing Elementary Baseball close-up and recruiting tutors from my peace studies classes at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, the University of Maryland, and Georgetown University Law Center, I can report this about mentoring and literacy volunteerism: We can be more certain about the benefits it gives to the service providers than those it brings to the service receivers...
...It was sad to have it end...
...Many are raised by grandmothers...
...To correct the problem of experience-poverty, I’ve been sending students to Garrison and Elementary Baseball for the past four years...
...Why wasn’t I with one of them...
...I won’t know if I have done any long-term good for a while...
...I may be teaching him a modicum of patience...
...I may be helping him,” Dilshad wrote at the end of the semester...
...It’s how revolutionaries get started, it’s how a few teachers begin to wake up and realize the truth of Martin Luther Gng Jr.5 call: “We must encourage creative dissenters...
...I am aware of this, and I know he is happy to see me every week because of these things and more...
...He may not know yet that this tutoring is a two-way street, but I aim to correct that...
...they asked...
...Burgess, who is the presiding judge in the court’s criminal division and who oversees cases in which up to 90 percent of the defendants are young black males from the kind of neighborhood where Garrison Elementary is located, says he has seen improvement in Anthony’s self-control: fewer tantrums during games, fewer outbursts at umpires...
...That’s risky...
...The current military budget is 17 times greater than the combined spending of the six nations-North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Cuba-we are instructed to worry about...
...In a year, the school was the only one in the District with its own team...
...It’s a ‘may’ when it comes to my helping him...
...I may be helping him to improve his reading skills...
...Be smart, be brainy, we tell them: Make A’s in school and you are predestined to make 4s in life...
...At Hamilton’s urging, judges and other members of the court heeded the call...
...These kids need someone who will be there for them week in and week out...
...Now he preens about as the savior of Generation X: “Let’s volunteer together to take care of our youth and help shape America’s future.’’ No...
...Most males in the lives of these children were failures: relatives in prison, drug abusers, layabouts...
...After teaching the Garrison children that first base was to the right, not left, John expanded Elementary Baseball into a literacy program...
...What’s that...
...Powell gets away with his Mr...
...To be on the baseball team-Garrison now has six-the kids also had to attend an afterschool reading program where they were matched with a mentor and a tutor...
...If baseball was foreign to many, so also was literacy and the habit of reading...
...Peacemaker...
...The $700 million a day that Congress gives the Pentagon is three times what the Peace Corps spends in a year...
...Whether they show their appreciation is irrelevant...
...Jimmy Carter administered a trillion dollar military budget, yet now he troops around the globe as Mr...
...Though not immediately measurable, apart from the rise in his scores on national reading exams, Anthony appears to be benefiting from his involvement in the program...
...What they learn through service is a way of tying ideas in the head to actions of the heart...
...Anthony Brown needs to know that he has a gift, and I am glad and grateful that he is giving it to me...
...What’s getting underway now in the literacy programs is catch-up work that wouldn’t have been necessary if the country hadn’t been impoverished by the military spending binge...
...And it should be noted that writing of his involvement in the life of Anthony Taylor is more than another exercise in journalism for me...
...Then too, what families...
...The program in which they participate is Elementary Baseball, a non-profit venture that my son John McCarthy started four years ago after a stint in the minor leagues...
...I don’t think he knows how much he is helping me...
...His experience was much less smooth than that of his schoolmates...
...We have to believe we’re fulfilling our responsibilities if we help one or two people along the way...
...But it is an ‘is’ when it comes to him helping me...
...At times, I’ve wished I could be with one of those cute little kids that shower their tutors with affection and excitement every time they see them...
...Dilshad Husain was in my University of Maryland honors class in the fall semester of 1996...
...What Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, George Bush and assorted other exhorters to goodness were preachCOLMAN McCARTHY directs the Center for Teaching Peace, a Washington non-profit that supplies teachers and information to schools wanting courses on nonviolence...
...On this spring evening, the judge and the student took in the Class-A Carolina League contest between the Frederick Keys and the Wilmington Blue Rocks...
...Ironically, the gang of exhorters on the platform at the Philadelphia volunteerism summit-Clinton, Powell, Bush, Ford-are among those of one generation who helped create the mess and despair that the creative dissenters of the next generation are now called on, as altruists and idealists, to ease...
...Within any culture, it’s difficult to know who’s going to achieve and avoid crime and who won’t...
...I may be teaching him how the world is enlarged through books...
...Volunteerism number, thanks to a fawning media...
...In late March, the President and Hillary Clinton spent a morning at the school, advancing what is part of the administration’s proposed $2.7 billion ‘America Reads Challenge...
...At the first practice, kids had to be told to run the bases counter-clockwise...
...That, too, would be one of the benefits of volunteerism, available to both servers and served...
...not] commit crimes!’ In addition to Garrison’s mentor program, during the last school year, over 70 literacy tutors-primarily college and high school students-were working individually with Garrison children...
...I could take pictures, show them to my friends at school and say ‘Here’s my little buddy.’ I’m sure there are many advantages to an experience like that...
...They called runs “points...
...Will it happen...
...One of eight students who became involved with Elementary Baseball, Dilshad was paired for 14 weeks with a boy named Anthony Brown...
...Sarah Heard, one of my BethesdaChevy Chase seniors now doing well at Amherst, wrote last year of working with a child at Garrison: “I definitely gained a great amount from this experience...
...Baseball...
...I may be doing a lot of things for him, intentionally and unintentionally...
...Few had ever played...
...It’s on an individual basis, one on one...
...To find the mentors, John turned to Chief Judge Eugene Hamilton of the Superior Court...
...ing in Philadelphia, Judge Burgess was practicing...
...He told stories about Satchel Paige and Hank Aaron-both went to the same grade school in Mobile-and encouraged the Garrison kids to be the best baseball players they could be...
...In 1993, John, who attended public schools from first grade through college, gave a motivational talk at Garrison Elementary...
...Frank Burgess, Princeton ’65 and Harvard Law ’71, with two years of the Peace Corps in between, has been mentoring Anthony Taylor for three years...
...It has given me an inspiration to follow up on tutoring activities after high school...
...I don’t recall Powell decrying this squandering of the nation’s wealth, neither while wearing his uniform nor in his autobiography detailing the glories of his career...
Vol. 29 • June 1997 • No. 6
