Listening Post: talk around the station
While I spend most of my workday peering into dual computer monitors and typing and clicking furiously, NCPR is in fact a great social network–one where it is hard to spend a day without learning, or learning of, something interesting and new. This being Listening Post day, Barb Heller dropped by to fill me in on a guest on this afternoon’s String Fever who will talk about the upcoming Cream Cheese Festival in Lowville. (I know, I’m excited, too.) According to Barb we should be—it’s a hoot.
But as an aside she mentioned a thing I’d never heard of—that the Lowville public school has a community service requirement to graduate. Student labor, in part, makes the festival possible. I turned to our new news intern, Roger Miller, and asked if his high school had a community service requirement. To my surprise, he said yes: 120 hours. In his case he spent it as a volunteer tour guide on a Cold War-era submarine, but other classmates worked soup kitchens and food pantries, neighborhood clean-up, etc. What a great idea, particularly in cash-strapped communities trying to hold it all together in hard times.
A little later, Nora Flaherty sent around her promo for a news item on controlling the annual crow infestation in Watertown. I sent her back a poem I’d written shortly after the fall of the USSR about solving a crow infestation in Moscow. She passed that on to her man John, who sent back a truly creepy demo recording of his new song observed through the baleful eye of a crow. Which brought to mind other crow poems I had written and so on.
Ellen Rocco then chimed in from the West Coast where she is spending a week in my world, at a Knight Foundation “boot camp” learning about using new media to cover old beats. She says, in part, “I am buried alive in drupal, buzzdata, scraperwiki, and other stuff I think an old lady like me is probably crazy trying to understand!” I know the feeling. Then I met Radio Bob on his way out the door, balancing a transmitter and a toolbox, on his way home to tune a new radio antenna in his garage. Didn’t know you needed to–didn’t know you could.
New information, new correspondents, new day. Pretty nice. Turn to your co-worker and ask what’s new. Pass it on in a comment below.
Tags: listeningpost
Don’t mean to be a downer but….
While there are many positives to volunteering, we should keep in mind that if a job is worth doing, it is also worth paying for. In some cases, volunteers deprive people of having a paying job.
That reminds of visiting a retirement community near Oberlin College in Ohio. It was like walking around in an interactive library. I was having a fascinating conversation about religion and high energy physics and mentioned “The Tao of Physics” but couldn’t remember the author. “Fritjof Capra,” said a helpful soul who happened to be walking by at the time.
Having a diverse appetite for knowledge is a little like going to an all you can eat buffet when you are hungry: You want it all, but storage is limited. I often work alone at home and much of my fun facts to know and tell come from email communications, but when I get to the classroom where I teach two nights a week, I have to be careful not to unload too much of the great new knowledge I’ve come across to my students…who have four to six other philophiles doing the same thing.
The other problem I have with retaining knowledge is that my ability to recall a particular thing is inversely proportional to its utility. So I can remember the active agent in poison ivy (urushiol) and the theme to Beverly Hillbillies (my apologies to those of you who will hear that in their head for the rest of the day), but the password for my bank account or whether I left the stove on are elusive.
But it beats sitting in my rocking chair, waving my cane and yelling, “Get off my lawn!”
Gotta disagree about 110% Pete. Even in flush times there are many jobs worth doing that no small community can ever afford to pay for. Fire, rescue and EMT services. The local mission work of churches.
I’m a trustee of one the better funded North Country libraries. We hire people–in fact we have made new hires this year–but volunteers are also essential, both in freeing paid employees to do professional level work, and in extending hours and providing niche professional services that would never justify a hiring.
I’m on the board of Reachout. The County pays for a professional community mental health service, but Reachout volunteers provide phone coverage for the more than hundred hours a week that it is not open.
There are any number of things that might be desirable, worth doing–but that will remain forever unfundable, in every North Country community. They will remain undone, or they will be done by volunteers.
Dale Hobson,
NCPR
Well, sure, Pete, if the money can be found. But I work with a historic preservation organization, and we are constantly cash-strapped. If we didn’t have volunteers, we’d be doing a whole lot less than we do now. Parenthetically, seeing the story of the lady who left $2.4 million to the Wild Center and the Adk Museum is frustrating! They’re both great organizations, but they’re already pretty well-funded. What we could do with a tenth of that amount! And I’m sure that there are plenty of other small historic preservation organizations around that feel the same way.
There are a lot of very important jobs, such as volunteer fire and EMT, that the ‘volunteers’ really should be compensated for as opposed to typically having to actually ‘pay for the privilige of volunteering.’ As the pool of available volunteers shrinks due to economic factors, increasing qualification requirements, and in Adirondack communities loss of younger people, there may be no choice but to pay for these services. Either that or do without.
Students looking for an interesting and educational volunteer public service activity should consider getting involved in volunteer Amateur Radio emergency and public service communications. This would be especially valuable experience for anyone intersted in a technical carreer or emergency services career. More info; http://www.emergency-radio.org
120 hours of community service requirement? Wow, Roger Miller you went to a tough school!!
Our only child had to complete 40 hours of volunteer work as part of the high school graduation requirements. (This was the Ottawa English public school system.) It was good for him, and yes, I think it does help the community.
Tip to students & parents: try find something likable that feels like a real contribution. But what ever you do…finish those hours early! Before the driver’s license, before the part-time paid job, before the girlfriend/boyfriend scene gets serious. Before the homework and term paper madness that is junior and senior year. (Or “grade 11 and 12”, as people say here.)
Getting it done early helps younger teens gain confidence. With luck the service chosen might also build experience leading to paid employment (this was the case for our son).
Also, if the hours are recorded on a sheet of paper, make and keep an up-to-date photocopy. If the original sheet gets lost after the hours are earned (hey, I’ve heard it happens) that’s bad news all around.
Pete, if potential employers are using mandatory school volunteers to replace other-wise paid employment, I would agree, that’s undesirable.
But a lot of times what gets done is more like the service Dale describes: needs doing and ain’t gonna happen without volunteers.
I didn’t have to do this when I went to high school. I would like to know if today’s student, having done this, feels more inclined or less inclined to chose to volunteer later on in life?
I have nothing against volunteers or volunteering. I do object to volunteering being forced upon a person, such as requiring it to graduate. That’s not volunteering.
Misusage of words leads to destroying their meaning. I’m thinking here of our “all volunteer military.” Since they are paid, could not say everyone who works on Wall Street has volunteered to work on Wall Street?
Words have meaning and corrupting them for whatever end is never justified.
Hi Pete: I agree that volunteering is not the right word to use for a mandatory requirement. I didn’t call it volunteering–I called it a community service requirement.
Volunteers came up in the context of unpaid community service displacing paid job opportunities, a point you raised. But there are many worthwhile tasks that will never be paid for. Right now, where they are being done, they are being done by volunteers–which as you point out are in dwindling supply–even for (particularly for) the most basic services.
A school community service requirement could change the math on this by providing another source whereby some of this work gets done. It wouldn’t be volunteering, but it could be a legitimate part of a school’s educational mission.
Hopefully, students would learn that neither the amenities nor the necessities of a healthy community are provided solely by government or employers. That there is work they can do that makes a real difference to people. That the duty of citizenship encompasses more than just doing your day job and paying your taxes.
Those who learn these lessons will likely be more inclined to become volunteers later in life, and they may be more inclined to find a way to remain in a community where they have invested their labor to improve it.
Dale Hobson, NCPR
The Lowville Cream Cheese fest is indeed a hoot! Part of the charm over the years has been your own Barb Heller holding down the “MC” duties for the various live music acts that perform throughout the day.
I should add that the festival seems to be growing every year. I believe they estimated over 10K people there last year. And you don’t have to be a fan of Cream Cheese as there’s something for everyone at this event. Great music, lots of food vendors, arts and crafts, games, etc. And the weather forecast looks nearly perfect.
I agree. Mandatory volunteering is an oxymoron. My wording was sloppy. Community service requirement is the better, more accurate term. And I like the picture of mutual contribution Dale paints.
Wish I could make it to the Lowville Cream Cheese Festival this weekend, it sounds great.