The Revolving Door of Authority
Cycle of volunteers in nonprofit programs detrimental to children
By Lillian Schrock
Kunal Kochar is one of the lucky ones. He knows that.
As a sophomore in high school he heard a 40-minute lecture from investment banker Frank Oelerich at a “Youth About Business” camp. It was that speech that helped Kochar decide on his future — the Naperville, Ill., native would become an investment banker. Kochar learned so much from Oelerich that he stayed in contact with him after the camp had ended.
Now, four years later, the University of Pennsylvania economics and finance major still gets together with Oelerich from time to time.
“He’s been a mentor for me the past four years,” Kochar said. “He’s been extremely supportive”
Other kids aren’t as lucky as Kochar. They don’t get the same kind of treatment; many get involved in nonprofit programs only to experience what’s called the revolving door of authority. Volunteers cycle through programs and often don’t stick around longer than a few weeks.
Often, volunteers are confused about their roles within a program, and feeling like they can’t speak up causes them to feel burnout, according to a study by two Creighton University professors. This has well-meaning volunteers closing the door on their altruistic efforts.
Part of the problem: required public service hours. College classes, Greek organizations and even some local businesses demand mandatory service as a means of both bettering the community and educating volunteers. This system encourages fleeting commitments. Service hours become just another check mark on the to-do list. And as soon as the ink has dried, volunteers often disappear — leaving the kids they were helping behind.
Janelle Mueller, program director for Children and Family Urban Movement in Des Moines
The revolving door of authority can be detrimental to kids’ self-esteem. Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Iowa is doing something to impede these negative effects, said Danielle Smith, a mentoring coordinator for the program, which matches children with “bigs” to mentor them for a minimum of one year.
“More damage is done with a kid if the match lasts less than a year. A lot of times kids have people come in and out of their lives. We want their mentor to be a consistent presence in their life,” Smith said of the one-year minimum for mentoring pairs. “If a child is matched with someone less than a year, it’s another adult who has come into their life and left them. It causes a lot of pain for a child.”
There’s another factor keeping good Samaritans from coming back to their volunteer efforts, Mueller said. Volunteers often travel in groups and don’t feel comfortable returning on their own.
“When I get a big group from a small town in Iowa, I say, ‘I dare you to come back on your own,’” Mueller said. “They want to come and see what it’s like, but they don’t have their heart there.”
Mueller worries that a stigma on the neighborhood CFUM is in — a poverty-stricken area in Des Moines — keeps volunteers from coming back.
“There’s so much stigma behind this agency, stigma based on location, there’s an assumption,” Mueller said.
Volunteer-based afterschool programs such as CFUM and the Boys and Girls Clubs are hardest hit by the revolving door of authority. They recruit volunteers to teach classes to children and help them with their homework. They work with students to improve reading, writing and math skills through educational games, as well as teach social skills. Ultimately, for those who stick around long enough, they create a bond with the kids — something that influences both the volunteer and those they are helping.
“You don’t want to come and just maybe improve a reading score,” Mueller said. “You want that child to be impacted.”
Mueller has been with CFUM for more than decade and taught some of the parents of current CFUM students. The kids can count on her to be consistent. Some children are dropped off at CFUM at 6 in the morning, then go to school and aren’t picked up until 5:30 in the evening. So Mueller sees the children more than their own parents do. Mueller becomes an adult the children can talk to and trust on a daily basis.
“A little girl got a black eye and she told me what really happened to her eye. I didn’t ask but she told me,” Mueller said. “They’ve got to share somewhere, though. Everybody has got to get rid of that baggage.”
Long-term volunteers who make a commitment to the program are able to form those same relationships, she said. Joyce Rupp, an Iowa-based author and volunteer with CFUM, encouraged eighth grader Lorena San Elias to write her own poetry book, My Gift to My World, which was published earlier this year.
Anthony DeCamello, a New York state licensed psychologist, said there’s research that shows kids need personal champions in order to build resilience.
“If all you have is your family and maybe it’s a dysfunctional family, the moment somebody comes into your life and maybe is accepting of you instead of rejecting, who has some sense of you, sees some sort of promise in you, your perception of yourself is expanded by that,” DeCamello said.
Many children with Big Brothers Big Sisters live in poverty or they’re homeless, or they might be in foster care, Smith said. These are kids who have probably been let down by inconsistent adults in their life.
“Kids need consistency just to be happy and healthy and feel like they have a good, solid person to count on,” Smith said.
For these kids, their mentors become their family.
Smith previously worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters in Muscatine, Iowa, before coming to Des Moines. There, she met a big/little pair that had been together for seven years. The big sister and little brother were matched when the boy was in elementary school, when, each week she would go to his school to meet with him and they would color pictures in silence. When it came time for the boy to move onto middle school, the woman asked him if he wanted to continue to get together.
“He told her, ‘Of course I want you to keep coming. You have stood by me for all these years,’” Smith said. “She stuck by him and that was important to that child, the consistency, he knew that he could count on her. A lot of people wouldn’t have understood that but clearly that was important to him.”
Photos by Lillian Schrock
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