Symbolic For The Living

Later this month, as they do every few years, a group of volunteers in Durham, North Carolina, including some city and county officials, will invest some time and “elbow grease” to tidy the historic Geer Cemetery.

It is an all-black burial ground was established in 1877, twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed “separate-but-equal” laws in the South, known as Jim Crow laws. In many states, that even included segregation after death.

Geer had fallen into such disrepair, that four years after that 1896 decision, the 10-month-old Durham Sun opined in an effort to get the city to restore this hallowed place.

But 115 years after that editorial, the City of Durham still finds excuses as to why that can’t happen.

Rather than racism, I suspect it has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia enabled by a reticence found commonly which is that asking questions is associated with criticism and “rocking the boat” with retribution.

This cultural affliction is very difficult to root out and inhibits private as well as public entities.  In my observation, it is most often the culprit holding organizations back from being more innovative.

This will be the fourth or fifth time in my 26 years of residence that volunteers have filled the city void.  Geer Cemetery is only a few blocks from my first house here on Shawnee Street in the Old North Durham neighborhood.

I grew to know the old cemetery during morning walks there with our dog at the time, named Jack.

On an April morning walk less than a year after my arrival, I saw members of the former Durham Service Corps (DSC) working to rehabilitate the old cemetery, a project documented in the report Reclaiming Yesterday.

Volunteers set to do the same thing next month are well advised to click on this link and read the report.

Resurrected, the DSC would be a more strategic, comprehensive and sustainable approach to both the issue of youth employment as well as maintenance of commons such as Geer Cemetery.

There are many benefits to engaging volunteers including a sense of community, physical activity and camaraderie, as well as bringing greater awareness to issues.

But a disconnect occurred about thirty years ago when governments at all levels, including those in Durham, seemed to forget that matching grants such as the one meant to pilot DCS as well as volunteerism are not mean to replace caretaking but to supplement it.

It isn’t that simple when it comes to cemeteries.

When it comes to a true census of cemeteries, it is volunteers including genealogists across the country who work hard to track cemeteries including hundreds in Durham County alone, mapped and maintained on the web by Allen Dew who partners with the Durham-Orange society.

Only a couple fall under the stewardship of the City of Durham.

Keep in mind that even progressive counties such as Durham didn’t begin the practice of issuing death certificates until 1908, a practice not required across North Carolina until 1913, a decade after that chide in the Durham Sun newspaper.

Some cemeteries here are incorporated with places of worship but most are small family plots including those I see seemingly protected in the right-of-ways along roadsides as I ride my Harley.

I grew fond of cemeteries beginning when I was age three as I would tag along with my parents up the hill behind the horse barn to a small cemetery carved out of our ancestral ranch to maintain the graves of many of my ancestors.

I even remember that it was while visiting the small historic cemetery next to a former Jesuit Seminary on a bluff high above Spokane, Washington one Saturday in 1973 that my daughter and only child decided it was time to be born, resulting in a mad dash down the mountain to the hospital.

Volunteers today also staff a website entitled “Find A Grave,” carefully curating cemeteries and individual gravesites on the web.  The nation-wide effort was founded in 1995 in Salt Lake City by Jim Tipton before being absorbed a few years ago into Ancestry.com.

The gravestone shown here in Holliday is that of one of my great-great grandfathers but it isn’t the original one.  One of that community’s first settlers, he was buried there in 1900 but by the late 1980s the old cemetery was in need of rehabilitation including replacement of headstones.

My maternal grandfather rescued the original marker and delivered it on a trip near the end of his life to my sister in Enumclaw, Washington, where as shown in the image in this blog, it rests in her garden.

Cities first began creating public cemeteries in 1831 and they soon they became viewed as the nation’s first public parks.  In fact, seeing how popular they were inspired cities two decades later to begin creating open and forested spaces dedicated as parks.

Just as WWII broke out in Europe, the Durham County health department closed Geer Cemetery in 1939 because it had become over crowded, although a burial or two was still held there until 1944.

It would be another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court would put an end to segregation, although segregationist candidates would continue to openly run and be elected in states such as North Carolina up through the 1990s.

Standing as a reminder of intolerance and our country’s ongoing struggle to overcome bigotry, historic Geer Cemetery deserves more of our recognition and respect including the city and county.

Morphing Service Is All About Place

The oldest Rotary Club in Durham, North Carolina, where I live is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year by promoting 100 acts of service among it members.

So far, an impressive 592 individual acts have been tallied.

Rotary was formed in Chicago in 1905 but didn’t expand to other cities until several years later.  By 1910, there were clubs in 16 cities.  Within five years, groundwork was laid for a club in Durham.

Coincidentally, this happened to be the same year the Ku Klux Klan was resurrected in the South, soon spreading across the nation this time until it was washed away by the Great Flood of 1927.

But just as it had during the first rise of the KKK following the Civil War, Durham had already taken another course having earned a reputation for being accepting.

Within a couple of years prior to the formation of its first Rotary Club, Durham was already spawning a “black entrepreneurial enclave” soon known as “Black Wall Street” which had recently earned acclaim for both social and economic justice during visits by W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington.

But in many towns, the KKK tapping into fraternal and service club membership lists including Rotary Clubs, as a means of trolling for members.

Back within two years of its first meetings, the Durham Rotary Club had been jolted by the Great Influenza Epidemic which originated in Kansas just as the KKK too was reaching there.

It was known as the “crowd disease” because of how it spread, and within a few months the epidemic had killed 675,000 Americans alone, more than the number of soldiers on both sides who died in the Civil War.

Some cities in North Carolina, such as Charlotte, were even quarantined.

Club minutes and histories from that time show that almost from its ounset in Durham, Rotarians here were caught up in a struggle between members focused on embedding ethics and ideals among its members and some who were more interested in projects.

When I was president of the club in 2003-2004, the underlying tension between the two was still apparent with the push for projects often winning out over ethics and ideals.  But there was something of even deeper concern.

This is when the findings by sociological researchers had moved from journals where they appeared in 1995 into mainstream literature, explaining why service clubs had been rapidly losing traction.

Rotary membership in the U.S. peaked in 1993 and had been in slow and steady decline, falling back below 400,000 by 1999.  Looking back, sociologists now believe this is symbolic of a shift in social architecture that took place two or three decades earlier.

It has been documented in several studies, nearly all of which are summarized in an excellent book published last year by Marc Dunkelman entitled, The Vanishing Neighbor.

Service clubs such as Rotary may have surfaced during the Progressive Era but they have their roots in an earlier, fundamentally American change in social architecture identified during his 1831 observations by Alexis de Toqueville which he termed the township.

But by the late 1970s, we know in retrospect that America began to experience another change in social architecture, coincidentally parallel to the federal government’s evolution of the “network.”

Charitable giving continued to increase parallel with personal income but more significantly the percentage of Americans volunteering doubled between 1977 and the late 1990s.

But during this time Americans had stopped attending meetings and joining organizations.

While the number of organizations continued to proliferate, they were mostly to engage in activities such as lobbying.

By 1989, when the Internet was opened for individual and consumer use, we too began to shift to a more networked society.

Today, people volunteer and join together in causes but more so relating to short-term issues or projects on an a la carte basis.  They are less drawn to long-term, project-intense service clubs.

Instead, in the future it is more likely that service clubs will morph to more resemble these network.

Some already have, but it will take time for anyone over 35 or 40 to make the shift or to embrace a new way of involvement, one that morphs project by project.

A few, like the Durham Rotary Club have begun to grow again.

There is good news, as Dunkelman explains, when he cites studies such as the one published in 2012 by Dr. Robert J. Sampson entitled Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, another great read.

It is a follow up to an earlier study Sampson led over a 30 year period entitled, “Civil Society Reconsidered: The Durable Nature and Community Structure of Collective Civic Action.”

In summary, Dukelman notes, “The good news is that even as individual membership has declined since 1970, collective efficacy has remained stable…Community trust, it turns out, can flourish without a townshipped arrangement.”

Neighborhoods and neighbors, he continues, “who know each other only tangentially can be active on the same LISTSERVs…the utility of townshipped community can still be tapped, if not bolstered, in a networked society.”

But at the heart, Sampson concludes, is “the importance of place,” referring to the inherent traits of a particular city and neighborhood.  Nowhere is that more apparent today than in Durham.

In the words of a Dane LaJoye, a spokesman for Lions Clubs, a service club that also started in Chicago a decade after Rotary had and a couple of years after Kiwanis was founded in Detroit

“…People still want to volunteer like we did in the ‘50s and 60s but people want to volunteer with their families and their kids…They want to get their hands dirty.”

Lion’s membership peaked in 1978 and Kiwanis in 1992, a year before Rotary did.  Still, worldwide, the three organizations had 2.5 million members when I retired in 2009 and my involvement today is honorary.

As a map for sustainability, they can do no better than to focus on place and to use the difference between mainframe computers and local area networks as a metaphor.

Calculating The Value of Serial Volunteers

I sometimes tease a friend of mine, a micro business owner and a fellow-motorcycle enthusiast in Durham, North Carolina, about being a serial volunteer.

He is one of more than 1-in-4 American adults over the age of 25 who volunteer.  According to an article in the journal Democracy, my friend and other volunteers across the nation “provide the equivalent of nine million full-time workers, or 6 percent of the U.S. labor force.”

This does not mean 9 million new jobs would be created if volunteering was outlawed.  Volunteers such as my friend are providing services found unaffordable by the marketplace or abandoned by local governments.

Overall, including other age groups, 49% of Americans volunteer to charitable causes, with 94% of that proportion doing so on behalf of their religion.  This is up from 43% previously when we fell just behind Sri Lanka in volunteerism across the globe.

Utah is one of the highest states for the percentage of people who volunteer.  I wonder if that is due in part to active or returned Mormon missionaries (who undertake two-year volunteer assignments,) but that wouldn’t explain why Minnesotans are in second place.

North Carolina, where I live, is fifth from the bottom at 36%, but much higher where I live because of “whatever it is we do in Durham.”

Dr. Clive Belfield, a professor of economics and researcher at Queens College, recently took a stab at quantifying both the costs and benefits associated with volunteer programs at the national level.

You may know him as the North Carolina project leader for research into employment and earnings outcomes from community college education.

First, the cost of national volunteer programs is estimated at $1.4 billion in direct public funding with another $600 million of in-kind resources and other sources of funding for a total of $2 billion annually.

In monetary terms, the volunteers generate $7.9 billion in benefit to society, a net gain or return on investment each year of $5.9 billion.  That’s a return of 4 to 1.

For any fiscal conservatives reading, that is a return of $4 for every tax dollar spent on national service.

Not everyone gives sweat and blood.  Overall, philanthropic giving in American comes to more than $300 billion each year.  Professor Belfield finds the idea of an expanded national service program appealing.

There are 40 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 in America, and judging from their experience since since the church’s inception in the 1830s his argument is bolstered by the superior life skills the experience has given over a million Mormon Missionaries.

Wherever I’ve lived, some very impressive friends have been former members of the Peace Corps, each one a contributor to community, state and country.

At a budget of only $379 million annually, no group is more cost effective.

Americans operate under the misimpression that they work too hard, but as a country we’re working less than we did even in the 1960s and 1980s.  Read the report at this link from The Atlantic, especially the chart over forty years of the hours of leisure time by gender and age.

Working moms, especially single working moms, may have reason to feel they are working more, even with modern conveniences, but even there the amount on housework and other chores had dropped 35%.

Men—especially married men—are hardly working compared to a few decades ago.

Maybe It just feels different to many because they haven’t updated the term leisure to mean more than just not being at work.

Volunteers understand that in the words of Ken Matos who handles research for the Families and Work Institute, leisure is “time you can actually do the things you want.”

Maybe the key to not feeling overwhelmed is to learn to shed the 75% of distractions at work that are self-interruptions unrelated to work, and to learn to redirect when we aren’t at work.

The six or seven hours I spend each day on these essays is pure leisure to me.  Sitting in occasional meetings of groups with which I am involved and where many people seem disengaged, however, can be pure hell!

Any organization which has been through a thorough workplace diagnostic as part of the selection process for the Sloan Awards for Business Excellence will recall that “autonomy” is one of the six secrets to engaged employees.

Many employees throw this term out when really they are trying to resist working and networking as a team or resist following protocols or object to accountability.  But those things aren’t what workplace autonomy means.

In fact, workplaces such as Google understand that it doesn’t require much time at all to fuel a sense of workplace autonomy.

There it involves only a few hours on occasion to work through a innovation a worker has been noodling or to reflect and think through strategy or…a couple of hours to volunteer for a mission-related cause they are passionate about.

True volunteers fuel their sense of engagement and autonomy by volunteering during their leisure time.