I just got the national newsletter for the organization I volunteer with in the mail.  I am perturbed by a short profile piece for a group on the other side of the country.  Because this is an organization that is part of the court system it varies greatly from state to state and county to county but the core ethos is the same: members of the community advocating for kids ‘in the system’.  After having volunteers drop out prematurely and leaving kids in the lurch, the featured group had analyzed their retention of volunteers and decided what characteristics would keep a volunteer involved: over 40, in a relationship, not working full-time, had raised children.  Wow- that seems like a pretty homogeneous profile particularly given that I don’t meet a single one of those criteria, love volunteering with my local group and I know I’ve been successful.  I can appreciate their motive in  wanting volunteers to stick around but are they doing right by recruiting within such a narrow bandwidth? That doesn’t look like a profile of a community to me. Is it really serving the organization or the kids to narrow things down that far? They run the danger of having a single definition of “right”. It’s easy to define diversity as a matter of ethnicity and race and so common in our vernacular that I think people frequently forget that it means more than that. They’ve come to treat diversity like an item on a checklist to be completed as opposed to an ongoing process.  It will always be an ongoing and evolving thing because the world is always changing – that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to be racist, just that we have to keep updating our cultural perspective of how we label people.

Why didn’t they look at themselves?

It seems to me that this organization looked only at what made up the profile of the volunteers that stuck around instead of what might make the volunteers that left stay.  Why? Because it’s so much easier to evaluate how to change others than how to change ourselves.  Odds are good that they’ve gotten comfortable with their office politics and ways of doing things within the team. They don’t want to have to change that. But that’s where diversity becomes possible, where positive and amazing change can happen.

College kids almost always complain about having to take breadth classes outside of their major, I know I did.  I just wanted to get on with it and not have to switch mental tracks  to something completely different.  But that’s what well rounded means and that’s something that never really goes away; it’s less work and less stress to stick with the familiar – people we can easily identify with, subjects we already know something about, places we’ve been to before.  And you can live a safe and comfortable life like that but I wouldn’t call it fun, interesting, or rewarding.

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