The voluntary society

The week of April 19-25 is National Volunteer Week, a good time to celebrate the millions of Americans who give their time and energy to neighborhoods, community organizations, and charitable causes of all kinds. Volunteers are the great unsung stewards of our self-governing society.

When I think of the people who made a difference in my life as a kid growing up in Puyallup, Washington, there are plenty of paid professionals including teachers, librarians, pastors, and coaches who come to mind. But I think also of the volunteers—PTA parents like my mom, church camp counselors, and Scout leaders. I think of the veterans at the American Legion who made it possible for me to take part in programs like Boys State and the Legion Oratorical Program. And I think of the Kiwanis Club.

I was introduced to the Kiwanis spirit of service by my grandfather, Ed Zeiger, who became a Kiwanian in the 1980s. He took on various leadership roles at the Club and took part in Terrific Kid Assemblies. He also maintained his Club’s sponsorship of the Boy Scout troop he led, which I went through the ranks of as a teenager myself.

So after coming home to Puyallup to get involved in public service in my mid-twenties, I joined the Kiwanis Club of Puyallup. The club included some influential education, nonprofit, and business leaders, whom I thought I should get to know. I was eager to get involved in the club and connect with its members while embarking on my new life in public service. The Club had a long history of local public servants as members, and it was a point of connection to a vibrant ecosystem of community service and civic leadership.

But I had another reason for joining. In a project I had conducted to interview members of the World War II generation from Puyallup, I learned about the role the Kiwanis Club played in the local war effort. I was eager to learn more about how the Club had shaped the community. I immediately volunteered to serve on the Club history committee.

The Club’s 100^th anniversary was a decade away, and I thought I could pace myself by working my way through the archives and conducting oral history interviews with longtime Club members. Over the next decade, I delivered occasional talks to the Club on what I was learning, and I gradually pieced together a history of the Puyallup Kiwanis Club. It would be printed on the occasion of the Club’s 100^th anniversary in 2021.

Among the things that struck me was the way the Club had served as a civic home for people from all kinds of professions.

A number of school administrators had found an outlet for volunteer service beyond their jobs through Kiwanis over the decades. Take Rich Green, for example. After growing up as the son of longtime Kiwanian Harris Green, Puyallup High School’s Vice Principal Rich Green was hesitant to join. “I really didn’t want to,” he told me. “That was something my dad did, and I didn’t want to follow my dad. But I became vice principal at Puyallup High School, and Dale Mitchell was my principal, and Dale said, ‘Yeah, Rich, you’re going to join Kiwanis!’ I said, ‘Well okay.’ So, in December of 1981, I joined Kiwanis.”

According to Rogers High School Principal Stan Cross, belonging to Kiwanis as a school administrator made a lot of sense. He could see the “power that Kiwanis has in the community,” he said. “It was a great organization to be involved in for two reasons. Being a school administrator, I could be down there, so if there were questions or concerns regarding school issues, maybe I could help handle that part. And we needed Kiwanis to help in some of the school-community things too, so we’d pat each other’s backs, but we worked together to get results. We encouraged other administrators to get in over the years too, and, of course, there have been a lot of school administrators before me who were involved too.”

Cross recruited a fellow school administrator, Lloyd Freudenstein, to join, but only after repeated attempts. “I wanted Lloyd to become a member, and at that time he was principal of a junior high down here, and I said, ‘Lloyd, you have to come and be part of this group.’ ‘You get out of here with that dang crap’—he had these one-liners. ‘I’m not that kind of a person to be joining all these clubs.’ But I kept after him. One day…there were three of us who walked into his office, and he said, ‘Okay, where do I sign.’ He has gone through the chairs and been very good.”

However, some school administrators were reluctant to take part in a service club that met in the middle of a workday, so they joined the Daffodil Valley club, which met on Wednesday mornings. “It was really an educators’ club, because Randy Hathaway, Sam Peach, and Russ Hamburg were in it,” said Green. “They had severe conscience. They didn’t want to meet on school time, so they met at 6:30 in the morning…. If you knew Randy and Russ, they were very straight shooters, and I didn’t think they ever wanted to be accused of meeting on school time.”

Other school leaders, like Cross, Freudenstein, and Green, were not only happy to take part in Thursday lunch meetings, but also to take leadership roles in the Puyallup Kiwanis Club.

One of the other things that impressed me about my fellow Kiwanians was how they had taken on unique responsibilities for major cultural events, including Puyallup’s annual Daffodil Festival parade.

Gary Johnson had led parade logistics for the Daffodil Parade in the ‘80s and ‘90s, with help from Larry Bargmeyer. When Johnson took a new job and left the Club, Bargmeyer recalled, “I accidentally asked, ‘Who is going to do the parades now that Gary is gone?’ I should have known better than to ask that question, but somehow I asked that question.” Bargmeyer ended up leading parade logistics for the Puyallup parade route for the next quarter-century.

Bargmeyer described the how Kiwanis involvement shaped the Daffodil Parade over time:

Kiwanis had been doing float logistics for years before I got there, just the float portion. But as the Daffodil Festival started dwindling, the Kiwanis Club took over bigger and bigger portions. Now, if there’s a parade in town, for the high school football team or something, they just call Kiwanis and say we want to have an A, B, or C parade. We have three parade routes all done, because, of course, the city is required to do all kinds of things if you have a detour. So it’s all on computer today—you know where every sign is placed, how they’re placed. So if the school district has a parade, or if there’s a veterans parade like we did, you just pick one of those three routes…. Other towns come to us and asked, “How did you solve this problem?” Basically, you want a parade to go in a circle, so that when the bus drops people off, it’s waiting in the same spot when the parade is over. So you design a parade route where that can happen.

…. I have always been a delegate and get the heck out of the way. There are people who “own” certain duty stations. “I’ll handle this,” and I don’t ever ask how. If they say that’s their corner, it’s their corner.

Bargmeyer recalled one particularly memorable experience that one of his volunteers made possible. A young Boy Scout once showed up at the Santa Parade only to discover his troop hadn’t signed up to join in the lineup. But there he was in his perfect uniform, along with his parents dressed as Christmas presents. “They didn’t have a spot,” said Bargmeyer, “but our volunteer said, ‘oh yes, here’s your spot, right here in the line.’ So this little kid in his brand-new Scout uniform got to walk down the street with his parents dressed as presents. Isn’t that a lifetime memory? A great volunteer will say, ‘Here’s your number right here.’”

We dole out a lot of glory to the nonprofit CEO or the mayor, but often it is the patient, faithful volunteer—the parade route coordinator, the PTA parent, the historical society docent, or the church trustee—who keeps things going for a community. And it is this kind of volunteer who deserves special acknowledgement during Volunteer Week, and throughout the year.

While there is plenty to commend about shorter-term volunteer engagements, there is no substitute for long-term volunteer commitments. It has become trendy for nonprofit experts to say that young people are more inclined to get involved in low-touch or one-off activities than to join something. They commend one-time volunteer projects for corporate teams (which often require intensive planning by nonprofit staff members) or lower expectations for maintaining membership in a group.

Yes, volunteering will need to look different in our generation. We will need new kinds of organizations, higher-tech points of connection, and fewer meetings for the sake of meeting. We need not emulate everything that was done in the past, which had plenty that ought not be emulated.

On the other hand, I’m convinced that people of any age need outlets for service, and they need them as a life feature and a habit, not just an occasional project. Furthermore, I’m not sure we can get by as a civil society without the kind of sustained and intensive commitments previous generations have made to particular institutions and particular places. As Jennifer Breheny Wallace writes in a wonderful new book entitled Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose, “We have more pop-ups and ‘experiences’ but fewer reasons to be regulars somewhere.” Wendell Berry has written of community as a “membership.” However, civic life may take on different forms in different generations, it seems we are born to hold membership.

If there’s some meeting of purposes between the needs of our society and the needs we have as individuals to be fulfilled as members of a community, it ought to push us toward the high task of institution-building and stewardship. It may answer a tremendous civic imperative that also happens to make each volunteer participant a little less lonely.

When people ask me about how they can chart a course to making a difference in their community, I tell them they ought to join something. Get involved with something you are passionate about, where you can build your social network, and where you can make a difference.

The volunteers who make up the Kiwanis Club of Puyallup—and thousands upon thousands of organizations like it all across the country—show how citizenship ought to be done. Voluntarism is a way of life, and we should do all we can to perpetuate it.

Hans Zeiger is the president of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.