Volunteering

The candidates for school board have been asked about about our past work with local volunteer organizations. It is important to be involved and to give back to the community but I have some thoughts on the nature of “volunteer” work and the risk of creating or reinforcing hierarchies.

I am deeply involved in my community, though I do not have extensive volunteer experience. I have provided free childcare for a refugee family in my community. That family has in turn shared freely with mine, having us over for meals, exchanging toys between our children, everything friends and neighbors within a community normally do. I have installed car seats for single parents and spent the day digging cars out of snow. I have collected neighbors’ names and email addresses for a news report on the difficulties with insurance companies after damage to our homes and cars from the recent Skokie water main break. I have also had those same neighbors help shovel the ice out of my own garage. I took a second, part-time position as a preschool gym teacher at the YMCA Children's Center for a year while my child attended. The position was paid but it filled an immediate need for the school. I did not teach my child’s class. Each one of these experiences, paid or unpaid, official or unofficial has benefitted me just as much as I was able to benefit those I was helping.

Requiring school board candidates to have extensive volunteer experience places an affluence requirement on the position. Equating the school board with volunteer work misunderstands a fundamental aspect of the school board. Yes, being a member of the school board is unpaid, but it is not volunteer work. It is a responsibility, it is not charity. Volunteer work implies a one-way relationship between the helper and helped, with the helper in the superior position in a hierarchy. The school board does not sit above the community. The school board represents the community and is given authority to carry out the community’s wishes. I am just as dependent on my community as it is dependent on me, if not more. I am a part of my community, enmeshed in it. I do not stand above it. My honest belief is that extensive volunteer work does not prepare a candidate to be an effective member of a school board. I fear it could have the opposite effect, by accustoming a candidate to the one-way, hierarchical relationship between a volunteer and community they serve. This is my approach to leadership. A leader is not an enlightened elite, bestowing their gifts onto the needy and grateful out of pure altruism. A leader leads well because they are part of the community, because the needs of the community and the needs of the leader are one and the same.