Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Empower Yourself ix Chapter 1: How to Learn Something in an Empowerment Project 1 Part One: Cultivating Civic Equality Chapter 2: Participating under Unequal Auspices 17 Chapter 3: The Spirit that Moves Inside You: Puzzles of Using Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer's Problems 48 Chapter 4: Temporal Leapfrog: Puzzles of Timing 55 Chapter 5: Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics, Blank Reflections 87 Part Two: Cultivating Intimate Comfort and Safety Chapter 6: Harmless and Destructive Plug-in Volunteers 117 Chapter 7: Paid Organizers Creating Temporally Finite, Intimate, Family-like Attachments 146 Chapter 8:: Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort 152 Chapter 9:: Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: People Out of Their Clumps 165 Part Three: Celebrating Our Diverse, Multicultural Community Chapter 10: Getting Out of Your Box versus Preserving a Two Opposed Ways of Appreciating Cultural Diversity 183 Chapter 11: Tell Us about Your Culture: What Participants Count as Culture 190 Chapter 12: Celebrating ... Empowerment Projects! 206 Conclusion: Finding Patterns in the Open and Undefined Organization 231 Appendix 1: On Justification 259 Appendix 2: Methods of Taking Field Notes and Making Them Tell a Story 261 Notes 265 References 281 Index 303