Page 38 - 1925 September - To Dragma

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 27

PROFESSIONAL VOLUNTEERS IN SOCIAL WORK

A FRIEND of mine whose memory ranges back over many more
years than mine does, has told me of a committee of volun-
teers of which she was a member many years ago, whose chair-
man would habitually order the paid secretary of the committee to
move chairs, open or close windows, etc., while the committee was
in session. He was conscious of no discourtesy, neither was she.
She was a hired employee, to be treated with such consideration
as one would give one's house maid or one's office boy, and this
was understood on both sides.

Such a relation between volunteer and paid workers in social
work would be unthinkable today. Even to understand it one
must know something of the early history of the movement, and
understand that in the beginning was the volunteer and nothing
else at all. People f r o m the leisured classes, impressed with the
material inequalities and obvious lacks in the social system, banded
themselves together to do good works among the poor. The whole
merit consisted in doing them oneself with one's own hands and
means, f o r thus did one lay up treasure f o r oneself in Heaven.
Later, serious-minded persons began to question what this "dole-
giving" conception of "good works" was doing to the people it
was supposed to benefit, and so was born the case-work idea, of
doing with and f o r the individual what will best serve to strengthen
him to l i f t himself out of his special set of troubles. This new
idea was not accepted without a struggle; those early sixties to
nineties were fighting days, when convictions, not experience and
not scientific study, were all the budding case-workers had to go
on. As the emphasis moved f r o m relief to service, more service
had to be provided than the volunteers could manage to render,
and the paid social worker sprang into being. Not as a profes-
sional worker, far f r o m i t . She was not a college graduate; there
were no such. She was not even a learner, f o r she was likely to
be a mature woman, perhaps the widow of some committee mem-
ber's head clerk, or the minister's spinster daughter. She was
not trained; there was no one to give training. She was hired,
at an incredibly small wage, to carry out the specific directions of
the volunteer committee.

Sometimes the committee would succeed in finding a thought-
f u l person of native skill in handling human problems, as when