Page 39 - 1925 September - To Dragma

28 TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI

John Ruskin was so extraordinarily wise as to engage the young
Octavia H i l l to manage his tenement property and to improve the
housing of the district. But often this hit-or-miss system pro-
duced only well-meaning drudges who failed to carry out or even
to grasp the real purposes that were apparent to the keener minds
of the volunteers. A n d so the idea of a real responsibility on the
part of the volunteers f o r selecting more trainable people to do
their work, and then for giving time and thought to their training,
became a part of the thinking of all forward-looking agencies.
The colleges began to interest themselves in social work and
social reform, and their graduates began to enter in increasing
numbers what was by the beginning of the twentieth century a
profession.

But with the coming of the professional social worker, in place
of the merely paid social worker, an unthought of change took
place, unthought of, I am sure, by the volunteers who first encour-
aged it. The professional in a few years ousted the volunteer
f r o m a position of leadership in the movement. Instead of paid
workers quite humbly and subserviently looking to the volunteers
for direction and stimulation, there was almost a complete right-
about-face in the field as a whole with the paid workers contribut-
ing the leadership and the new ideas, and feeling responsible f o r
recruiting, training, and directing the volunteers. The pendulum
had swung with a vengeance!

As this tendency grew more pronounced, I am speaking now
of the time just before the war, a sort of vicious circle, as we
now look back on it, came into being. The paid worker came to
feel too busy to bother with volunteers ; they were unreliable; they
were sentimental; you had to watch them too closely. Social work
was a skilled profession for trained people; volunteers would not
submit to training; ergo the volunteer would have to go. To this
feeling the volunteer responded by more and more dropping
interest in the work itself and making a last stand f o r position and
power on boards of directors. Volunteers in the actual work of
the agencies were given less and less responsible tasks to perform,
and, as always results, became less and less interested and less and
less able to carry responsibility. The links between the social
worker and the community he worked in were becoming fewer
and fewer; young people who had a serious interest in social