Page 40 - 1925 September - To Dragma

TO DRAG MA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 29

problems were avoiding volunteer service because it gave one no
training and no standing. Volunteer interest was being withered
at the roots.

Then came the deluge of 1917 and the war was upon us.
Social workers, intent upon technical problems and professional
training, found themselves faced overnight with the task of organ-
izing an army of enthusiastic and willing but untrained soldiers
in the common weal. The Home Service of the American Red
Cross set the pendulum swinging back the other way, and I do
not believe i t has stopped swinging—for out of the marriage of
professional training with volunteer enthusiasm which it brought
about, a new idea came into being. W h y should training, expert-
ness, skill, be the sole possession of those who earned their liveli-
hood in social service ? The volunteer had started the paid worker
along the road to competence and professional standing; training,
further developed by the professional f o r professionals, was being
held rather jealously on the assumption that only professionals
were worth training. The war had shown that this was not a
correct assumption. Why, then, should not the paid workers
return the debt they owed the volunteers by imparting to them
the technical skill they had developed, and take them back into
partnership again?

A real demand to right a real injustice can usually make itself
heeded; and the process initiated during and after the war is still
going on. I t is still in the experimental stage, so that it may be
worth your while to detail to you the steps which my own society
the New York Charity Organization Society, has taken to meet
the changing times. For the last five years, half of the time of
one of our ablest professional workers has been spent in recruit-
ing and training volunteer workers to work shoulder to shoulder
with the paid staff in the work with disadvantaged families. The
other half of her time has been spent on the society's publicity,
and she has made the one play into the hands of the other. Each
newspaper story has carried somewhere the note that volunteers
will be welcome and taught to do this work themselves. Talks
before church and other groups have carried the same note. The
would-be volunteers who apply have had it brought to their atten-
tion from the start that they are expected to measure up to the
same standards as the paid workers, f o r their references are care-