Employee Layoff Hurts Volunteering Efforts
By Michael Gechter
Contributing Writer

I have worked with Rita Wodinsky in a number of different positions in my two years at Pomona and was shocked to read that she would soon be fired. The implications of this decision by the Claremont University Consortium and the Office of Chaplains are disturbing. As Kyle Warneck explained in his article in last week's TSL, Wodinsky is one of two volunteer coordinators working for the Office of Chaplains at the McAllister center. She is responsible for the volunteer study breaks designed to recruit volunteers for various community organizations that take place each semester. The other volunteer coordinator's main responsibility is to organize the one-time volunteer opportunities that McAllister offers. These include beach cleanups, trail maintenance, and the alternative spring break.

The administration's preference of these one-time opportunities reinforces the idea that volunteering must involve a low level of commitment and an under-utilization of students' skills. While one-time volunteer opportunities do help whatever organization they serve, I think that a repeated commitment to a given organization-a commitment that makes better use of skills learned here at Pomona College-has the potential to be far more helpful. College students are trained to be able to do far more than simply labor and, as a result, college students have the potential to be rare and valuable resources for the organizations that they serve. Currently, they are often not used enough by the organizations themselves, who ask that college students do relatively menial tasks, ones that can be done by any volunteer. However, if students can prove that they are committed to forging a continuing relationship with the organization where they volunteer, this can change. The decision on the part of the CUC and the Office of Chaplains to cut Wodinsky's position sets this process back by suggesting that student commitment to an organization is less important than one-time volunteer opportunities.

Wodinsky, in my experience, has been committed to fostering long-term relationships between students at the 5-Cs and organizations off campus. Her organization of the volunteer study break every semester attempts to connect students to organizations that need them by bringing representatives of these organizations to speak about the goals of their groups and the role that they envision for volunteers. After the presentations, there is time for interaction between students and organizers, and this interaction takes place without the intermediary of a volunteer coordinator. The students are presented as individuals that organizations will work with for at least the duration of a semester-not as anonymous volunteers, brought to a site to work for just one day.

Aside from simply allowing students to become more useful to the organizations that they are interested in, Wodinsky's study breaks, in building connections between students and these organizations, also builds relationships between the colleges and the community, something that is often talked about, but rarely done. In achieving this, Wodinsky's connections with the community organizations made over the course of 17 years of work as a volunteer coordinator become invaluable. This is something that CUC and the Office of Chaplains could never hope to replace, even if they wanted. Somewhat reasonably, but still sadly, there has been no proposal thus far for McAllister's other volunteer coordinator to take over the function of organizing these study breaks. At this point, it seems that study breaks simply will not occur, a clear statement on the part of the administration that long-term volunteer opportunities are not valued.

Wodinsky's connections to organizations in the community are not useful only for the organization of her volunteer study breaks, however. They are also useful for students seeking to create their own organizations. In last week's article, Warneck pointed out that Wodinsky had been crucial to the establishment of the SOVA food pantry, an organization that is now thoroughly established in the community, with its own staff and daily operating hours. This is not the only example of Wodinsky's helping to start and make viable a student-run organization. She has played this role in the starting of SHARE Low-Income Services. She has used the full extent of her connections to help the members of that organization, setting up meetings with the executive director of the umbrella organization Pomona Inland Valley Council of Churches, as well as bringing members along to their meetings. She has also shown an interest in assuring the long-term viability of SHARE. Wodinsky has suggested numerous avenues of funding which are available to the group. These would allow SHARE to potentially hire workers in order to continue operating through winter and summer breaks and, in so doing, become a legitimate organization beyond the level of the student-run organization in the same way that the food pantry did.

Developing a student-run organization to this point has all the benefits of long-term volunteer opportunities, in terms of making good use of student skills and connecting with the community. Wodinsky's assistance seems crucial to fostering this kind of volunteering.

What's more, Wodinsky's position is not very costly. She almost always works in excess of the ten hours perk week for which she is paid, so she is undercompensated while remaining generally available to students. I hope the CUC and the Office of Chaplains will reconsider their decision to fire Wodinsky so that other students and organizations can benefit from the resources she provides.