The Washington Post published an editorial on Monday by Katherine Turk, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of. The headline and subhead:

Volunteering and generosity are no substitutes for government programs.

Conservatives have weaponized Americans’ desire to help to attack the social safety net.

As the editorial notes:

…as we honor these selfless acts, we should also recall National Volunteering Week’s dark origins story, when president Richard Nixon distorted benevolence to serve the least generous of goals. This history makes it clear that volunteering cannot stand in for government provided support…

…(President) Nixon, a Republican, set out to change the conversation about what the government owed to citizens when he became president in 1969. In particular, he sought to shrink Aid to Families With Dependent Children (often called simply “welfare”), the program that paid modest sums to low-income families. He also wanted to fulfill his campaign promise to be a president of “law and order” by redirecting War on Poverty funds into expanding incarceration and more aggressive policing in urban communities of color.

To lay the groundwork for these changes, Nixon took up his predecessors’ focus on volunteerism, and warped it. Many Americans needed assistance, Nixon claimed, but their generous fellow citizens could meet those needs. Volunteer programs should replace government-funded and run services… Nixon outlined an ambitious vision in which teens tutored youths; business leaders mentored aspiring entrepreneurs; housewives cooked for elderly neighbors, and those elderly served as foster grandparents. Most anyone could be recruited to aid another person free.

This praise for volunteerism helped erode the notion that basic sustenance was a right — something for which Americans shouldn’t have to rely upon the vagaries of charity. 

I strongly encourage you to read the entire editorial. As for me, I love volunteer engagement, I love volunteerism – and I absolutely agree with this editorial.

I won’t repeat myself – I have blogged about this so many times. I’ll let those past blogs speak for me:

• Charity isn’t enough
• Volunteering, by itself, isn’t enough to save the world
• Are charities “stuck up” – or the corporate volunteers offering help?
• Corporate volunteers can be a burden for nonprofits
• Is group volunteering really all it’s cracked up to be?
• Initiatives opposed to some or all volunteering (unpaid work), and online and print articles about or addressing controversies regarding volunteers replacing paid staff
• The value of volunteers
• time for USA nonprofits to be demanding
• Trump is trying to eliminate national service – again
• Trump’s War on Volunteerism
• A plea to USA nonprofits for the next four years (& beyond)
• Governor Bevin & Donald Trump Are Wrong on Community Service Requirements
• Requirements to volunteer are getting out of hand
• Kentucky politicians think volunteers are free
• Vanity Volunteering: all about the volunteer