Author : Susan J. Ellis
Publisher : Jossey-Bass
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 30,40 MB
Release : 1990
Category : Self-Help
ISBN :
Most history books paint our past with portraits of presidents, generals, and captains of industry. By the People introduces the multitude of citizens who stood on the front lines when history was being made--the volunteers and associates that shaped us as a people, from the Social Compact of 1620 to the Underground Railroad before the Civil War and the women's suffrage movement.
Author :
Publisher :
Page : 20 pages
File Size : 29,37 MB
Release : 1968
Category : Volunteer workers in social service
ISBN :
Author : Rita Nakashima Brock
Publisher : Beacon Press
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 10,68 MB
Release : 2012-11-06
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0807029084
The first book to explore the idea and effect of moral injury on veterans, their families, and their communities Although veterans make up only 7 percent of the U.S. population, they account for an alarming 20 percent of all suicides. And though treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder has undoubtedly alleviated suffering and allowed many service members returning from combat to transition to civilian life, the suicide rate for veterans under thirty has been increasing. Research by Veterans Administration health professionals and veterans’ own experiences now suggest an ancient but unaddressed wound of war may be a factor: moral injury. This deep-seated sense of transgression includes feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness, and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs. Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini, who both grew up in families deeply affected by war, have been working closely with vets on what moral injury looks like, how vets cope with it, and what can be done to heal the damage inflicted on soldiers’ consciences. In Soul Repair, the authors tell the stories of four veterans of wars from Vietnam to our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—Camillo “Mac” Bica, Herman Keizer Jr., Pamela Lightsey, and Camilo Mejía—who reveal their experiences of moral injury from war and how they have learned to live with it. Brock and Lettini also explore its effect on families and communities, and the community processes that have gradually helped soldiers with their moral injuries. Soul Repair will help veterans, their families, members of their communities, and clergy understand the impact of war on the consciences of healthy people, support the recovery of moral conscience in society, and restore veterans to civilian life. When a society sends people off to war, it must accept responsibility for returning them home to peace.
Author : Elizabeth McKenna
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 11,64 MB
Release : 2014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0199394598
Much has been written about the historic nature of the Obama campaign. The multi-year, multi-billion dollar operation elected the nation's first black president, raised and spent more money than any other election effort in history, and built the most sophisticated voter targeting technology ever before used on a national campaign. What is missing from most accounts of the campaign is an understanding of how Obama for America recruited, motivated, developed, and managed its formidable army of 2.2 million volunteers. Unlike previous field campaigns that drew their power from staff, consultants, and paid canvassers, the Obama campaign's capacity came from unpaid local citizens who took responsibility for organizing their own neighborhoods months--and even years--in advance of election day. In so doing, Groundbreakers argues, the campaign engaged citizens in the work of practicing democracy. How did they organize so many volunteers to produce so much valuable work for the campaign? This book describes how. Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han argue that the legacy of Obama for America extends beyond big data and micro-targeting; it also reinvigorated and expanded traditional models of field campaigning. Groundbreakers makes the case that the Obama campaign altered traditional ground games by adopting the principles and practices of community organizing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with OFA field staff and volunteers, this book also argues that a key achievement of the OFA's field organizing was its transformative effect on those who were a part of it. Obama the candidate might have inspired volunteers to join the campaign, but it was the fulfilling relationships that volunteers had with other people--and their deep belief that their work mattered for the work of democracy--that kept them active. Groundbreakers documents how the Obama campaign has inspired a new way of running field campaigns, with lessons for national and international political and civic movements.
Author : Dennis Carlson
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 45,17 MB
Release : 2012-09-15
Category : Education
ISBN : 9460917372
This book chronicles the live of a Peace Corps volunteer in Libya in the late 1960s, including the first American account of living through the revolution that brought Gaddafi to power. The author moves from campus protests at the University of Washington in the spring of 1968, to Peace Corps training in Utah and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, to living and teaching in an isolated village in Libya, to a European summer vacation, to the revolution that led to charges that Peace Corps volunteers were CIA agents, to returning to the U.S. in October, 1969, to witness the anti-war moratorium on the Capital Mall in Washington, D.C. The heart of the story is the author’s own evolving journey as a teacher, during which time he began to question both the official curriculum of English instruction and the broader purposes of teaching for liberation. This is also a story about the author’s education and re-education in Libya as he struggles to learn the rules of everyday life (including the rules of gender and sexuality) as a stranger in the village, and as he begins to see and appreciate the world through somewhat different eyes. Part of his education involved a reconstruction of the history of the village in terms of wave after wave off European colonizers----from the time of the Romans, to the Italian fascist colonizers, to the liberation of the village by the British chasing Rommel’s troops across the desert, to its decline, renaming, and reappropriation as an Arab village. The author brings all this up to the late 1960s by describing the role of U.S. foreign policy in the “development” of Libya in league with global oil, and with the support of the largest air base outside the continental U.S. near Tripoli. This is, finally a coming of age story--about a young man who was desperately looking for something to believe in and live for, and more pragmatically looking for a way out of the draft and Vietnam, and out of an America that seemed to be slipping into collective madness. It is a story (like all coming of age stories) about setting off on a great youthful journey of self-discovery, and a rekindling of the human spirit. Audiences for this book include: college students (undergraduate and graduate) in education, cultural studies, and Arabic studies; former Peace Corps volunteers and those interested in the Peace Corps and its history; readers interested in recent developments in Libya looking for some historical perspective on how Gaddafi came to power and why the revolution turned anti-American; and all those interested in a first-hand account of what America was like at the end of a decade ushered in with Kennedy idealism and the Peace Corps. A powerful story of exile and a search for home, Volunteers of America is the Odyssey of a generation. Awakening to a world in flames, inspired by visions of liberation erupting everywhere, Dennis Carlson heard the chords of freedom echoing all around him and faced the question: Which side are you on? Here is Carlson’s poignant and still timely answer to that question. - Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days and many other books on education, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago.
Author : Marc A. Musick
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 681 pages
File Size : 42,47 MB
Release : 2007-11-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0253116864
Who tends to volunteer and why? What causes attract certain types of volunteers? What motivates people to volunteer? How can volunteers be persuaded to continue their service? Making use of a broad range of survey information to offer a detailed portrait of the volunteer in America, Volunteers provides an important resource for everyone who works with volunteers or is interested in their role in contemporary society. Mark A. Musick and John Wilson address issues of volunteer motivation by focusing on individuals' subjective states, their available resources, and the influence of gender and race. In a section on social context, they reveal how volunteer work is influenced by family relationships and obligations through the impact of schools, churches, and communities. They consider cross-national differences in volunteering and historical trends, and close with consideration of the research on the organization of volunteer work and the consequences of volunteering for the volunteer.
Author : Herbert A. Wisbey
Publisher :
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 17,79 MB
Release : 1994
Category :
ISBN : 9781885287007
Author : Arlen J. Hansen
Publisher : Skyhorse
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 19,98 MB
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1628721499
They left Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Michigan, and Stanford to drive ambulances on the French front, and on the killing fields of World War I they learned that war was no place for gentlemen. The tale of the American volunteer ambulance drivers of the First World War is one of gallantry amid gore; manners amid madness. Arlen J. Hansen’s Gentlemen Volunteers brings to life the entire story of the men—and women—who formed the first ambulance corps, and who went on to redefine American culture. Some were to become legends—Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, and Walt Disney—but all were part of a generation seeking something greater and grander than what they could find at home. The war in France beckoned them, promising glory, romance, and escape. Between 1914 and 1917 (when the United States officially entered the war), they volunteered by the thousands, abandoning college campuses and prep schools across the nation and leaving behind an America determined not to be drawn into a “European war.” What the volunteers found in France was carnage on an unprecedented scale. Here is a spellbinding account of a remarkable time; the legacy of the ambulance drivers of WWI endures to this day.
Author : Jerad W. Alexander
Publisher : Algonquin Books
Page : 334 pages
File Size : 16,84 MB
Release : 2021-11-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1643752189
“Riveting and morally complex, Volunteers is not only an insider’s account of war. It takes you inside the increasingly closed culture that creates our warriors.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of the National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe life “inside the castle,” within the embrace of the armed forces, the only world he knew or could imagine. Most of all, he dreamed of enlisting—like his mother, father, stepfather, and grandfather before him—and playing his part in the Great American War Story. He joined the US Marines straight out of high school, eager for action. Once in Iraq, however, he came to realize he was fighting a lost cause, enmeshed in the ongoing War on Terror that was really just a fruitless display of American might. The myths of war, the stories of violence and masculinity and heroism, the legacy of his family—everything Alexander had planned his life around—was a mirage. Alternating scenes from childhood with skirmishes in the Iraqi desert, this original, searing, and propulsive memoir introduces a powerful new voice in the literature of war. Jerad W. Alexander—not some elite warrior, but a simple volunteer—delivers a passionate and timely reckoning with the troubled and cyclical truths of the American war machine.
Author : Nina Eliasoph
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 44,84 MB
Release : 2011-02-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1400838827
An inside look at how community service organizations really work Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.
