Jon's Job Blog

The first volunteer event I worked after my termination was a senior center in East Liberty called Vintage, where I spent an afternoon handing out food vouchers that the people receiving them could use at farmers markets. The cause connected, geographically and personally, to places I had lived in and worked in and was hoping to work in again. The work itself was uncomplicated. I stood at a table, made small talk, and directed people to where the vouchers were being distributed and where the program staff were standing if they had questions I could not answer. There was no expertise being deployed. There was no virtue being performed. The folding tables came down at the end of the afternoon. The people left with vouchers that would, the following weekend, be exchanged for produce at a local market. I left with the first thing that had felt unambiguously good in months.

I want to be honest about what I thought, at that early point, the work meant. I should also be honest about how I had come into the work in the first place, because the version I sometimes tell myself — that volunteering has been a thread running through my life since childhood — is true at a high level but compresses, in a way that does the actual story a disservice, the period in which the thread became continuous. Volunteer work was present in my life through Boy Scouts and through college philanthropy events in fraternity life. It then largely receded for the working years that followed. The version of it that is present in my life now — the United Way involvement, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy involvement, the rhythm of having a civic life that runs alongside the professional one — began only about a year before the termination. The origin was practical before it was principled. I was working fully remote, and the United Way involvement began partly as a way to meet coworkers — the office I did not have — and partly as a way to be out of a house that had, during the slow dissolution of my marriage, become a difficult place to be. I am not going to itemize the difficulty. The end of the marriage was hard on both of us, and my own share of the damage simply surfaced later than my partner’s did. I started picking up volunteer commitments partly for the cause and partly for the simple practical effect of having somewhere to be that was not home.

The Conservancy involvement, in particular, has an origin I do not usually describe in detail. I had been trying to do volunteer work with my partner — the same way they had asked me to attend various charity walks and events alongside their career, which I did willingly — and the pattern, by that point in the marriage, was that the engagement was not returned. I had suspected, by then, that my partner was having an affair, on the basis of behaviors I had observed between them and a friend of ours at a party. I had raised it. It was denied. With the help of a mentor who walked me through how to have an honest conversation about where the marriage was, I had asked directly about the state of things, and my partner’s unwillingness to engage with anything connected to my work — including a Conservancy volunteer day I had proposed we attend together — was one of the data points the conversation surfaced. I decided to go to the volunteer day alone. After it ended, on the drive home, I pulled up the security camera feed on the house, because my mother-in-law was supposed to be coming over and I did not particularly want to walk into that conversation unprepared. The footage showed the suspected friend’s car parked in the driveway during the hours I had been gone. When I got home I pulled the rest of the footage. I found, in the guest bedroom, the physical evidence that confirmed what the footage had implied. The marriage ended swiftly after that, and the evidence I had assembled allowed it to end without ambiguity, without negotiation, and without the kind of protracted unraveling that the same situation produces in the absence of that kind of clarity. The Conservancy event that day was the beginning of a body of volunteer involvement that, in the months and years that followed, became one of the things I built a different life on top of. The work was useful. The timing was, in retrospect, exact.

What the Tax Code Got Right

The clearest case for community work, in my experience of it, has been a series of small encounters with institutions that were designed to help people and that, against the run of play, actually did. The United Way’s free tax-preparation program is one of them. People earning under sixty-nine thousand dollars can have their taxes prepared by trained volunteers at no cost; people earning up to about eighty-nine thousand can self-file through a partnered platform. The eligibility thresholds are generous. The software works. The volunteers, in my experience, are competent and patient.

I want to admit something about my own relationship to this program, because the admission says something the rest of the essay is going to draw on. I benefited from these services in the year of the termination. I could have benefited from them in any of the four-and-a-half years preceding it. My salary at PPG was well under the upper eligibility threshold, and the tax-prep software I was paying for each spring was costing the equivalent of a tank or two of gas or a grocery run — not large amounts in isolation, but real amounts in a household budget, and amounts I did not need to be spending. I was not spending them because I needed to. I was spending them because I had internalized, by then, an idea about who used services like the United Way’s free tax preparation and who did not, and I had placed myself, without examination, in the second category. The placement was not accurate. The placement was a particular kind of delusion that white-collar work cultivates, in which the worker confuses being employed with being secure, and confuses being above a threshold with not needing help. The delusion is one of the things the termination clarified. The clarification, like most of the clarifications this period has produced, arrived later than would have been useful. And the admission has a present tense. I have continued to use these services during my current employment, because my current salary still sits below the thresholds. That is worth stating plainly: an analyst with an MBA, nearly a decade of professional experience, and a full-time corporate role remains eligible for the free tax preparation the United Way runs for people the economy is not paying enough. The eligibility is not a loophole. It is a measurement.

A second example, from a less expected direction, is the Internal Revenue Service. After I lost my job, I had to draw on an early retirement withdrawal to cover the months between paychecks and severance, and the early-withdrawal penalty on a withdrawal of that size is the kind of number that can compound a bad year into a much worse one. The tax code, it turns out, has a hardship provision. Of the thirteen thousand dollars I withdrew, ten thousand qualified for exemption from the penalty under provisions designed to recognize that people in genuine financial distress need access to their own money without being further punished for the access. It is a small, specific design choice embedded in the code, and it is the kind of design choice that almost no corporate severance package or HR process contains. The IRS, on this particular dimension, was more humane than the apparatus I had spent four and a half years working inside.

I bring up these two examples not to make a libertarian or anti-libertarian point about which institutions deserve trust. They are not arguments about ideology. They are arguments about design. Institutions can be designed to help, or designed to extract, or designed to perform their function while doing neither. The institutions worth honoring are the ones whose design is faithful to the purpose stated on the door. There are more of these than the language of corporate disillusionment usually allows. Recognizing them is the first move away from the simple narrative in which everything outside the corporation is automatically better than what is inside it. Some of what is outside is better. Some is not. The differences matter, and the differences are visible only if one is paying attention to design rather than to label.

Proximity to People Who Have Vocabulary

What I did not understand, when I first started giving time to United Way and to the Conservancy, was that the most valuable thing the work gave me was not the work itself. It was the proximity to people who had vocabulary I did not have. The volunteers and staff in these organizations had spent years thinking about kinds of harm that the corporate world is structurally incapable of naming — the harms that do not produce a line item on a balance sheet, that do not appear on a performance review, that do not generate a press release, and that are usually borne by people whose ability to describe what is happening to them has been eroded by the experience of having it happen. The vocabulary these people had was the vocabulary for those harms. Knowing them gave me language I could then turn around and apply to my own experience.

An example. The dissolution of my marriage involved what would, in retrospect, be described accurately as a pattern of financial abuse. The marriage operated on a joint account from which both of us paid bills, and the arrangement, looked at from the outside, would have appeared cooperative. What it produced, in practice, was a series of decisions in which I was encouraged toward debt-financing the things I would otherwise have saved cash for. One instance, which has stayed with me because I have just finished paying it off, concerned a piece of property-maintenance equipment — a zero-turn lawnmower for the couple of acres we kept mowed on the rural property that is now mine alone. I had wanted to put aside cash for a small tractor that would also have done other useful work; the conversation I was steered into was the conversation in which I took out a loan and opened a credit card to finance the immediate purchase of the mower instead. Gifts for an affair I did not know about at the time were charged to a shared credit card. The eventual divorce required me to refinance the mortgage at a higher interest rate in order to retain the home, with the cumulative economic effect summing to something on the order of a hundred thousand dollars. The credit card from the lawnmower purchase was settled four years after the decision was made, in the month I am writing this. The legal system did not capture any of this as abuse, because the forms it took were subtle enough that none of them individually rose to the threshold of a recognizable category. The pattern was the abuse. The pattern was not the legal system’s concern.

There is a coda to the lawnmower, and I include it because it is the rare piece of this story that ends in the black. The property is six and a half acres. The two and a half that got mowed were the two and a half we mowed while I was married. The conservancy work changed my relationship to the land itself — I mow maybe half an acre to an acre now and let the rest do what land does. So I sold the zero-turn, for twelve thousand dollars — a six-thousand-dollar loss from new over the year or two I owned it — and replaced it with a 1979 International Harvester that cost about four thousand and does the other useful work besides, which is to say it is the machine I had wanted in the first place. The loan on the mower had been written at zero percent interest, which meant the sale proceeds were, functionally, money borrowed for free, and that money helped float a stretch of unemployment that ran the better part of two years. The mower the marriage steered me into debt for became, in the end, part of the runway out of the period the marriage helped produce. I do not want to overload the symbolism. But I did notice it.

What community work gave me, in this case, was not a remedy. The remedy was unavailable, by design. What it gave me was the people who had names for what had happened. Financial abuse, as a concept, has a body of advocacy and research behind it, much of it nurtured by the nonprofit sector. The framing did not unwind the harm. It made the harm legible, which is the precondition for anything else. The same is true of a long list of other invisible harms the corporate world produces: stack ranking distortion, retaliatory termination, neurodivergent silencing, the slow erosion of institutional knowledge as experienced workers are pushed out in favor of cheaper replacements. The corporate vocabulary for these things is impoverished by design. The nonprofit vocabulary, where it exists, is richer because the people who developed it were closer to the people the harm was being done to. Community work is, among other things, a transfer mechanism for that vocabulary. The naming is the gift.

One Question at One Event

I want to describe a specific moment, because the specific moment is closer to what community work actually taught me than the broader theoretical reading I might be tempted to put on top of it. United Way held a daytime donor event at Pittsburgh Scholar House, a separate nonprofit that receives United Way funding, which operates as a residence and support system for single parents pursuing higher education. The program is good. The model is sound. The event was a tour and a presentation, in the middle of a workday, attended by donors and partners and people involved in supporting the program’s work. I was there as a volunteer. The presenters described the program. The donors asked questions. Most of the questions were the kinds of questions donors ask, which is to say, generally supportive, generally informed, and generally about the operational mechanics of how the program ran.

One question, asked by one donor, sat with me in a way the others did not. The donor wanted to know whether the program could be structured to restrict the use of education dollars in some specific way I have, for reasons of my own discretion, decided not to repeat here in detail. The proposal was not malicious. It was an instinctive constraint of the kind that surfaces in any room of people thinking about how money is being spent. What struck me about it was that it surfaced in the room of people whose mission, on paper, was the expansion of educational access for a population that already faced more constraints on its educational choices than the donors in the room had ever personally encountered. The instinct toward restriction was operating on the side of the table that had the least direct experience of being restricted. The instinct toward expansion was operating on the side of the table that was, ironically, the one being served. The asymmetry was not malicious. It was simply visible in the room in a way it would not have been visible from outside it.

I do not want to make this moment carry more weight than it can. It was one question at one event. The donor was operating in good faith. The program was not, as a result of the question, restricted in the way the question proposed. The reason I mention it is that the moment crystallized something I had been carrying without language for, which is that the rooms where decisions about service are made are not always populated by the people the service is for, and the gap between the room and the served population is a real variable that affects what gets funded and how. The variable is not the whole story. The volunteer work I was doing was, on balance, good work, in support of a population I genuinely wanted to support. The moment did not change that. What it did was add a small wedge of awareness to my participation, which I have carried since.

I should also name, because it would be dishonest not to, that I am now a participant in a philanthropic leadership program that operates on something close to the same logic as the rooms I am describing — rooms in which a relatively small group of people meet to discuss how resources should be directed toward the support of populations none of us, in our day-to-day lives, are members of. I am participating in this program in good faith, with the awareness that the awareness I have accumulated since the Scholar House event is part of what I bring to the conversation. The wedge of awareness does not exempt me from being in the room. It does, I hope, shape what I bring to it. The shape of what one brings to the room is, in the end, more important than whether one is in it.

Who Actually Does This Work

There is a related observation about who, in fact, populates the rooms where the day-to-day work of social support gets done, and the observation is not unique to United Way or to the Connect U program. It comes with a caveat, because the composition varies by program: the Conservancy’s land-stewardship work, for instance, draws rooms that are more balanced and sometimes male-leaning. But in the early-career Connect U group I have been part of, the men in the room on a given evening have numbered about two out of twelve. The daytime committee work, the grant-review work, the volunteer coordination, the program staffing — in the rooms where much of this work happens, the labor is, in its day-to-day composition, predominantly women’s work. Not universally. Reliably enough that the pattern deserves naming.

I had to leave my own social context to fully recognize this. I have a cousin who lives in Oakland, California, a few blocks from the original headquarters of the Black Panther Party, and a visit to that neighborhood produced one of the more durable corrections to my prior understanding I have had in recent years. I had grown up thinking of the Panthers, on the basis of the cultural imagery I had inherited from a mostly conservative upbringing, as a radical paramilitary organization defined by its armed confrontations with police. The historical record is, on closer examination, quite different. The substantial majority of the Party’s actual day-to-day labor was social-program work — the Free Breakfast for Children program, the community health clinics, the legal aid services, the literacy and tutoring programs — and the people running those programs were predominantly women. The famous public-facing figures of the Party, the photographs of armed men in berets that the surrounding culture seized on as the Party’s defining image, were a small fraction of the actual organization. The actual organization was women filling gaps the state had declined to fill in their communities. The image of the Party that I had been carrying was the image of the small minority that the surrounding political culture had been most invested in publicizing. The Party itself, considered as an organization actually doing work, was something else.

I bring up the example because the structural pattern it reveals is the same structural pattern I have seen in every social-program context I have participated in since. The work of holding communities together, of filling the gaps institutions have declined to fill, of organizing the practical responses to the harms the dominant economy produces, is done substantially by women. The men who participate are a minority. The men who get the headlines, when there are headlines, are a smaller minority still. This is not a flaw in any particular organization. It is the labor structure of social support in this country, and it has been the labor structure for as long as the country has had a labor structure. The corporate apparatus this series has been describing is the apparatus that has, by structural default, been considered the main economy. The work of holding things together, when the main economy fails, has been the second economy, and the second economy has been disproportionately women’s work, undercompensated and undercounted, for the entire history of the period the main economy has been measured in.

The relevance of this observation to the larger argument of the essay is not that nonprofit work is uniquely virtuous. The relevance is that nonprofit work, in its actual operational composition, is being held up by a category of labor whose value the dominant economy systematically refuses to register. The volunteers and program staff doing the work are, in many cases, working without the institutional protections and the compensation structures the main economy reserves for the work it considers serious. The work is no less serious for that. The economy doing the considering is the one whose seriousness is, on closer inspection, less defensible than the rhetoric supporting it.

Corporate Apathy Has a Local Address

The corporate side of the ledger is easier to describe, because the corporate side is louder and more legible. The clearest local instance I have direct experience of is Giant Eagle, the regional grocery chain headquartered here, where I worked briefly during the unemployment period. The new-hire onboarding included a portion devoted to explaining that the company’s margins were lower than its larger national competitors and that, as a consequence, its wages could not be higher than they were. The narrative was delivered as if it were a fact about the world rather than a choice the company had made. It is a choice. At the time I worked there, Giant Eagle was privately held, with ownership distributed among five founding families — Shapira, Chait, Goldstein, Porter, and Moravitz — who had retained controlling stakes for generations, over a company with annual revenue measured in the billions. The decision about how profits were distributed between family returns and worker compensation was not dictated by margin pressure. It was dictated by ownership preference, and the ownership preference, like all such preferences in private companies, was not publicly disclosed. As I was finalizing this essay, that era ended: an agreement was announced for Kroger to acquire the chain, for a price a little over a billion and a half dollars, with the local name and headquarters retained and the deal expected to close the following year. I will note the juxtaposition and let it sit. The ownership that could not afford to pay its cashiers more found a buyer at ten figures. My honest expectation, for what it is worth, is that the change will be a net benefit to the region — a national operator’s scale and pay structures are, whatever else one says about them, more legible than a family preference that answers to no one. But the onboarding narrative was delivered while the families held the stakes, and it was false when it was delivered. The sale does not retroactively make it true. It just names the price.

The narrative the new hire receives is therefore an instance of weaponized information asymmetry. The story functions because the audience it is delivered to does not have access to, and in many cases does not have the background to interrogate, the financial structure that would falsify it. A significant portion of Giant Eagle’s workforce is composed of people with disabilities, recent immigrants, retirees on fixed incomes, and workers without strong formal economic literacy. These are the populations least likely to challenge the framing. The framing is therefore most effective on the workers who pay its greatest cost. This is the same pattern Essay 2 described in the context of corporate values rhetoric — ownership language deployed to people from whom ownership is withheld — and it shows up here in its most literal form. The phrase the new hire is asked to internalize is essentially we cannot afford to pay you more. The underlying reality is closer to we have chosen not to pay you more, for reasons whose disclosure would weaken the story.

The trajectory of the business is also worth attending to. Within my lifetime as a customer, Giant Eagle has shed a video-rental division, an optical division, and various other consumer-service offerings, while adding, in many of its locations, a class of cabinet-style gambling machines marketed as skill games under Pennsylvania’s ambiguous regulatory treatment. What is added and what is removed from a business is one of the more honest disclosures about what the business considers itself to be doing. A company that removes the apparatus of community service while installing the apparatus of micro-extraction has signaled, more clearly than any statement of corporate values can, what it has come to understand its function as. The transition is not unique to Giant Eagle. The pattern is regional, national, and industry-wide. Giant Eagle is simply the local instance I have the most direct line of sight on.

One inference from this is that consumer choice, like volunteer work, is a form of civic engagement. Where one spends grocery money is a small vote about what kind of regional economy one prefers to subsidize. The chains that have entered or matured in this market — Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Wegmans, and others — offer a redistribution opportunity that the volunteer hour does not. They are not nonprofits. They are companies with their own pathologies. But they are not the local incumbent whose practices the volunteer is otherwise donating time to mitigate. Until the local incumbent’s practices change, the small daily decision of where to buy bread is a real one, and the people pretending it is not real are typically the people who benefit from its being treated as trivial.

When Profit Is the Motive and a Person Is the Product

The most difficult section of this essay involves a loss in my own family and an industry that has been the subject of recent federal investigation. A cousin of mine died of an overdose about a decade ago. The path to the overdose is the path most overdose deaths trace, which is to say that it was not a single event but the eventual conclusion of years of escalating substance use that began, in his case, after a period of confinement in a residential program for so-called troubled teens. The program was Ivy Ridge Academy, in upstate New York. It was part of a larger network now under sustained scrutiny, and the network operated — and in altered forms continues to operate — on a business model whose defining feature is that the customer (the paying parent) and the consumer (the child) are not the same person. The death did not happen during the period this essay series covers. What happened during this period was that the death, and the larger set of family conditions surrounding it, surfaced in a way they had not surfaced before. The therapeutic work the post-termination period prompted brought a number of long-deferred truths into view; the resulting realignment of my relationship with that side of the family was one of the costs and one of the clarifications. The loss is, in that sense, a presence in the essay even though it predates the events the essay otherwise narrates.

The troubled-teen industry, as it is now called, generates roughly twenty-three billion dollars in annual revenue, with somewhere between one hundred twenty thousand and two hundred thousand minors held in residential facilities at any given time. A Senate Finance Committee investigation led by Senator Ron Wyden produced a report describing, in extensive documentation, patterns of physical and psychological abuse, inadequate oversight, and the systematic intake of public funds — including Medicaid and federal child-welfare dollars — into facilities whose practices have been credibly described by survivors as torture. The World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, the network that included Ivy Ridge, was operated by figures including Robert Lichfield, whose corporate liability shields have insulated him through multiple rounds of litigation and reform attempts. The Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, advanced in significant part through advocacy by Paris Hilton and a coalition of survivors, established federal transparency requirements but left enforcement largely to state-level oversight, where regulatory capture has continued to constrain implementation.

I do not draw a direct causal line from one program to one death. The data does not support that line and the situation does not deserve it. I draw a structural inference. An industry that takes vulnerable adolescents from families who do not have the information or resources to evaluate the placement, holds those adolescents under conditions that the Senate has formally described as abusive, charges the families thirty to a hundred thousand dollars a year for the holding, and returns the adolescents in measurably worse psychological condition than the condition that triggered the placement — that industry is producing the outcomes I am describing not by accident but by design. The design is the business model. The business model is what is producing the deaths. The individual operators are downstream. The shield they operate behind is the upstream condition.

The contrast that gives this section its second half is a program in my own city called Café Momentum Pittsburgh, which is the local affiliate of a national nonprofit. Café Momentum operates a restaurant staffed by young people who have come through the juvenile-justice system, providing them with paid work, mentorship, wraparound services, and the experience of being trusted to do something that other people depend on. The program produces a recidivism rate of about fifteen percent against a national average of about forty-eight percent for the same population. The cost per participant is lower than the cost of any of the alternative interventions that could be applied to the same group, including, by a substantial margin, the residential programs of the troubled-teen industry. The economics, in other words, favor the service-first model. The thing keeping the for-profit model in place is not efficiency. It is culture, and culture, as Essay 17 argued, is downstream of what the relevant institutions are choosing to measure.

I had dinner at the Pittsburgh location of Café Momentum once, by myself. The food was not just good. The food was fantastic. I ordered the New York strip steak, followed by an order of macaroons for dessert that I, characteristically, finished alone. I made some small talk with the wait staff and with a group of patrons at the next table over who had asked, in friendly curiosity, about the steak. The bill came to somewhere around fifty dollars before tip, sixty after. The same meal at the comparable steakhouses a few blocks away in the same neighborhood would have been substantially more — not just incrementally more, but the kind of more that the chain steakhouses on the order of Ruth’s Chris and the other expense-account establishments downtown charge as a matter of course. The price-to-quality ratio of the place was, on its own merits, the most competitive in downtown Pittsburgh for that kind of meal. The food was not subsidized by mission. The food was simply better than what the more expensive restaurants in the area were serving, at a fraction of their cost.

There was another diner sitting alone at a nearby table, a man in business attire whose appearance scanned as someone with a professional reason to be there. For all I knew he was a benefactor of the program returning to support it, or a curious philanthropist exploring what the nonprofit space in Pittsburgh looks like — in the way I now think of myself, when I am being honest, as exploring it. I was in jeans, an old flannel shirt left over from my forestry days, and a graphic tee, eating roughly the same meal he was, taking in the atmosphere, not interrupting his evening. The contrast in our presentation in that room was, on reflection, a small visible instance of the larger pattern of who shows up to spaces like this and what they look like when they do.

What stayed with me about the meal was not the man at the next table. It was the program that had produced the meal in the first place. The young people running the restaurant — the ones cooking, serving, learning the trade of having an adult job in which other people are depending on them — were, in a structural sense, the people the institution was actually serving. The diners were the mechanism. The program existed for the staff. The structural difference between the institution that had served as a stop on the way to my cousin’s death and the institution preparing those young people for an adult working life was not a matter of staff quality, regulatory environment, or geographic luck. It was a matter of which question the institution was organized around. The for-profit asks: how do we extract revenue from this child’s family while minimizing our liability? The nonprofit asks: how do we set this young person up to make it? The two questions produce, predictably and at scale, the outcomes the data describes. The fact that the second question is also cheaper is, in its way, the saddest part of the story. The first question is being asked, and the deaths are being produced, for cultural rather than economic reasons. We could afford to do this differently. We are not doing it differently because the people in the room making the decisions are not the people in the room paying the cost.

The program structure produced, by a route I had not seen articulated as clearly elsewhere, the same outcome my own working childhood had produced for me by a more improvised route. I started working when I was twelve, cutting lawns for family members. The work itself was unremarkable, and there is some part of me that resents the idea that a twelve-year-old needed to be working. There is a larger part of me that recognizes the work for what it functionally was, which is the apparatus that kept my hands occupied and my afternoons accounted for during a stretch of life in which the people whose afternoons were not accounted for were, in numerous cases I could name, getting handed pain pills by adults who should have known better and ending up on trajectories that did not end well. The work I was doing was the thing standing between me and that. Café Momentum, in its institutional form, was building for those young people the same structure my childhood had improvised. The structure is what does the work. The work is what makes the structure possible. The two questions — how do we extract from this child? versus how do we set this child up? — produce institutions that, downstream, do or do not provide that structure. I sat long enough to finish the macaroons, and then I left.

Calibrated Engagement, and the Hockey Game

I want to close with something practical, because the rest of this essay has been heavier than I would normally let an essay run without a counterweight. The counterweight, in the period this essay covers, was a Penguins game I went to a few months after the termination — the big blowout I described in Essay 16, where the home team lost so badly that the experience flipped over from disappointing to absurd and then to oddly restorative. That game is in the background of this essay too, because the function it served — communal participation in something low-stakes and faintly ridiculous — is part of what community is for. Not all of it has to be heavy. Some of it is just being in a room with other people doing a thing that does not matter, agreeing collectively that the thing is the thing for the evening, and then going home. The cumulative weight of the small civic gestures is part of how a person stays oriented.

The harder lesson, which has taken longer to integrate, is about how much engagement is the right amount. Early in my involvement with United Way, I gravitated toward visible roles — committee work, event presence, the kinds of activities that signal commitment and accumulate, over time, into something that could be put on a resume or a board application. After Scholar House, after the donor event, after the slow recognition of the reputation portability problem, I have stepped back from the visible roles while continuing to do the grant-review work that uses the analytical training I have. The shift is not a retreat. It is calibration. The grant review is the place where my actual skills produce the most useful output and where the social pathologies of the donor environment are least operative. The committee work and the board service were the places where the pathologies were most operative and where my marginal contribution was least distinctive. Recognizing which form of engagement is which is, I think, the practical version of what this essay has been describing. The mature volunteer is not the one who shows up to everything. The mature volunteer is the one who has figured out which form of showing up is producing the value the organization actually needs.

I will say one more thing about community before closing, because community in the strict sense is sometimes not a program at all. The context takes a sentence. I had posted a direct comment on an internal social platform at work — the kind of comment that names a pattern plainly rather than diplomatically. A colleague I had never worked with saw it and messaged me through the work platform to say that he agreed with it and asked if I would be open to a conversation. His situation, it turned out, was adjacent to the one this series began with: his own role was on its way to being eliminated — and he was, I suspect, angry at the situation and reading some of that anger into what I had written. I said yes. We had a call later that same day. The exchange was brief, and I left it without being entirely sure what it had been. The honest answer is that it could have been either, and the ambiguity is part of what made the exchange what it was. He shared that he was working through some difficult professional terrain of his own. I told him to connect with me on LinkedIn and to ping me if he saw a role that fit, and that I would do the same. We have not been in regular contact since. The exchange was small. Calling it a defining moment of community would be more weight than the actual interaction can bear. What it was, I think, was a small data point about the fact that the comment had registered with at least one other person in a way that made him want to write back. That is a smaller thing than a community. It is also not nothing. The community I have, the durable kind, has come from the volunteer rooms and the long-running involvements and the friendships rebuilt across the period this essay covers, not from any single workplace exchange. The lesson, if there is one, is that community at its most useful is not the institutional structure. It is the collection of small reciprocal exchanges, conducted over time, in rooms where the participants are not being graded on their participation. The institutions can help. They can also, when their incentives drift, function as substitutes for the thing they are claiming to facilitate. The volunteer worth becoming is the one who can tell the difference.

Closing

The work that restored my faith in work was not the work that paid the most. It was the work that meant the most. That sentence is true, and I will let it stand, but I want to qualify what I think the sentence means now that I have spent enough time inside the work to see its shape clearly. It does not mean that the meaningful work is the noble work and that the paying work is the compromised work. It means that the meaningful work has its own compromises, its own embedded pathologies, its own dependence on the same money and the same social networks that produced the conditions the work is trying to address. Recognizing the embedding is part of the maturity. The naive volunteer thinks the nonprofit is the opposite of the corporation. The experienced volunteer knows the nonprofit is the corporation’s shadow, drawing on its donors, employing its retirees, deferring to its leadership, and doing, within those constraints, work that is still — on balance — worth doing.

The counterweight community work offers, then, is not what the language of social impact suggests it is. It is not a separate, purer world to retreat into. It is a different posture in the same world, oriented toward a different question. The corporate apparatus asks what can we extract from this person, this region, this resource. The community apparatus asks what does this person need, and what is in our hands to provide. Both questions are asked inside the same political economy. The second is the better question. Asking it more often, in more rooms, with more clarity about what the first question is doing in the background, is the project. The volunteer who understands this is not less committed. The volunteer who understands this is more useful, because the volunteer is no longer pretending that the act of showing up is enough. The act of showing up is the beginning. What one does with the noticing, after one has shown up enough times to notice, is the work.

← Essay 18: How ‘Professionalism’ Silences the Neurodivergent View Full Archive