Doing GOOD Together
Volunteers have become an essential cog in how Rappahannock works. Can the machine keep running?
It’s been said that Rappahannock runs on volunteers’ fumes.
There’s something to that. Starting with the more than 200 men and women on the rosters of the fire and rescue companies to the hundreds of others who tutor local students or stock shelves and unload trucks at the Food Pantry, volunteers have become an essential cog of the community.
In fact, you could make the case that they play an outsized role here, a place where the “young retired” have become a core demographic. Still largely fit and active, and without job and family demands on their time, they’ve become a valued asset in a county where keeping government expenses and local taxes low has long been a top priority.
That’s fueled the notion that Rappahannock has a distinctly high level of volunteerism. But does it? Or is that mainly the perception of those immersed in nonprofit programs or fundraising activities? Also, how much of an impact do volunteers have on the local economy? And, how much are they helping those truly in need?
Which leads to another set of challenges facing anyone hoping to do good works here. How do you reach out to people too proud to seek help? Then, how do you gain their trust to coax them to begin talking about the crosses they’d rather bear alone? And how, in a community with an economic disparity that can widen a cultural divide, do you offer charity that doesn’t feel patronizing?
“Distrust of help is in the DNA here,” said Kathryn Treanor, a long-active volunteer who’s now Member Services Coordinator for Rapp at Home, the nonprofit dedicated to helping older county residents stay in their homes. “So much of the success of nonprofits is about garnering trust. It’s about having conversations. And then more conversations. You need to help people become more comfortable with a different way of helping.”
“This is what we do”
Rappahannock has long been a place where neighbors looked out for neighbors, whether it was to give a hand in picking apples or rounding up runaway cows or plowing snow blocking a long gravel driveway. Jennings “Jenks” Hobson, retired pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church, tells the story of a woman from a family relatively new to the community, who was killed in a traffic accident. “They hadn’t been here that long, but all these people started showing up at the home with food,” he said. “This is what we do.”
Amissville native and real estate agent Jan Makela shares those memories of times when people here instinctively came together to help neighbors get through troubles.
“When there’s been a need in this community, people have stuck together. When a home burned or maybe a family lost the breadwinner, everybody would rally around and help them,” she said. “I’ve watched that play out over and over and over in my lifetime.”
At the same time, neighborhood churches have, for many years, been the closest thing to local social services agencies, helping members of their congregations deal with financial, health or personal crises. “The churches here have been a key place for that, for building a sense of community, where you take care of the sick and people in need,” said Hobson. “If a church is doing its job, it’s always reaching out into the community.”
Rev. Jon Heddleston, longtime pastor of the Reynolds Memorial Baptist Church in Sperryville, agrees. “Churches have been the model for every social service that’s come along,” he said. “They fly under the radar in a thousand different ways. People in churches do all kinds of things for others in the community that people don’t realize.”
Churches have also played a pivotal role in one of Rappahannock’s first and more critical commitments to volunteerism — the staffing of its seven fire and rescue companies. Over the years, many of their members have been recruited within church congregations. “There’s always been this connection between the churches and the local fire and rescue departments,” Makela noted. “There’s a lot of overlap. People not affiliated with churches didn’t tend to join the fire departments.”
The value of volunteers?
About 20 years ago, when she was volunteer coordinator for the Rappahannock County
School District, Makela surveyed groups in Rappahannock to try to get a handle on the financial benefits of having an active volunteer community here. She determined that county residents contributed, without pay, a total of more than 1,000 hours of their time every month.
While acknowledging that realistically, the actual figure was higher, Makela used Virginia’s minimum wage at the time — $5.15 an hour — to place a value on the volunteers’ service. That resulted in a lowball estimate of more than $60,000 a year, which would be equivalent to about $90,000 in 2019.
Today, that figure would no doubt be appreciably higher, given that back then local nonprofits such as the Food Pantry, the Benevolent Fund and Rapp U didn’t exist, and Headwaters, the foundation that supports the school district with many volunteers, was still in its early days.
But it remains difficult to nail down the overall impact of volunteers in the county. For starters, you’re talking about a very fluid “workforce,” with people continually plugging in or dropping out. It’s also challenging to pinpoint how many Rappahannock residents are actually volunteering because a lot are involved with more than one organization.
Additionally, while the commitment of fire and rescue volunteers has clearly saved the county a lot of money over the years, it’s hard to estimate how much, since county officials have yet to take a close look at the budget implications of shifting to an emergency services system with at least some paid workers. More broadly, the financial value of charitable work can be tough to assess because it tends to involve a wide range of “jobs” — from responding to emergency calls to spending months planning a fundraiser to driving folks to medical appointments to helping park cars at an event.
There are, however, some data that reflect the notable influence of volunteers and nonprofits here. According to the website Tax Exempt World, Rappahannock is currently home to 98 nonprofits, which equates to one for every 75 residents. That ranks fifth in nonprofits per capita among Virginia’s 95 counties. Here’s another indication of the sizeable footprint of nonprofits here: With the addition of a handful of new ones in the past decade, the total annual revenue of the seven fire and rescue companies and the 10 largest local charitable organizations now comes close to $3.5 million, based on data compiled from Tax Exempt World.
A different kind of nonprofit
The first signs of a shift in the means of local charity came in the late 1950s, with the launch of a chapter of Lions Club International. The Rappahannock Lions was then, and remains today, a grassroots organization, but with a broader community service approach, rather than responding to the pressing personal needs of church members. It focused on helping groups in the county, such as 4-H clubs and sports teams, or Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Eagle Scouts. In time, it also began offering free vision and hearing tests for Rappahannock children, and providing eyeglasses for kids who need them.
More foreshadowing of a changing culture came in the 1970s after Sursum Corda, a small private pre-school opened in the basement of a building in the Town of Washington. It would evolve into the Child Care and Learning Center (CCLC) and expand its mission to include daycare and after-school and summer programs for kids between three weeks and 12 years old. It also would become a model and training ground for a different kind of volunteerism, one shaped by a nonprofit organization committed to a single purpose — in this case, childhood education.
“The needs of the community began to change and a group of people began to surface who came here from places where they had been volunteers and involved with nonprofits,” said retired philanthropic consultant Bill Dietel. Dietel’s wife Linda was a longtime member of the CCLC board and chaired the fundraising campaign that enabled it, in 1986, to build its current home on Route 211 just west of Washington. “There was a critical number of people with experience with nonprofits and an understanding of what they could do. They had an optimism about what they could accomplish. And the people who were involved in that have popped up in volunteer organizations for the next 40 years all over the county.”
That includes the formation of Headwaters in 1997, a nonprofit foundation that sprouted from the humble beginnings of what was known as the First Thursday Education Support Group. Started by a handful of public school parents, its goal was not only to stimulate more community engagement with the school district, but also to find
ways to help teachers by integrating volunteers into the learning process. Now, more than 150 volunteers typically participate, for instance, as students’ mentors in Headwaters’s Starfish program or as part of its After-School Enrichment or Farm-to-Table programs.
Headwaters is a prime example of how volunteerism and the role of nonprofits in Rappahannock has evolved into a more structured and sharply focused model taking on complicated issues, such as childhood illiteracy.
“Headwaters has a whole panoply of programs that must be managed,” said Jim Blubaugh, who has been an active volunteer with the Rappahannock Lions Club and other organizations during his 40 years in the county. “They’re dealing with things like how they address the institutional problem of illiteracy at the second-grade level. It’s not like the Lions saying, ‘Okay, we’ll help the Boy Scouts.’
“So, everything has changed a lot,” he added. “And, over a period of time, various functions that most people would have considered something taxes would pay for, have, little by little, been covered by nonprofits.”
But the truth is that growth of Headwaters and the nonprofits that have taken root during the past 20 years has been tied to the infusion of wealth that’s come with the migration of retirees. “Most importantly, for a rural community like this, there’s money here,” said Bill Dietel. “Big money.”
Filling the pipeline?
For many in the community, becoming a volunteer is a way to weave themselves into the fabric of the place they’ve chosen to live out their lives. “One of the things I tell people who move out here and wonder if they’re going to have trouble meeting people is to volunteer,” said Blubaugh, “All you have to do is volunteer, and all of a sudden you’ll find yourself in a network of dozens of people.”
As CCLC’s executive director for 25 years, Rose Ann Smythe spent a lot of time working with volunteers. She appreciates why they do it. “As people age, they’re still looking for a sense of worth,” she said. “They don’t want to spend a lot of time in meetings listening to people talk. They want to do.”
But there’s the “fumes” part of the volunteer experience. Burnout isn’t unusual, particularly for those who offer their services for multiple causes. And, as with so many matters in Rappahannock these days, time is taking its toll. Volunteers simply age out. It might be drivers who no longer trust themselves to transport people to medical appointments in another county. Or aging firefighters anxious at the prospect of not being able to carry someone out of a burning building.
It’s a process that can play out in prosaic ways. Take the example of the Lions Club’s big yellow and white tent. It’s a familiar site at events in the county; last year it was set up a dozen times, most often for nonprofit fundraisers, at no cost. But erecting the tent is no small job.
“It’s heavy,” Blubaugh said. “It takes six guys to put up that tent. And I only have 12 guys in the Lions who are strong enough to do it. And one just had openheart surgery. He’s 82.”
Or consider that the average age of the crewmembers who have done the heavy lifting in setting up the “Taste of Rappahannock” fundraiser is about 70. That includes two men who did a lot of climbing up and down ladders. Their combined age is a bit shy of 150.
It’s the sobering reality of a slice of the community that doesn’t just provide emergency care, but also free rides, home repairs for elderly widows, and eye exams and scholarships for kids. The question that hangs over all of it: How do you sustain the volunteer pipeline?
“Think what this community would look like if there weren’t volunteer services,” said Dot Lessard, who was on the Headwaters board for six years. “Think of what goes away without volunteers. Think of what goes away if you don’t have what the Lions Club does or what Headwaters does.
“I don’t know that everyone takes a moment to think about that.”
“Think of what goes away without volunteers. Think of what goes away if you don’t have what the Lions Club does or what Headwaters does." DOT LESSARD, former board member, Headwaters