Around 2:30 on a recent Thursday afternoon, Sally Meno left work on North Michigan Avenue, got into her car and drove a few miles north to Augustana Hospital, where she picked up 100 pounds of freshly laundered blankets.
She used two carts to lug the blankets down the hospital freight elevator. She put them in the trunk, drove to a Lincoln Park church and carried the blankets into the chapel.
Then she went back to her office, and stayed late that night to get her work done.
The blankets she had rushed out to get (”They had to be picked up by 3”) would cover 25 to 30 homeless men who seek shelter each night during the cold weather. The shelter rotates each night among the four churches.
Meno is part of what many say–they hope–is a growing trend.
She`s a young (27), well-educated professional with a demanding job–she could easily be described as, forgive the expression, a yuppie–who puts in many hours a week ”doing good.”
Instead of writing a check to a charity, which she could easily afford to do, she chooses instead to work in a shelter for the homeless, setting up mattresses, dishing out food, serving on the board that oversees the shelter and doing odd jobs such as picking up the blankets.
Activism among young people is nothing new. In the `60s they marched for civil rights, registered voters in the South, joined the Peace Corps and flocked to doing-good jobs in social services. But that was in an era of hot- blooded liberalism, an era known for its rebellion against materialism, long before the current climate of conservatism and certainly before the coining of the Y-word.
And there have always been the avid churchgoers and other social-minded people who have devoted their time to working in soup kitchens and for other worthy causes.
The difference today is that these are young people, like Meno, who relish their careers, their lifestyles and their material possessions. But it`s not enough.
They have a need to help others, whether it`s in a shelter or tutoring a child from a housing project. For some, that need is based in religion. For others, it`s an acute sensitivity to the poor and the homeless. And some are frustrated with the impersonal aspects of corporate life, no matter how big the paycheck.
A HUNGER TO HELP
”It`s a hunger to be doing something,” says Aleen Bayard, 27, associate editor of Crain`s Chicago Business. She volunteered to help with a Christmas party for female prisoners in Dwight last December and has been an activist ever since. ”We`ve gone through the radical `60s and the `me first` `70s, and maybe this is the middle of the two extremes. I don`t want to move into a commune, but I`m interested in more than my VCR.”
”I see this definitely as a trend. We have so many young professionals wanting to help,” says John Miller, the paid coordinator of Lincoln Park Community Shelter, a joint effort of four churches: St. Clement`s Catholic, St. Pauls United Church of Christ, Lincoln Park Presbyterian and Church of Our Saviour Episcopal.
”I think there`s the sense that whereas their work might be rewarding and fulfilling in many aspects, it`s not the whole thing. And it`s the recognition of the need; there are so many homeless. Once you`ve been exposed (to the need), it`s hard to walk away,” he said.
Miller, 32, reacted so strongly to his first exposure to the need of the homeless that he changed careers, leaving the corporate world for a job coordinating space, cots, blankets and meals.
”My first experience was in the West Town shelter (in Logan Square),”
he said. ”My reaction was anger–anger that this kind of situation existed, that there was this underclass. Then I thought, I`m part of this society. I have to do something.”
Not long after that, he caught a $36,000 processing error at the corporation he worked for. ”The money I saved them was the total annual operations budget of West Town. Priorities seemed askew. . . . I made a conscious decision: I decided that my future lay with this kind of work.”
Miller, who became the director of the West Town shelter and now directs the 2-year-old Lincoln Park shelter, is the first to acknowledge, however, that a career change is not for most people.
LITTLE PAY, BIG BURDEN
”Many volunteers are making far in excess of what they would get (in the social field),” Miller said. Most small grass-roots community organizations pay $10,000 to $21,000 annually (to full-time staff) and the responsibilities are enormous. You have to produce every day; you are keeping people off the street at night and seeing that they get a decent meal.”
Karen, 29, volunteers in an Uptown shelter and asked to remain anonymous because she is considering changing careers, like Miller, but is reluctant for her employer to know it. She is a private person, and is reticent about others knowing of her deep faith and how it affects her.
”I easily work 50 or 55 hours a week, and I take work home with me,”
she said. ”I like what I do. But there`s this nagging feeling inside of me that just doesn`t give up. I seem to have the resources and skills, and I keep thinking that I should be funneling them into projects that will help other people`s lives.
”I`m just really religious; I feel I`m in touch with God. I`m not a born-again Christian, but this is very personal and very deep. I`m very happy. I think it`s people who are happy who want to share their happiness. If you`re depressed, you can`t be your best self. There`s a reason for being this happy. If you`re given the skill to dance, you would do that. Shouldn`t I be doing something more?”
The tremendous visibility of the homeless and needy is certainly one of the reasons behind the desire to help in a hands-on manner, according to several people in the field. There are at least 25,000 homeless on the streets of Chicago, according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, a private organization.
In neighboring Du Page County, one of the wealthiest in the country, approximately 1,000 volunteers are participating in a shelter system that is a year old this month. ”It`s not the problem that it is in Cook County, but it`s a problem that`s certainly growing here,” says Barbara Brent, coordinator of the ecumenical program.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
”When you have to step over someone in the street, it makes an impression,” says Bernard Brown, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago. ”People want to find something that will make a difference. Traditional charities are worthy, but giving to a big, impersonal bureaucracy isn`t enough for some people.”
Mary Ellen Durbin, director of emergency services for Catholic Charities in the Joliet Diocese, agrees.
”We have these vast numbers of people in our own midst, suffering extreme poverty. We see them. They`re very visible. You don`t have to go to the Third World to build latrines,” she says. ”The need is right here. We`re getting calls all the time from young people who want to help, who are looking for specific things they can do.”
Aleen Bayard of Crain`s says she was a ”bleeding-heart liberal” in college, but once she entered the working world she began doubting whether she, as one person, could really make a difference.
”I love being a reporter, but I felt I wasn`t having that much influence. There was that feeling similar to, well, what`s one vote?
”Then last year I was at a women`s professional meeting, and a woman stood up and announced she was `going to prison` on Dec. 22; would anyone want to come? I went. . . . There were about 40 of us. We went on a bus to Dwight state prison. A lot of people on the bus were involved in a lot of programs
–it really turned me on. The other thing was, I had had all these impressions about what the women prisoners would be like. I thought they would be rude, hostile. They weren`t. We sang songs, sat and talked one on one. It was quite an experience.”
It was a beginning for Bayard. She`s now involved in several projects, most of them related to hunger; she was one of the organizers of a new fundraising group called Entertainment Action Team (EAT), which has raised more than $50,000. The money is given to such organizations as the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
FRINGE BENEFITS
It was also a beginning of a different sort for her. She met the man who would become her husband, Forrest Bayard, on that bus ride to Dwight. ”He was so wonderful with the inmates; he was hugging them, dancing with them and singing. I was really afraid at first. I was standing back and doing things with the cookie plates. He called to me and said, `Get over here, and be with these people.`
”Our next date was at the East Bank Club–we went running there.” She laughed, acknowledging the contrast. They were married in May and are expecting their first baby.
Romance isn`t the motivation to work in a shelter or throw a prison Christmas party, but it has its place. People volunteering in a shelter are likely to have more in common than those trying to strike up a conversation over the produce stand at Treasure Island or across the washing machines in the corner laundromat.
”They call us `the shelter couple,` but actually we had already met,”
says Sally Meno, who was Sally Burg until her marriage in October. ”We used to work in the same place and started going out then. He knew I was involved
(in a shelter) and he said he wanted to see what I was doing. Then he became involved, for his own reasons.”
Meno, a CPA, got into shelter work through an acquaintance, Karen Przypyszny, and in turn has gotten five or six others, all from her office, involved in the shelter.
”Lots of times, I don`t think people know what to do or how to go about doing it. . . . Day to day, you`re in a job and making plenty of money, but you see all around you people who don`t have much. My job takes a lot of time –45 or 50 hours a week, and it can go to 70 or 80 hours during busy times. But there has to be someplace else to put energies besides just work. I feel strongly about this.”
Working 45, 50 or 60 hours a week and then putting in extra hours as a volunteer can be a real juggling act, as Pastor Jeffrey Doane of Lincoln Park Presbyterian points out.
”It certainly isn`t a case of trying to fill up (the volunteers`) time. These people have extremely demanding jobs. Sometimes it`s a struggle for them to do both. They are using their professional skills to be of service to their neighbors, and I use that term broadly,” he said.
For the last four years, Stephen Lythcott and Vicki Marshall, both lawyers, have been among a group of about 15 young professionals who spend their Saturday mornings tutoring 3d graders from a housing project. The two are black, and race is a factor in their dedication.
”I think black professionals can provide important role models for these young kids,” Lythcott said.
But although the numbers of upwardly mobile, affluent young people who are following time-consuming dictates of conscience may constitute a trend, even to the point of becoming an ”in” thing to do, it`s not likely to be an overwhelming trend.
Prof. Marty talks of being on an airplane flight and getting into a conversation with the attendant. ”She said the only things to do besides her job were to sleep and work out, so she had gotten another job working in a boutique.”
Sleeping and exercising are two things that these young, career-oriented activists don`t have much leftover time for.
”Sometimes I feel as if I have two jobs,” Bayard said. ”But when I go to bed at night, I feel that I`ve really done something.” —
