Editorial | Melissa and voluntarism

The Gleaner notes, and supports, Damion Crawford’s renewed proposal that Jamaica establishes a department of voluntarism to register – and align skills to needs – people who want to volunteer their services to Jamaica.

When Mr Crawford, then a senator, previously broached the idea three years ago, it was against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that shuttered schools and isolated students, which he felt demanded education and psychological interventions that were beyond the capacity of the State to deliver on its own.

In his original construct, the department would be part of the education ministry and would have the job of “encouraging, vetting, coordinating and deploying well-thinking Jamaicans’’ who wanted to volunteer for mentorship and other services in schools.

Now the parliamentarian for North Western St Catherine, Mr Crawford has revived the proposal in the context of the widescale destruction caused by Hurricane Melissa in western Jamaica, and what he said was the willingness of many people to donate not only money or goods, but their “time, skills and effort” to the recovery exercise.

“There are channels to donate supplies, but no structure for coordinating human effort,” Mr Crawford wrote in a letter to this newspaper.

The new department of voluntarism would be centred in the Office of the Prime Minister as (although Mr Crawford didn’t explicitly say so) a permanent agency.

That, too, The Gleaner supports.

DATABASE IDEA REVIVED

Though revived by Damion Crawford in 2022, the idea of a database of some kind, to provide a basis for at least measuring the true state of volunteerism in Jamaica, is not new. Indeed, it was recommended nearly three decades ago by the social anthropologist and public academic, Don Robotham, in his 1998 GraceKennedy Lecture on voluntarism.

There was a strong perception, Professor Robotham argued then, that “a spirit of selfishness and indiscipline” in the society had created a hostile environment for volunteerism, which didn’t prevail in pre- and early post-independence Jamaica when volunteerism thrived.

He added: “We have no independent way of knowing what the true state of affairs is in this regard. There is certainly no register of volunteers nor any database of voluntary associations, which one could use as a reliable baseline against which to compare the present situation. We have no quantitative data of any degree of reliability in this field.

“This is clearly an area in which we can start now to rectify, if we wish to strengthen volunteerism in Jamaican society. We can agree, here and now, to begin to establish and maintain a database of volunteers and voluntary associations on a much more complete basis than any existing record, so we can keep track of this most important barometer of our society’s health and, if you like, of our social capital.”

Unfortunately, Professor Robotham’s suggestion was not acted upon – at least not with the depth and robustness he recommended.

POTENTIAL ADVANTAGE

Not only does Jamaica not have a clear sense of true state volunteerism, nor is the country in a position, in times of crises, to draw on an already in-place system to identify and allocate critical volunteer human resources.

However, it is this newspaper’s view that volunteerism and civic-mindedness are neither dead nor in terminal decline. Rather, despite the seeming flourishing of individualism and weakened national cohesive spirit, volunteerism and civic action are not dead or in terminal decline. They have, and are, evolving in new ways: a multiplicity of small organisations, concentrated on narrow fronts, more professional and managerialist in their organisation and operation. The new ways have, at least for now, displaced political engagement.

However, the deeper spirit of societal caring, and the wish to do good, clearly emerges in situations such as Jamaica now finds itself. The question is how to channel that spirit and the resources that come with it.

Mr Crawford’s suggestion seems to be as good as any.

His idea for a department of voluntarism has another potential advantage. It can provide a launch pad for promoting the renewal and a deepening of the ethos of volunteerism in Jamaica, and in helping to advance what in 1998 Professor Robotham called the “manufacturing of volunteerism”. That, in part, includes public and private sector partnerships in building community organisations in communities and schools, and in creating public interest groups.

Perhaps it is time to revisit Professor Robotham’s ideas of 1998, test their applicability to today’s circumstances, and determine if, and how, they can be built on.

Indeed, this is a crisis that Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness shouldn’t, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, allow to waste. He has to lead the rebuilding of Jamaica from its most destructive and economy-sapping hurricane ever. That will be hard.

The prime minister also has an opportunity to rally Jamaica around a cohesive national ethos, which can be the foundation of a new type of volunteerism and a deep sense of community. That will require extraordinary leadership.