Yellowfire Press

by Ivan Scheier

@ -- permission for use-with-acknowledgment

CHAPTER THREE

Finding the Gladly Give
(And Understanding It Once Found) @

"People Approach attitudes are at work anytime an imaginative leader of volunteers creates a needed job around the motivations and abilities a person or group brings to a situation, or anytime a sensitive interviewer of prospective volunteers listens to their hopes, concerns, interests, rather than telling them what they ought to want to do. These relatively unselfconscious applications of People Approach are warmly applauded here. But the main agenda has been development of self-conscious, systematic methods and strategies derived rigorously from the People Approach Principle. . . " MINI-MAX" and "Need-Overlap Analysis in Helping (NOAH)"

For contributions to Handbook contents, thanks to Jerry Bagg, Judy Wilkinson, and Sue Dryovage for internal review; to Miriam Gingras for manuscript preparation and editing.

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"Bless my sour," said Mrs. McBee, "because doing something you can do very well, for somebody who needs it being done, not only pleases him, it pleases you."

"Give something you can do very well to somebody who needs it. And see what a pleasure it’ll be."

From Beginning with Mrs. McBee. A story by Cecil Maiden, with drawings by Hilary Knight. © 1960 by Cecil Maiden.

Introduction
Yes, that’s a children’s book and yes it was written more than 20 years ago, and yes again, it expresses perfectly the theme of this chapter: a search for that happy state in which giving is as satisfying as receiving. For each individual, the vehicle would be what we will call a "Glad Give," a fairly specific activity

which a person
Likes to do, enjoys doing
Can do pretty well
and which
Might be of help to other people.

Note that a "Glad Give" is the direct counterpart in an individual of the overall People Approach principle or process as stated in Chapter One.

Instances of Glad Gives occur when, for example, people enjoy comparison shopping, vegetable gardening, cooking, writing, etc., are competent in these skills, and can be connected to other people who will benefit from these abilities.

Glad Give (1) is simply a shorthand for describing a concept, a convenient way of talking about a person’s immediate, specific potential for helping other people – now. A Glad Give is not a speculation on how or why a person got to the point of enjoying an activity and doing it pretty well (the same Glad Give might have different origins in different people). The Glad Give simply says the person is there now, "ready to go" at the point where helping might be connected to the activity described. In sum, Glad Gives are concrete versus abstract, specific versus generalized, and contemporary versus historical ways of organizing the identification of human-helping motivation. They define quite precisely what People Approach should try to get close to in a person as the departure point in the adventure of helping.

To repeat, Glad Gives are a basic category identifying what we begin with and work with in People Approach.

Glad Gives are real enough in their potential for powering help. We must only guard against any unconscious tendency to think of them as if they had physical existence and location, like an automobile battery, or a special set of wrinkles in the brain.

Components in Glad Give and Relationships Between Them
All Glad Gives are divided in three parts:

1. A desire, to perform an activity or service,
2. The ability to do so, and
3. The clear potential for linking this enjoyable competency to the needs of others.

People Approach is based on the faith that these three parts frequently go together, that what a person likes to do is often something s/he also does pretty well, and is also helpful to some other person or persons. Let’s take each of the components separately and then trace some of their main inter-relations.

Desire
I wish, wish, WISH we volunteer people would stop talking about skills. People may not enjoy applying some of the skills because of burnout or for other reasons.

However skillful a person may be, s/he is likely to be a poor risk as a volunteer if s/he doesn’t want to perform the activity. Therefore, a crucial thrust in People Approach is first to discover what people are already motivated to do. To be sure in identifying Glad Gives we are handicapped by that old Puritan reluctance to admit that anything we enjoy could possible be of use to someone else. Thus, this part of Glad Give identification severely tests the skills and sensitivities of the leader of volunteers. S/he must be able to reassure people that it’s okay to enjoy helping others, then help them move beyond vague gropings to a clear articulated statement of their Glad Gives.

Competency
"Can do pretty well" is a self-assessment for each glad giver. Anyone can be wrong about this, and widely varying standards can be applied. Therefore, how sure can we be that we are identifying genuine competencies?

One mitigation of this validation/accuracy problem is the broad latitude permitted in defining Glad Give competency. You don’t have to be the world’s leading expert, just reasonably good at it. This very big bullseye is vary easy to hit.

A second safety factor is that Glad Gives are usually identified in situations where a person can expect to be taken up on most of all of his/her offers. This prospect of validation encourages reality testing in self-assessment and discourages bluffing. The bluffer will be found out soon enough, and even sooner than that when Glad Give exchanges are in terms of immediate transactions such as: "I have information now on ___(subject)___ and would be glad to share it."

It’s still partly a case of "let the buyer (needer) beware." As long as this is clearly understood, I don’t believe the risks warrant all the muss and fuss of monitoring quality of services given. Indeed, my rather extensive experience strongly suggests that the quality of Glad Gives is generally high.

Another question concerning the competency factor: is it equally important in all Glad Gives? At one extreme, wanting to teach people about energy conservation isn’t enough; you must also know something about this subject. But how much technique or training does the glad give hugger need? Speaking for myself, as long as she doesn’t outright crush me, the spirit of the thing counts most. We should think more about kinds of Glad Gives in which motivation means more than ability, in which where there’s a will, there’s a way. We’d probably find a good number of these in the area of personal or emotional support.

The Relationship Between Desire and Competency
Both desire and capability must be adequately present, if a Glad Give is ever to help another person. I may love to talk about solar power, but if I don’t know what I’m talking about, it won’t be of much use to anyone, and will probably do some damage. Conversely, my technical proficiency in teaching tennis does little good if I hate the game. The latter instant is the volunteer who doesn’t show up for work; the former case is the volunteer who shows up for work and you wish s/he hadn’t.

But ordinarily, desire and competency do go together. We enjoy doing what we’re good at because we get recognition for it, have pride in it. At the same time we tend to become skilled in what we enjoy, because we’re motivated to learn more about it, and practice it a long.

The Relation Between Desire + Competency and the Needs of Others: Connectability to Need
It’s one thing to assert that Like to Do/Can Do’s are potentially connectable to Need. It’s quite another thing to show this actually happens, and that the linkages, once made, will benefit the receiver of the Glad Give. Why should we be so lucky?

There’s significant indication that we are so lucky. I’ve facilitated processes for offering Glad Gives with over 5,000 people on about 200 occasions over the past 8-9 years. Given a reasonable amount of time for the process (an hour or more) about 80-90% of the Glad Gives in a room will get linked to needs of other people. One recent application reported 91% of Glad Gives gladly used within a family group, including in-laws. There’s no reason to quibble about the exact percentage: the only claim is that the proportion is substantial, impressive.

Try it for yourself. Think of 8-10 Glad Gives of yours, then give the list to a few friends, acquaintances, or colleagues, and ask if there is anything they can use there. If nobody wants any of the Glad Gives on your list, I’m tempted to offer to eat said list.

Or look at this fairly random assortment of Glad Gives people actually have offered:

• Wash dishes
• Do macramé
• Review writing of style
• Train volunteers
• Community fundraising
• Company for other joggers
• Calligraphy’
• Indoor plants (green thumb)
• Split wood
• Dramatic readings aloud
• Gourmet cooking
  

Is it conceivable there is nothing in this short list you can possibly explore using for yourself, your program, or your organization? Honestly?

My own related experience is in the apparent impossibility of finding any example to illustrate that not everything people like to do and can do is of use to other people. Here are two recollections of recent workshop dialogue:

Me: What about someone who likes to translate Sanskrit into English and can do that pretty well? Anybody need that one? (snicker) What about someone who likes to translate Sanskrit into English and can do that pretty well? Anybody need that one? (snicker)

Women in Audience: My son does that as a volunteer (Gasp. . . and moving right along to next subject . . . without daring to ask . . .): My son does that as a volunteer (Gasp. . . and moving right along to next subject . . . without daring to ask . . .)

Me: I love to watch sunsets and feel I am an excellent sunset-watcher. But that’s really not going to do you much good. See what I meant? (hearty laugh) I love to watch sunsets and feel I am an excellent sunset-watcher. But that’s really not going to do you much good. See what I meant? (hearty laugh)

Voice from the Back of the Room: Why don’t you describe a sunset to some of the blind people I work with? Why don’t you describe a sunset to some of the blind people I work with?

Smarty is still looking for examples of enjoyed abilities that can’t conceivably be helpful to some other persons. Anyone else care to try?

((( And is anyone still unconvinced? If so, please skip ahead to Chapter Four which lists 50 Glad Give in the area of volunteer leadership, developed at a single meeting of a volunteer coordinator’s group.)))

Amidst all this optimism, several cautions should be mentioned. First, though people who have Glad Gives usually want to share them, this is not automatically so. I may prefer to keep the sunset-watching experience to myself and that’s certainly my privilege, to be fully respected. I might enjoy writing and do it pretty well, but this doesn’t necessarily mean I’m ready to write your overdue annual report RIGHT NOW!

Occasionally, I’ve observed people who were ready to do things which raised some eyebrows. Perhaps this was in jest, and the point might be too obvious to mention. Nevertheless, even if some people in some groups happen to enjoy certain activities, and do them well, you should still:

• Avoid the illegal and/or dangerous; for example, speeding in an automobile except in cases where it’s directly needed in an emergency.
• Reject the mean and ill-intentioned, such as having fun kicking the dog.
• Be cautious about the esoteric. It’s always possible your love of ancient Mesopotamian poetry will be of use to someone else, but a Glad Give for fixing cars is much more easily marketable.

Finally, a Glad Give should be fairly specific. "I like everybody to be happy" is a bit too general to link effectively with needs here and now; so in all probability is "I like to rap with kids and do it pretty well." Which kids? About what? On the other hand, "I like to rap with blue-eyed, red-haired kids, ages eleven and half to twelve" is ordinarily too narrow to be matched. A better compromise between precise and applicable might be "I like to rap with teenage girls who are having problems at home." But the best level of specificity will always be a matter of judgment, dependent on the particular helping situation. Incidentally, hobbies tend not to be as specific as Glad Gives. Also, hobbyists aren’t always willing or able to help other people via their hobby. For these reasons, hobbies and Glad Gives are not necessarily synonymous. Many Glad Gives are not hobbies, and some hobbies are not Glad Gives.

Variation, Gradations, Qualification
Let’s begin by recalling the argument of the preceding section: the three components in a Glad Give – desire, capability, and connectability to need – go together often enough so that we can consider the Glad Give as a single concept.

So considered, certain distinctions, qualifications, and variations in Glad Gives will add flexibility and power to their application, and also complexity. (practitioners can best decide for themselves the appropriate tradeoffs between flexibility and complexity.)

Range
Glad Gives come in several delicious flavors. You can offer;
Glad Gives come in several delicious flavors. You can offer;

1. Information, Ideas, Knowledge. (I know a lot about local history and would be glad to share that with others.) The information can be self-standing, as in the above example, or it can be information leading to. (I know nothing about local history but can give you the phone number of someone who does.)

Information, especially information leading to, seems generally one of the easiest media for Glad Giving, with things or materials often a close second.

2. Skills. (I’m a good public speaker and would enjoy teaching this form of communication to one or two other people.)
3. Personal Support. (I’m a good listener and like to do this on a 1-to-1 basis.)
4. Things, Materials, Facilities. (I’d be happy to share extra copies of our successful volunteer recruitment poster.)

All four kinds of Glad Gives, and especially the first two, cast the prospective volunteer in the role of a resource person or teacher. Ironically, our approach to volunteers often emphasizes how much they have to learn from us via training supervision, etc.

Immediacy
Glad Gives vary widely in the immediacy with which they can be delivered. A colleague recently told me he was still giving golf lessons to another person on the basis of a Glad Give – need exchange contract 18 months ago. (He was laughing, more or less, as he said this.) At the other extreme I recently encountered a Glad Give smiler and received same immediately. Similarly, Glad Gives of useful current information can often be delivered quickly and completely. Sometimes, materials can be exchanged on the spot, too.

Deliberately orienting Glad Give to more immediately deliverable ones helps to introduce the concept persuasively.

Gradations
Until recently, Glad Gives were usually described in an over-simplified on-off way. Implication, you were either glad to do something or you were not; nothing in between. But, rarely if ever are people totally glad or unglad about anything. It’s therefore realistic – and will prove useful – to recognize degrees of gladness. The discrimination should not be too cumbersome for people in their self-assessment; for example, a hundred-point scale. A few relatively simple verbal tags will usually suffice; for example, enthusiastic/willing/unwilling. Or it might be enough to ask people simple to distinguish between glad and very glad give, with everything else implicitly in the "not glad enough" category.

Whenever you might be tempted to get numerical, I suggest that the verbal counterparts of the numbers also be there. Here is a sample scale, at what is probably near the practical ceiling of complexity for self-assessment.

5 (or +2) = Very glad, Enthusiastic

4 (or +1) = Glad, willing

3 (or )) = In-Between, indifferent

2 (or –1) = Moderately unwilling

1 (or –2) = Strongly averse, hate it.

With gradations in gladness, we’re better equipped to deal with what some might call the real challenge of voluntary action: getting the less attractive tasks accomplished. Once we’ve creamed off the gladdest of the Glad Gives, there will always remain important jobs nobody (in sight) is lining up to volunteer for: the envelope licking, the potato-peeling, the cleaning-up-after, etc. Once we are out of Eden, with the Glad Gives gone away, we can still try for lower degrees of willingness, to fill task-need which have trouble attracting top enthusiasm.

Variations Over Time
Another over-simplification is based on a lazy assumption that knows better. It sees enthusiasm for a task, or the lack of it, as a fixed characteristic of an individual, never changing over time or circumstance. It’s as if feeling like cooking tonight means you feel exactly the same way every night. Realistically, at different times people are more or less "in the mood" for an activity, such as washing the car, reorganizing the files, catching up on reading, writing letters, and – so they tell me – vacuuming. These fluctuations sometimes seem quite random, or at any rate not obviously linked to changes in the surrounding situation. On other occasions, the relation to setting or situation is clear enough. Thus, intensive prolonged repetition of an activity will often bore or burnout a person so that motivation for the activity drops to zero or below. But with sufficient time off, the person’s motivation for this work will often be renewed and refreshed. Changes in surrounding conditions over time will also affect enthusiasm for a task; the next section on setting and conditions goes into this more.

For now, both random and situational fluctuations in motivation for a task can be dealt with via the concept of:

One-In-A-While’s
or, said otherwise,
Every-Now-And-Then’s.

At a practically acceptable level of approximation, this concept describes activities a person enjoys occasionally but not all the time or even most of the time, as would be implied in a Glad Give. Washing windows might not be something you’re wild about doing every day (Glad Give). But Once-In-A-While? When you’re in the mood? Sure.

Recently, we analyzed the work of our household into approximately 120 tasks. Each of the three residents then rated each of the 120 tasks as either a Glad Give for them or an Every-Now-And-Then. To match the 120 tasks, the three of us produced a total of approximately 30 Glad Gives, plus an additional 80 Every-Now-And-Thens. Approximately 60 tasks not covered at all by Glad gives were possible for us to get accomplished via these Every-Now-And-Then’s. (For household tasks in the bathroom area, we were forced to come up with a new designation: "Every Other Century.")

Clearly, capitalizing on peaks in time-varying motivation can uncover large new reservoirs of useable work offering (more than if we stick to the assumed constant highs of Glad Gives). This is People Approach in the sense of allowing people to serve at their "best times."

But there are special challenges in the use of Once-In-A-Whiles. In come cases, people won’t be able to predict when the "up" times in their motivational cycle will be. In other cases, they’ll have some solid hints; for example: "Give me at least two weeks off between assignments of this type." Overall, this means we must learn to be more flexible in our scheduling of volunteer work and, whenever possible, allow the volunteer to schedule herself-himself—almost unheard of in some circles.

I am recommending that volunteer leadership use the total available scope of scheduling flexibility (which will take much skill and in some cases considerable awareness-raising as well). I am not claiming this scope will always be large. If you’re planning a recognition banquet for your volunteers, and you want a popular speaker, and you haven’t got that speaker, and the banquet is only two weeks away, your program chairperson cannot move on this matter whenever she happens to feel like it. But even in this situation, she might have one or two day’s grace over which to choose a more-in-the-mood occasion for contacting a speaker.

Setting, Conditions
Your might be very willing and able to share your program evaluation experience with one or two other people at a convenient date and time. But if you’re suddenly told to expect 75 students with slide rules at midnight Tuesday, the quality of gladness is probably somewhat strained, and likely to reverse towards aversion.

Most people’s willingness to offer some service or thing is implicitly contingent on certain reasonable conditions of work being met. Usually, these conditions include; the number of people receiving the service (not too many); the giver’s convenience in date and time of delivery; and limitations on overuse ("I never promised you seven days a week!") It’s probably best to have some general orientation on this point for potential glad givers. Moreover, if they’re asked to register their Glad Gives more formally in writing, conditions for the continuation of gladness should be covered in the forms used. Otherwise, these kinds of considerations should definitely be part of face-to-face negotiations between prospective givers and the needful.

The Organizational Variation
Glad Gives for individuals are directly paralleled by "willing shared resources" for groups, agencies, or organizations; for example, use of a meeting room, time on a computer, assistance in business management, sharing of a postage meter, etc. Though this handbook focuses on individuals, People Approach for organizations is touched on in Chapter Four.

 

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1) Sometimes also called "glad gifts" or "skillwills." Please suit yourself on which word you use, or some other word, or none at all.