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“Today, many get paid to do the work that volunteers once did. We’re on a recognition treadmill that says the only job of value is the one that you get paid for. And who’s paying the price for all this craziness? Families.”

         -writer Karen Vachon

As a mostly stay at home mom, who mixes in some business to keep myself sane, the quote above, from my Mom’s Page-a-Day calendar really struck a nerve. How do we value things in the world these days? There’s a new concern with “Return on Investment” and I am seeing its acronym ROI everywhere. Chris Brogan has a paradigm for this, that I’m using frequently these days, which is “Calories in vs. Calories out”- Is the energy you have to put into a project worth the return? How do you measure ROI in areas where you can’t quantify results?

This whole concept of finding value in what you choose to do came up again in a conversation I had with Andrea from the Just One More Book podcast. When you are doing a project based on your passions, how does money factor in, if at all? This got me thinking about money, finances and the whole concept of value through a slightly new prism.

The Way Moms Work:
Does volunteering count as added value?

When James was little, I joined the volunteer group at the hospital, called the Junior Board. I was the youngest person, by at least a decade, involved in the organization. We joked that I was the only member with working ovaries. The Junior Board ladies, in their cherry pink smocks, run the gift shops and coffee shops, help at the information desk, in the surgical waiting room for families, and other jobs that soften the edges of a large institution. Almost all the members were old enough to be my mom or grandmother. But this was serious business as well. These women raised hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for the hospital, and gave out grants to special projects, ranging from buying new equipment to improve breast cancer screening, to funding the new cancer center’s research library, to giving the seed money to start the daycare facility on the hospital’s premises. These are women with both a service and a financial interest in the community, and they are smart cookies indeed.

I often felt a bit out of place, being the baby of the group, but these ladies taught me so much about who I wanted to be when I “grew up.” The Junior Board women taught me that there is tremendous value in doing small things for others, especially when visitors are under stress. A kind word, taking the time to wrap a gift well, or offering a kind smile and understanding when needed can make all the difference. They embody much of what I think Mother Teresa meant when she said: “We can’t all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” That sums up a lot of what the Junior Board is about at its core.

The work may be unpaid, but the benefits to the patients and visitors to the hospital is tremendous. The direct benefit, or to be crass about it, the ROI, to the volunteers is the tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction that comes from helping someone else in need. I think we all need that feeling of a job well done, often much more than the paycheck. And there are times when a paycheck is often besides the point- it can make something done out of love and passion seem like something that can be bought and sold. Caring is not a commodity.

The volunteers at the hospital are largely people who have “time on their hands”- a rare commodity with younger people. Moms with kids in high school or college, empty-nesters, retirees, and others that are giving back with their time. There are ladies that are considered “society ladies” mixed in with accountants, teachers, nurses, moms, and more. But now, as the introductory quote stated, much of what was volunteer work is being paid, and those volunteering to make the world a better place are seen as saps or suckers, or “people with nothing better to do” by a large portion of society.

Even the stay at home moms I know feel pressured about the value of their time. They can volunteer at school, but if they find themselves at home with extra time on their hands, they feel a pressure to find a job or to do “something” to contribute to the “greater good”. Any mom who has been at home for any length of time knows there is this perception we are all sitting around, eating bonbons and watching soap operas on TV, like some Leave It To Beaver rerun. Why can’t we have the perfectly-tended house and meet our man with martini in hand, wearing pearls and heels? (We can leave this debate for another day, but let’s start with the fact that The Beaver and Wally walked to school in their neighborhood every day, played unsupervised, and would eat whatever was served, with no complaints, and certainly did not have a pre-planned activity every day after school.)

Part of the great dichotomy in feminism is that women wanted the option to have equality in the workplace, to increase their options of what they chose to do. This has become a point of contention in society, where we now assume that women should work, and often must work to contribute to their family- in a way that contributes a paycheck. Times have changed since the ’70’s. Society doesn’t seem to place the same value it once did on raising a family. This is work that can be outsourced to day cares, nannies, etc. Right?

It doesn’t take many families long to start calculating their own ROI of Moms in the workplace. We have the paycheck on one side, counterbalanced by costs of daycare/after school care/nannies/babysitting/private schools with full day kindergarten, etc. This is the basic cost of doing business. Then you have to multiply this by the number of children you want to have, and you can see that each child multiplies the income needed just to support the outsourcing of the stay at home mom’s first job- making sure the children are supervised. Then we have to look at factors of maintaining these little people- driving to and from activities and their costs, keeping them fed and clothed, and all the monotonous chores this involves, many of which aren’t easily outsourced. (While we have occasionally slipped up and had a kid’s t-shirt come back from the dry cleaners, pressed and on a hanger, it’s not worth the expense, trust me.) Let’s not even get to the stress involved of juggling so many roles, and constantly questioning whether you’re doing the right thing.

Yet, the first thing that happens in times of financial stress is that women are expected to go get a paying gig to contribute to the family war chest. We expect moms on welfare to get training and to make a living rather than expect society to support them and their families. And I agree we need to educate and empower people so they can participate in the American Dream, and benefit from their own ambition and labors. We all play on the same team, and every player needs to pull their own weight. I get this. But when we look closely at ROI, what are the costs as well as the benefits to this equation? It’s not as easy as our snap judgment of “Go get a job!” sounds.

We’re at risk of becoming a society that only values ROI. We have our eyes focused on short-term investments and big returns, and seem to forget than the payoff for many projects can’t measured in terms of quarterly profits.

Education, for example, used to be about teaching children to love learning. The thrill of finding out new things, the joy of a curious mind. But now, we’re testing these children so often, we are looking for moment-by-moment return on what information we’ve managed to cram into their heads, rather than whether they are becoming better people for the process. I think we should look at education as long-term R & D, and no student or teacher should be evaluated solely on the performance on any one test, any one lesson, any one day. It’s just one data point! It’s not indicative of the larger picture, but not too many people are willing to look at both the forest and the trees on this issue.

The single tree or student may not be doing as well as we hoped, but this doesn’t mean we need to fix the whole forest. Maybe helping that particular tree or grove of trees will make the whole forest healthier. Rather than looking at a student’s struggle or failure as a disease, one that might spread to the others, maybe we should look at it as an opportunity to nurture and pay special attention to these smaller trees, so they, too, can grow strong over time, at their own rate. Pruning the ones that are not like the others makes a very bland, uniform forest, with no diversity or real interest.

Similarly, when we’re deciding where our values lie, what our personal ROI is, maybe we need to look at life as a continuum rather than discrete data points. I have worked both full and part-time during my marriage, at paying gigs. I have been “only a mom” at times, too. I have worked “seasonally”- during just a portion of the year. I currently do “paying gigs” on a project-only basis. My husband teases me I will eventually piece together a full-time job, but I already have the full-time job I want-> the Mom in this household.

We are lucky that the household doesn’t depend on what I make to pay the bills or feed the children. The paying gigs I take are often about making a larger contribution to the world, and (don’t tell my various employers) less about the money. I think I’ve finally come to the conclusion that money is just one way people keep score of how they’re doing. I’ve just gotten to a place where, for myself, I am much more interested in trying to do things that make a difference in my life and the lives of others, and I’ve become less concerned with the monetary value system. Sure, it’s a luxury I can afford, since I am not worried about whether there’s a roof over my head or whether there is food on the table. But I think, as we walk the line between home and work, business and pleasure, considering the trade-offs and pay-offs on all dimensions is important. Not all value lies in a bar graph or pie chart. Many times the “Value Add” is unquantifiable. The value add is often that sense of contribution, the sense of joy, the sense of personal satisfaction and happiness that no paycheck alone will ever give you.

One of my goals for this next year is to take a wider view of Return On Investment. I want the investments I make to be ones I care about- the things I’m willing to throw my whole self into, regardless of the value (monetary or otherwise) of the return. If I’m not willing to invest part of myself into what I am doing, why do it at all? It ups the stakes, because it means success and failure are both much more personal. And as Meg Ryan said in “You’ve Got Mail”– “And what’s so wrong with being personal, anyway? Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”

Photo courtesy of Matt P, used under a Creative Commons License.

[tags]volunteer, moms, dads, roi, morals, obligations, society[/tags]