May 17, 2008
Sacramento parishioner leads effort to organize volunteerism in state
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Secretary of Service and Volunteering Karen Baker has conducted a 29-stop listening tour across California from San Diego to Crescent City to improve community disaster response plans. Cathy Joyce/Herald photo
Ten thousand volunteers registered to help after the San Diego wildfires last October.
After November’s oil spill in the San Francisco Bay, 2,000 volunteers showed up at the ruined beaches with kitty litter shovels and bags, ready to scoop up the oil and sift clean sand back onto the beach.
But they were turned back by officials who didn’t know what to do with thousands of volunteers.
To address the ensuing chaos, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger brought in Karen Baker, the executive director of California Volunteers, the state’s commission for volunteering. Originally created to oversee and allocate federal AmeriCorps grant money to the various programs in the state, California Volunteers has also become a practical clearinghouse for connecting volunteers to projects.
Baker realized that the bay clean-up volunteers couldn’t legally scoop oil from sand without completing a three-day hazardous waste removal training session. She streamlined the training to four hours, organized the process, and began funneling volunteers through the training to the beach.
She also spoke with the governor and the heads of various state agencies about the need for better supporting volunteer work in emergencies.
On Feb. 26, Schwarzenegger appointed the 46-year-old Baker as Secretary of Service and Volunteering, the nation’s first cabinet-level post devoting to volunteering.
The new secretary is responsible for coordinating volunteer efforts in times of disaster, coordinating disaster relief donations, and increasing the number and impact of volunteers in California.
The governor said he hopes to make volunteer civic engagement in California “the model for the rest of the country.”
Baker has been modeling volunteer civic engagement her whole life.
She’s been working with social justice issues since she graduated from college, starting with a post-college year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, she said in an interview with The Herald. But she’s been volunteering since she was a child.
She hails from a large Catholic family that moved to the Sacramento area from Dayton, Ohio when Baker was 16, settling in Our Lady of the Assumption Parish in Carmichael.
Her mother, Ellen Hallerman, did volunteer work and led Girl Scout troops while rearing eight children. Her father, Bill Hallerman, volunteered with United Way and continues his volunteer work today as president of Sacramento District Council of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
“My family has a strong commitment to social justice,” Baker said. Three of the eight Hallerman children spent a year after college with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, while another became a Maryknoll lay missionary and served in Venezuela for four years.
Baker and her husband, Edward, members of St. Ignatius Parish in Sacramento, have two children: Ella, 5, and Christopher, 2.
She attributes her own dedication to social justice directly to her faith. “Every week in the Mass,” she observed, “in the homilies, you hear the stories of Christ’s life and his care for the poor. You get a clear understanding of what part of our purpose is, which is to care for others.”
Baker’s career path in caring for others began after she finished her degree in sociology at UCLA and was assigned to work with teen runaways in Seattle during her year of JVC service. Since then she’s worked for social justice through public advocacy groups and nonprofit service organizations in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.
In Washington, she started her own nonprofit organization called “doingsomething,” named after the TV show, “thirtysomething,” she explained. She created it to connect busy professionals who wanted to do volunteer work with weekend or one-time volunteer opportunities. At the time it was a new model for connecting volunteers to opportunities. Since then similar programs, such as Hands On, have sprung up nationwide.
Since her appointment less than three months ago, Baker has conducted a 29-stop listening tour across the state from San Diego to Crescent City, meeting with people from nonprofits, corporations, municipal agencies and emergency services, to improve community disaster response plans and increase volunteerism.
Her office has also launched a statewide volunteer matching system at www.CaliforniaVolunteers.org, to connect people to projects. The system aggregates information from 17 different volunteer centers operating in the state, such as “The Volunteer Center of the East Bay” and “Hands On Sacramento.”
Prospective volunteers type in their interest and location, the matching system offers volunteer opportunities, and the volunteers register with the local volunteer center.
There’s even a phone number for people who don’t use computers: 1-888-567-SERV.
In cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, several volunteer centers pool their efforts with California Volunteers to bring help to people. In the more remote areas, a single center may serve more than one county. For example, Caring Choices, a two-person volunteer center in Chico, serves 12 counties from Butte to Siskiyou.
“We’re trying to build our base,” said Mary Bonney, VISTA supervisor at Chico’s Caring Choices. “The area is growing and the needs are growing, so we try to connect people to the work they can do.”
California Volunteers works to help all of the state’s volunteer centers grow their base. To help grow faith-based services, in particular, California Volunteers will co-sponsor a White House Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Aug. 18 at the Sacramento Convention Center. The conference will address questions of how church-based programs can appropriately tap into available public funding and services.
Baker said that most people will volunteer, if they have the opportunity, whether or not they come from a faith tradition.
“People are searching for a way to make a difference,” she said.
