Lakeside Fire Company Ladies Auxiliary - Where has Volunteerism Gone?

Like many of my neighbors, I have been privileged to be part of the fire company on our block. I can remember when we were children (we lived directly next door), and my mother was the President of the Auxiliary. There must have been thirty or forty women participating back then. Now, we are lucky if all eight of us can make the monthly meeting -- and we cannot plan a fundraising event unless ALL of our calendars are in sync, simply because there are too few to be missing anyone on crunch days.

I am always left with a simple question after we leave our monthly meetings -- where is everyone? Where are those thirty women of my mom's generation who were the foundation of Lakeside's Auxiliary? Surely, some have moved (or moved on), but many are still right here in our neighborhood. We discover at our annual Installation Dinner, that other fire companies have the exact same problem -- their auxiliaries barely hang on with five or ten members. What has changed?

Surely, life is not as simple as it was even a generation ago. At that time, it was the anomaly for someone's mom to work full time. The words "child care" were not yet a part of our everyday language. Now, it is the exact opposite. We are thrilled for the mom who simply gets to be home with her kids and be a home maker (the unsung career the women's movement unwittingly stole from us all, in my opinion). [side note: please be tolerant if your opinion on this is different, after working full time in Manhattan and not being able to enjoy my kid for so many years, well, I've earned by feelings on this -- but surely respect yours and anybody's.]

The point of this thought? We don't really have any free time any more. Even the stay-at-home mom often works part time or has her own direct sales thing going (Tupperware Ladies have been replaced with Jewelry Shows, Home Decor, Mary Kay and the dreaded knock-off-pocketbooks). So free time has simply become an oxymoron. It is spent doing laundry.

Adding to this, our society has so overscheduled our children, we have become full-time taxi services, shuttling from school to mad-science to religion to dance to soccer -- you get the picture.

The final nail in the coffin of altruistic neighborhood volunteerism, however, is that it too has become an oxymoron. Our volunteers are all paid. Now here I risk starting yet another debate -- Don't our firemen DESERVE their annuities? The very small gift our community can give back to them???? Of course they do. I'm just saying that as a society, we have risked true altruism for a payoff. Volunteering for its own sake is gone.

And here is the perfect example of this: There are a few women from the old auxiliary who still participate at Lakeside. They're firemen. And the answer to the obvious question of why is often, well why not. Why not get that annuity. If we are giving our time to our community and ten years later our community has an annuity for us, why not?

But you see, there is no annuity for being an auxiliary member. It is 100% voluntary. There isn't any pay off at all, to speak of.

Except the pay off that has stood for as long as mankind has gathered to live in communities -- quite simply, you are my neighbor, this is my community -- this is where I live. It is the same reason that people deliver Meals on Wheels and meet to clean up the side of the road twice a year. This is our home, and in some simple way, that makes us a family.

Auxiliaries used to exist to provide much needed financial and human support to our firefighters -- the financial role has been taken on by municipalities all over the place. But the heart -- the human support -- is still VITALLY necessary. We are the Christmas Parties; we are the neighborhood Halloween Bash; we are (as women have always been) the heartbeat of our homes. Homes that I hope still extend beyond my own front door.