ethnographic research project

all names have been changed to protect identities

fall 2017, oakland, ca

            I must have been so enveloped in Teresa’s story that I lost track of time, because when I looked up it had nearly been half and hour since I started the interview.  Although I had only spent three days with Teresa, I felt as though I had known her since a young age, which is not something that was uncommon among the people she met.  The way she talked to you was inviting in a way, and I had seen her on multiple occasions work her way into other people’s lives so well that I could tell from their body language that they, too, must have felt the same way I have to some degree. 

            She told me this story of a woman she had met on the phone years ago.  Teresa had been volunteering as a phone operator at the 201 Community Center in Oakland for quite some time now, a practice she was encouraged to do by her mother who had some personal connection with the staff who had helped her out financially some years prior.  Only a woman who had worked the phones for nearly two years as she had would truly know what goes on underneath the surface on the streets of Oakland. 

            If anyone truly needed help, it was this woman on the other end of Teresa’s phone line.  Teresa had told me that this woman had first called her about fifteen years ago, a time when this woman’s husband was absent in her life.  She was going through a particularly rough time in her life.  She had one son in college at San Francisco state and was supporting herself in a small San Franciscan suburb, struggling to make ends meet while balancing her son’s bills.  Teresa was providing mental guidance to this woman at a time when she could almost feel the four walls of her own home falling slowly in on her.  Over the next six months, she would call Teresa nearly every weekend, feeling lonely as she slowly tried to navigate herself through one problem after the next with one of her only friends; in these months, she was not only having her house foreclosed, but she was also in the process of being deported.  She decided to keep this a secret from her only son, and as time approached quickly she told Teresa that she, out of all people, had decided to donate her furniture and clothes, really anything that she couldn’t take with her back to her home country, to 201.  Teresa initially refused, given her situation, but eventually gave in and went out of her way to drive some of her stuff from her house to the organization.  As it was time to say their final goodbyes, Teresa said she couldn’t help but be inspired by a woman who felt called to donate her belongings instead of selling them in a time like this. 

            Teresa was talking fairly slowly now.  She told me that the woman had waited until the day of her flight back to her home country to tell her son that she wasn’t going to see him for quite some time, that she was getting deported, and that she was going to do what she could in order to wire him back money if she could.  That night, as they later found out, would be the same night that the woman’s son jumped off a bridge, bringing his brief life to an end. 

            I arrived at the 201 Community Center on Saturday, September 30th with an idea in mind, but not really knowing what to expect.  I had set out to explore what led people to devote their career and time to work in the non-profit sector, with specific attention to past events in their lives that may have led them to choose such a path.  There was a common story told around the parish that I grew up at.  My pastor would tell us more than a few times of a story, in which he, of all people, was the subject.  He told us of the day he seemingly saw an apparition, some sort of messenger from above in the form of a homeless man, that had called upon him to devote his life to the church; afterwards, this spirit-man turned down an alley, and as my pastor attempted to follow it, it vanished with seemingly supernatural speed.  At the time, I thought that this was a unique story, but as I grew up I gradually found that this story was not an uncommon one, as this supernatural “epiphany”-type story often presents itself in literature and film, and I sought to find out with what frequency does this type of story show up in nonprofit organizations, even if it is less extreme than my pastor’s. 

            In addition to this, I was also on a hunt to find out exactly why people engage in non-profit work, whether it was for religious, social, or political reasons, as well as how they justify giving up their time and potentially higher salary.  I wanted, specifically, to observe worker-client relationships in order to get a better picture of their underlying motivations.  Through interviews I would also gain insight on this topic, and I also wanted to find out if upbringing or geographic location had any sort of influence on their answers. 

            On my first day, I was told to work in the kitchen, but by my third visit they had moved me to work at the community help desk due to a lack of volunteers in that area.  Every Saturday, the community center hosted a free lunch for any individual who wished to come, which was made possible through the donations of many generous grocers around town who would donate almost-expired food, which was usually Safeway.  The community help desk was a place where people could sign in to receive 201’s services or be directed to other centers.  The 201 Community Center really served as a semi-religious place where the homeless and the needy could come to get a hot meal, a clean pair of clothes, a shower, or laundry service in a judgment-free environment that operated under the motto “neighbors helping neighbors.”  During my time at the center, I worked alongside a diverse mix of staff members and volunteers, ranging from longtime staff members who were also avid churchgoers of the local Catholic church to groups of East Bay country clubbers who occasionally volunteered their time and labor.  But to truly understand why many of these people are a part of the center, it would make more sense to first reveal information gained through their interviews first before describing their behavior, even if that means telling the story in reverse chronology in which I made my observations.  

            After interviewing five volunteers and workers that I worked closely with, it became clear that initial exposure to the charity was not, usually, attributed to individual choice; instead, it was largely an environmental factor that often had to do with family or work.  After working at the help desk one day, I first interviewed Sandy, a volunteer who had just finished her graduate work at UC Santa Cruz and was working at a women’s center close by, in part because she was closest in age to me.  Sandy, who I really couldn’t picture experiencing any other emotion other than joy, told me that she had first gotten involved as a regular volunteer here at the center due to an organized community service day at her work.  After that day, she felt so inspired to help the community that she actually signed up as a regular, once-a-month volunteer because she felt that by seeing the day to day operations at the center, it made the homeless problem in Oakland “more real” than just reading about it in the paper or seeing it on the news.  When I asked her if there was a single most important moment in her life—an epiphany or call to action—that she had leading her to help the less fortunate, she replied that she couldn’t think of anything significant that happened, that it was instead kind of just expected by her parents growing up to help the less fortunate and had little to do with religion. 

            During that same day, I interviewed Callie, a native New Yorker who completed her undergraduate and graduate work at Cal and is now working a professional job in Northern Oakland, who expressed similar sentiments.  This was actually the driest of all my interviews, but its flat and static nature actually shed more light on the trend than Sandy’s responses.  When I had asked Callie how she first got involved with 201, she replied that it was just something that she came up upon, and that her Buddhist religion, while not being a factor in choosing the location, encouraged her to help out the community.  When I had put the “epiphany” question to her, she also denied any sort of event in her past that resembled that pattern, but that she was, like Sandy, raised with parents who expected her to volunteer and donate when possible.  As one of her motivating factors to volunteer, she also noted that by spending time at the center she could “stay in the loop” and really know what’s going on around town by talking to other volunteers and employees, adding that it would be easy to just stay at home and isolate herself. 

            I not only began to notice that initial exposure to non-profits did not originate within the individual, but also that these epiphanous moments had nothing to do with the Catholic religion that was associated with the organization, and often were not religious in nature at all.  The motivation to work in non-profits was already not fitting the initial model of epiphany leading to exposure, and instead a different trend entirely began to form in my later interviews. 

            On my second to last visit, I interviewed Teresa, the staff member whose story of a woman that she met on the phone sharply opposed my initial theory.  Teresa was an Oakland native nearly twenty years my senior who was raising both her daughter and an adopted daughter on her own in East Oakland.  She was a long time volunteer of two years before she was offered a full time position at the organization, which she took and left her old job.  Out of everyone, I had grown most closely with Teresa, working with her four separate times.  The story that she told me of how she got involved was similar in some ways and different in others to Sandy and Callie’s stories.  She, too, was influenced by her mother to volunteer and help at the center after an encounter with someone at the 201 thrift store changed her mother’s life.  She was still figuring out her career path, but that telephone call with that woman made her mind, and she decided to stay with the organization in the end because when she said that when, “you see someone give when they have nothing, it really changes you.”  This was her motivating factor, her epiphany, that eventually led her to continue volunteering long enough to be offered a full time position, and it even motivates her to continue her line of work today. 

            I interviewed the volunteer coordinator, Shailene, next.  Shailene, a tall woman in her late twenties or early thirties with an absolutely angelic voice, is not an Oakland native but was exposed to 201 through a college course that she took in the past.  She said that her true passion lied in environmental work, but after her college course—strikingly similar to this course—that made her engage in community service and write about her experiences, she began to find a love for the community.  She eventually took a job here as volunteer coordinator and, upon being asked if there as a single most epiphanous event in her past that led her to help the poor, she said that there wasn’t really one moment, but rather that her favorite part about her job was that at the end of the day she gets to hear the reflections of the many first-time volunteers about what they saw and learned that day, and that hearing those stories day in and day out really inspired her.  After the interview, she said that there was one person that I absolutely must interview who might have a great story, since she knew I was looking for epiphanies. 

            That person was Tyson.  Tyson was a particularly muscular, tatted Oakland native who had grown up in this neighborhood his whole life.  I asked him what had led him to this line of work, which he answered that his probation period had made him take a stable job as a security guard at 201, a position he currently holds today.  When I asked him if he could identify an epiphany in his lifetime that led him to this line of work, he said that there was this one time during Christmas when a little boy had come up to him asking if he could have a dollar for a bus fare for him and his mother.  Giving money wasn’t really allowed, but he gave the kid a dollar anyway, and he vividly remembers the kid dancing around and running to his mom, celebrating in Spanish, and although he didn’t know what he was saying, he just knew that he was happy.

            Tyson said that these moments happen “everyday,” but that is the one that really has stuck with him.  And, thus, the old model of epiphany-then-exposure that I had initially set out to find was untrue, as it became very apparent that when I had asked for an “epiphany” that really made them choose this career or volunteer path, the interviewees almost unanimously chose a moment that had happened during their time at 201, not before.  Their initial exposure had preceded their epiphany, and while the initial exposure was not individually motivated, the epiphany was always self-originated. 

            When combined with many of the interviews, the physical and verbal interactions between the individuals at the center became more clear and patterned.  On multiple occasions, I saw good-hearted banter between the guests and workers (by workers, meaning both staff members and volunteers), but I saw even more jokes and conversations shared amongst the workers themselves. The country club members, I noticed, were very talkative and treated their shift almost as they might treat a social club, as they often told jokes or talked about their kids whilst chopping vegetables in the kitchen. Some of them even brought their kids. I worked most closely with Teresa, and I told her stories about school while she shared her stories about her kids with me when we weren’t signing in guests at the help desk.  Tyson would joke around with us, too, as he was usually the security guard in the main hall, and he would always play his music and tell us about his morning after lunch when there were less people, never failing to make Teresa laugh.  I noticed that many of these conversations revolved around funny or cordial times with the guests, one of these times being when I was signing this woman in to take a shower in the women’s center.  She had told me that, “anytime would be okay” for her shower time, which Teresa joked around and told me to sign her up for the 8:00 p.m. shower slot.  It was about 10:00 a.m. but for a split second the woman seemed to take Teresa seriously, but we were soon laughing as the woman (who was, in fact, a regular) and Teresa were teasing each other.  Sometimes Tyson would join in and laugh with us if something funny happened, as he did on this occasion.  Personally, I didn’t see what was so funny about a lot of these interactions, but there was this sort of enthusiasm to help the community that both Teresa and Tyson shared, even showing through in the way they talked and joked around with each other.  I noticed this type of cordiality again when I was working at the beverage station in the dining room at a time when I was unable to understand what a guest was asking for me to do; to my luck, another volunteer came and told me that the guest only wanted a cup of ice without water in it, and she gave me a sort of smile that really touched me in a way.  I really lived off that high for the rest of the day. 

            It became apparent that people engage in non-profit work because there is a kind of camaraderie shared amongst the workers.  There are hundreds of these micro-interactions that displayed this idea, which only became louder and more prominent in the interviews.  Callie had remarked that she volunteers her time in order to “stay in the loop” with everyone else, and Shailene had remarked that seeing the enthusiasm and altruistic changes in volunteers made her day.  Saying that volunteers and employees engage in non-profit work purely for the sole purpose of helping people is not entirely true, as there is a large, overlooked social aspect to it that wasn’t anticipated at the start of the project.  Even the epiphanies followed this pattern to some degree, as many of the epiphanies consisted of observing altruistic actions in people other than themselves, which were usually other good-hearted volunteers as the woman in Teresa’s story or the first-time volunteers in Shailene’s experiences. 

             In Teresa, specifically, I saw that the face to face interactions that go along with charity work was also a huge factor.  On my last visit to the center, this woman came to the desk requesting help with housing, which Teresa began to give her informational flyers on how to apply for government housing and welfare.  The woman was dead-set on not applying for welfare, and for a good reason.  I was kind of eavesdropping, but the woman had told Teresa that she would never go to the government for help because of what they did to her son.  This woman who I’ll call Cindy was seven months pregnant when her boyfriend had kicked her out of the house, and out of stress she had given birth to her son on an Alameda bus.  After being rushed to the hospital, she was met with several CPS representatives over the next couple of days to look into her situation.  Cindy said that the CPS representatives had fought with her, so later in court, CPS had labelled her as “aggressive” which was enough to take custody of the child.  Although Teresa was on lunch, she gave this woman complete eye contact and her full attention for such a long time, telling her that her mind was giving up before her body was ready to or something like that, that Cindy finally agreed to apply for welfare, and although twenty minutes prior they were complete strangers, they seemed to be almost friends in my eyes.  Teresa had a sort of smile on her face afterwards, and there is something to be said about the strength of face-to-face interaction.  Sandy had expressed similar sentiments when she had said that coming to the center made the homeless problem “more real” than on T.V. or print, and Tyson had remarked that physically seeing the happiness on a little kids’ face made his epiphanous story. 

            While the reason why people engage in non-profit work may not be a very complex one, perhaps it does not always follow the conventional pattern and reasoning that is often encountered in literature or film.  The original assumptions of the project were sort of wrong in the way that the people that I interviewed did not have an innate desire to help the needy prior to their exposure to the charity; instead, they went through a sort of process in which exposure led to epiphanous experiences which then led to long term commitment.  Although conversion might be a strong word, the exposure-then-epiphany reversal trend shows that this line of charity work functions more as a “conversion” environment rather than one that simply attracts people with innate desires to help.  Since the initial exposure to the center was not individually originated—only in Callie’s story was this true—the path to the non-profit sector does not appear to favor any one type of person, but rather the biggest determinant in joining a non-profit organization was simply exposure, whether that was through familial tradition, work and school requirements, or probation.  Through exposure, individuals were more likely to have good encounters with other volunteers or workers, which usually led to an epiphanous moment that could only happen through face-to-face or close interaction with altruistic behavior that comes along with being in an environment such as this one. 

There wasn’t a huge difference between Oakland natives and non-natives, as my interviews showed similarities across both types, and no distinctions could be made between the two groups other than Oakland natives were more likely to be full-time employees than non-natives.  Despite all of the religious imagery at the center, the motivations of the individuals that I interviewed were widely non-religious, but rather they were all strictly emotionally based as in Teresa’s phone operator story or Tyson’s bus fare story.  Motivation to work in this non-profit center is largely determined by the community of people who run it and contribute to it rather than those who benefit from the services, as there are cordial relationships that form among the like-minded individuals at the center.  I observed most prominently in Teresa’s interactions and my own experiences that physically seeing the faces of both those who need help—such as in the woman who had her son taken away by CPS—and of those who want to help you—as in my own experiences in the dining room—also served as a prime motivator. 

            Teresa’s story is one that I will never forget, but perhaps, like her, many individuals may be inspired by the altruism they see in others.  Teresa and the lady on the other end of her phone line aren’t so much different in a way.  Teresa is one of the strongest-hearted people I have ever met, and she above anything else is what I will miss most about this place.  I have been approached by a drooling man offering to sell me marijuana as I waited for my Uber, I have seen a grown man come in half-crying because he had been robbed while he was asleep the night before, and I have been scared out of my socks when a man with four teardrop face tattoos approached me at the help desk, only to find out that he was just there to play the piano in the back corner of the main hall, but in my entire twenty-four collective hours spent at the center, Teresa’s passion to help others is still the most striking memory I have.  However, Teresa would not be who and where she is today if she hadn’t picked up the phone one morning and listened to the emotional purging of a strong-hearted woman who had nothing and was still prepared to give all that she had. 

It may seem corny, but inspiration really does start small.  Even if it is something as small as someone giving you a quick smile as she helps you pour ice in a cup.