The Befriending Volunteer; P. Clayton

Behind the simple day-to-day humanity of her work lay an ethical strategy. Octavia Hill was influenced by John Ruskin, the English art critic and philosopher. Ruskin held that a root cause of society's malaise . was the absence of routine personal contact between classes. The poor lived their lives in obscure, impenetrable corners of cities. Those who dictated policy and formed opin ions knew nothing of them save what they read or assumed to be true. Many city Mr. Clayton is volunteer chairman ofthe Octavia Hill Society and of The Octavia Hill Birthplace Museum Trust in Wisbech, England. American membership secretary of the Society is Tina Hummel, 4730 Bradley Blvd., #A10, Chevy Chase, MD 20815. missions were patronizing, or conditioned their aid on conversion or adherence to a particular religion. Octavia Hill worked with her tenants not for them. The poor, she said, should be regarded "primarily as husbands, wives, sons and daughters, members of house holds, as we are ourselves, instead of as a separate class." All individuals were worth an effort. "Before our influence can be human, natural, and helpful, before our elaborate network of organization can be anything but harmful, these widespread masses which form the poor of our towns must be to us again separate human beings, with individual histories, characters, hopes, longings, temptations. It has been ordained that each of us has a distinctive face and form known to those who love us, and which enwraps a soul as distinct."

Central to her work was the recruitment, training, and efficient utilization of hand picked volunteers to manage housing for owners. She said, "We have to be the poor man's friend if we are to be his benefactor. " For Octavia Hill and John Ruskin, the only way that such friendship could be achieved was by personalcontactovera longperiod. The method chosen to build this relationship was the routine contact between landlord's agent and tenant. The Tenth Annual report of the Octavia Hill Association of Philadel phia in 1906 identified the three inseparable factors of housing management, "the house, the friendly rent collector or agent, and the 563 564 THE FREEMAN • OCTOBER 1994 Octavia.Hill wasaprolificwriterofbothlettersandessays. tenant. " "The house," it continued, "was never to be considered apart from the tenant and the kind officesof the agent; in fact, the three were to form practically a unit-the house existing to be rented by the agent to, and for the use of, the tenant, never for rent-value alone. The agent was to be the guardian, as it were, of the well-beingof tenant, house, and landlord, between whose trebly distinct yet united interests there could, in a most important sense, be no division."

The "fellow workers" in the field were but one type of volunteer utilized by the Octavia Hill method. The others included property owners who volunteered to forfeit the full rental value of their property. Oc tavia Hill needed enlightened landlords who were prepared to accept a limited but as sured rental return on their property. Once when she was talking to a group of peers in England, Octavia Hill was reproached by a Duke who said, "Miss Hill, you wish to tax our property." She replied, "No, your Grace, I wish you to tax yourselves." Skeptical of State Action Octavia Hill had little faith in state action. She had considerable respect for politics at a local, grassroots level, but her view was that the duty of national politicians was just to create and sustain conditions for individ uals to prosper. She pointed out that she had known two prime ministers (Lord Salisbury, who was a personal friend, and Gladstone), and neither of them had any experience with poorer people. Such ignorance, she insisted, could not produce sound policy.

As large-scale social policies were imple mented with vigor in the early years of this century, Octavia became a lone voice of dissent, pointing out with prophetic vision the inherent pitfalls. She wrote, "It is, of course, true that there are certain great human needs that may be met en bloc and from a distance, but it is curious how few they are, how badly they are met unless it be by those with much individual sympathy, and how curiously littlejoy or gratitude they bring, and how little self-reliance. It is the gift to the man himself, from a man, which reaches him. Lowell is for ever right- 'the gift without the giver is bare.' " "It is not by widespreading changes, it is not by more legal enactments but face to face and heart to heart that pauperism must be dealt with," she wrote. "It is the friendly help that takes the degradation out of it." She urged that volunteers "not attempt too much, but take some one little bit of work, and doing it simply, thoroughly, and lov ingly, wait patiently for the gradual spread of good."

For Octavians, there were no easy policy prescriptions for the problems of society. Redemption could· come only "from con certed and·sustained action by individuals. The value of their work was eloquently pleaded by historian Fullerton Waldo in his 1917 account of the Philadelphia Octavia Hill Association. "It is an investment in human lives, and it underwrites the welfare of the city, the country, the world in the age to come by assuring the health and happi ness of the unborn." D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERtY Some Philanthropists Turn Their Backs on Voluntarism by Kimberly o. Dennis I n the course of less than a century, government has essentially replaced vol untary institutions as the court of first resort for people seeking help. If you were a poor, single, twenty-year old pregnant woman in New York at the turn of the century, you would have had many places to turn for help, voluntary organizations whose goal was to help you to thrive independently. To obtain medical care, for example, you could have taken advantage of any number of free clinics, such as the Bloomingdale Clinic for the Free Treatment of the Poor. For food, clothing, and fuel you could have sought the assistance of the Ladies' Fuel and Aid Society. For training and employment you might have gone to the Charity Organization Society, or to one of the free schools or libraries sponsored by charitable institu tions. Typically, these organizations would have asked you for something in return for their help. Their intention, after all, was to provide a hand up, not a hand out, and as voluntary organizations they had no choice but to be economical with their resources.