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By Peter Bell, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, June 16, 2006

When Erik Olson meets someone new, he doesn't wait too long to make his move. "I don't know how I make it come up, but it always does," says Olson, a legislative assistant to Rep. Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat. A stranger at a party might ask Olson about his plans for the weekend, and he'll talk about his Sunday field trip, and maybe about his Tuesday evening plans as well. If the acquaintance sounds interested but hesitates, Olson eases off. But his windup has already begun. Eventually, he'll send the question sailing right down the middle: "It's just an hour and a half. You can't give an hour and a half?" For emphasis, he pats out each word on the table, and then leans back smiling. "That's my pitch," he says, his demonstration finished.

Olson is one of about 100 congressional staffers who volunteer with Horton's Kids, a tutoring group founded 15 years ago by Karin Walser, who was press secretary to the late Rep. Joe Moakley, D-Mass. Over the years, hundreds of Hill aides have responded to appeals like Olson's, volunteering to tutor children from the Wellington Park apartments in Southeast Washington. Hundreds more have mentored children during lunch hour at Tyler and Brent elementary schools through another program, "Everybody Wins! D.C." Its Power Lunch program, which now serves 30 Title 1 schools across the region that receive federal subsidies, just finished its 11th year, with more than 300 Hill people in its ranks.

With such dense concentrations of talent, one might expect these two volunteer groups to be abuzz with professional networking. But although some volunteer organizations, such as the Junior League, are known for blending professional socializing and community service, the tutors and mentors of Everybody Wins D.C. and Horton's Kids spend much of their volunteer time in one-on-one sessions with at-risk students, and they rarely focus on work-related networking. "You might be more likely to go to heaven," Walser says, "but I'm not so sure you're going to get a promotion."

Nevertheless, the relationships forged among the groups' volunteers provide a valuable sense of accomplishment and peer recognition that even a demanding job in government can't. And Horton's Kids and Everybody Wins D.C. have tuned their programs to the cadence of Capitol Hill, making it easier for staffers to forge those volunteer relationships on the fringes of the workday.

"The whole idea was to make it very easy for busy people," says Mary Salander, who has been the executive director of Everybody Wins D.C. since it began in 1995. Using school coordinators, the group makes sure that the children are ready to begin working when their mentors arrive, and it reschedules sessions if a mentor is too busy to come on a particular day. If the school coordinators weren't around to handle logistics, maintaining the 70 percent volunteer retention rate would be harder, Salander says.

"It's just nine or 10 blocks, and it helps to get my head out of this place for an hour and a half. All we have to do is show up. They make it easy to plug in," says Brian Ahlberg, chief of staff to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. Together, Harkin and Ahlberg mentor Amii Young, a student at Brent Elementary near the Capitol.

While participants in Everybody Wins D.C. find time for volunteering during lunch, Horton's Kids tutors do their thing after work. On Monday and Tuesday evenings, chartered school buses drop students off at the Longworth House Office Building to meet their tutors. On Wednesdays, the kids head for the Education Department. Sunday afternoons, the children and tutors go on field trips together to local museums and parks. Because the congressional workweek begins in earnest when members return from their districts on Tuesdays, Monday-evening tutoring is particularly popular among Hill staffers.

"Busing children to where the volunteers were -- mobile tutoring -- worked really, really well," Walser says. "In D.C., everybody is intense and working really hard -- and, otherwise, I think it would be hard for us to get volunteers, especially of the caliber we have."

The ease of the commitment has helped Amanda Farris, a Republican staff member on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, mentor with Everybody Wins for the last seven years. But feeling useful to others is another big incentive. "I don't have the talent to teach a lot of literary skills, but I can show them that it's fun to read," says Farris, who spends her work hours focusing on elementary school education policy and assessing programs under the No Child Left Behind education act.

It's those small but important contributions that keep volunteers coming back. Three years ago, Chris Grillo worried through his first tutoring session with Horton's Kids. When the student he was working with had trouble staying awake, Grillo wondered if she had eaten that day. "It was a tough start," he says. But without such difficulties, Grillo, a former aide to Guam Delegate Madeleine Bordallo who continued to tutor after joining a real estate services firm, wouldn't have quite the same sense of accomplishment. For the last year and a half, he has tutored one of the program's most promising students. He says the relationship is fulfilling and has strengthened his connection to Horton's Kids.

Siobhan Canty, the president of Greater DC Cares, a nonprofit coordinating group that places about 50 volunteers a week, says that distance from the workplace can actually make volunteer relationships more meaningful. Volunteers learn, " 'I have value to this community. I don't just have value to my employer,' " says Canty, who began volunteering in 1990 at a food-distribution center for the Salvadoran residents of Northwest Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood. "I think that's a great thing that volunteering brings to people."

Absent a paycheck, something else sustains volunteers -- the recognition of others. "We all want to be respected and admired," says Rob Dugger, the managing director of Tudor Investment and a former chief economist to the Senate Banking Committee who has mentored with Everybody Wins for three years. Dugger leads the Invest in Kids working group at the Committee for Economic Development, an organization of business and education leaders dedicated to policy research and implementation.

Aside from occasional mentions in the Congressional Record, the recognition that volunteers with Everybody Wins D.C. and Horton's Kids receive is mostly informal and low-key. But it brings the volunteers closer together. After evening tutoring sessions, the Horton's Kids volunteers gather at Tortilla Coast, a Capitol Hill bar, to mark the close of a long day and to share a few tutoring tips. The get-togethers are an informal way of acknowledging a shared purpose and experience.

Last month, Horton's Kids board member Bernie Robinson, a lobbyist with the Livingston Group, hosted an appreciation party for the mentors. When the volunteers arrived, they found thank-you cards from their students decking the walls of Robinson's Capitol Hill home.

"Their dedication and goodwill is something that is fun to be a very small part of," Robinson says. "Trying to make a difference in some of these children's lives makes everything else I do worthwhile."

Olson offers two reasons for his volunteering. "The base thing is obligation," he says. "But I wouldn't do it unless I was having a lot of fun." Those reasons were on display on a recent Sunday afternoon at Virginia Highlands Park in Arlington, Va. After spending the morning in the office answering constituent mail, Olson boarded buses with two dozen other tutors and headed to the playground with a gaggle of children from Wellington Park.

As a dozen kids overran the jungle gym, they chanted Olson's name over and over, reveling in the attention as again and again he came barreling over to give chase. For the next hour and a half, he took no important phone calls, attended no closed-door meetings, and met not a single political bigwig. But he was at the center of it all.

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