Opening Remarks by Father Richard Ryscavage, S.J.

Welcome to Neighbors Helping Neighbors: A Summit on Volunteering. I am Father Rick Ryscavage, professor of sociology at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and the founding director of the Center for Faith and Public Life, which is co-hosting this meeting today with the Knights of Columbus.

We’ve been calling this gathering an emergency summit because we’re living through the most intense economic crisis of our generation and it is deeply affecting charitable work.

Contributions have dropped and the need for service has risen, and many of you in this room are feeling caught in that trap. Both the Center and the Knights of Columbus believe that increasing volunteer services offers us a path through this difficult period. Nationally perhaps 25 percent of Americans do volunteer work, and, for example, in the city of New York that figure is much lower.

We think that we can improve that statistic dramatically, especially if we work together, and how to do this is what this meeting is all about. Most of you are associated with non-profit organizations, and my life has alternated between the world of non-profits and the world of universities and I can tell you that the academic community is only recently starting to study the world of non-profits. Academics commonly ask the question, what is a non-profit and we are hard pressed to come up with an adequate answer. We can’t even define with intellectual precision what we mean when we say volunteer or volunteerism, so I often tell my students this is an area that begs for fresh research and investigations.

At several levels universities can play a major role in addressing the issues before us today. I believe that especially faith-based private universities have a particular responsibility for studying service organizations driven not by profits, but by social values. But fortunately for you this is not an academic conference. We’re not going to debate definitions today. Our focus is quite practical.

Gathered in this room are practitioners representing a large array of organizational and professional experience and it’s rare for such a cross section to come together so it’s a time not to be wasted. I urge you to view it as a practical consultation where you can personally lend your voice to the emerging national discussion on service. What you say here today we hope to carry to Washington and to the broader American public.