Olasky brilliantly profiles those who are working daily miracles of social transformation. One must wonder instead whether tax money should have been offered to her proselytizing program in the first place. For fourteen years Hawkins, with a budget of whatever is left in the cash box at the end of the day, has been turning mostly abandoned kids, up to 75 at a time, into children of her own. She makes sure they do their homework. She finds ways to give a hot meal.
Volunteers help, but they come and go. . . .
And when they finish with you, it's not your program, it's theirs. In partnership with Prison Fellowship, Lusk's church is now central to a promising pilot program that ministers to prisoners' children. Conservatives should also question the notion that government guts volunteerism and charitable giving. Olasky's grass-roots inner city heroes and heroines, and scores more I could name besides, are struggling to get volunteers and make ends meet. National evangelical Christian church groups take in billions of dollars each year, but little of it ever goes to help their urban minority brothers and sisters in Christ.