The Side That Costs Nothing
Once a year my employer gives me a paid day to go be useful to someone other than my employer. Volunteer Time Off, they call it. There is one condition: the good has to come from an approved list.
I had never used the day. Not from apathy; from friction. Each year I skimmed the list, found nothing that matched what I actually care about, and let the day lapse. This year I read it closely enough to understand it.
The list is broad. Any licensed hospital. Any shelter. Any school. Food banks, river cleanups, youth mentoring, the household names: Red Cross, Habitat, United Way. A long catalog of plainly good work, and I mean that; none of it is wasted effort.
Then you notice what is missing, and the absences have a pattern.
Every approved category is a form of service. You go somewhere, you help a person directly, you go home. None of them is a form of advocacy: no civil-rights groups, no LGBTQ community organizations, no reproductive-health nonprofits, nothing whose stated purpose is to change the conditions that produce the hunger and homelessness and illness the rest of the list treats. You may spend your day on the symptom. You may not spend it on the cause.
What the list sorts by is controversy. The quality of the work and the urgency of the need barely enter into it. The approved organizations share one trait: nobody who matters will be annoyed that you helped them.
I noticed it first while looking for somewhere to spend the day for Pride.
The same company that turns its logo rainbow in June, that sends the warm all-staff email, that files “belonging” somewhere in its values deck, will not let me spend my one volunteer day with an organization like True Colors United, which does the year-round work of keeping queer kids housed and alive. The celebration is approved. The labor behind the celebration is not. We will say the words. We will not back the deeds, not even with a single day that costs the company nothing but my absence.
There is a defense of this, and it deserves a fair hearing: A company should not take political sides. Employees disagree, sometimes bitterly, and a volunteer benefit ought to be something anyone can use without feeling their employer has endorsed a cause they find wrong. Keep it nonpartisan and you keep it open to everyone. It sounds reasonable. It sounds, in fact, exactly like the careful, brand-safe reasoning that produced the list.
The trouble is that nonpartisan and neutral are not the same word. Calling a policy nonpartisan does not dissolve its politics; it relocates them into the definition of what counts as controversial. Someone decided that a food bank is safe and Planned Parenthood is not. That decision is a position, taken quietly, then dressed up as the absence of any position at all.
And controversy is not handed out at random. It attaches, with great consistency, to the people whose dignity or autonomy is still being argued over. Feeding the hungry stopped being controversial generations ago. Whether a trans teenager deserves support, whether a woman governs her own body: those remain, somehow, open questions in this country. So a filter that screens out the controversial beneficiaries tracks power. It approves help for the groups we have already agreed to help and withholds it from the groups still fighting to be counted. The policy looks evenhanded only if you forget the ground was never even.
For some communities the line the list depends on does not even exist. You cannot separate caring for LGBTQ youth from defending their right to live as themselves, because the danger to them is political at the root. You cannot separate reproductive health care from reproductive rights when access is the whole of the question. The tidy distinction between helping people and changing their conditions holds only for people whose conditions are not themselves in dispute. For everyone else it is a way to approve the comfort and decline the fight.
I am not asking my employer to take up politics. I am pointing out that it already has, and chose the side that costs it nothing.
An honest version of the policy would say what it means: we will support the charity that makes us look good and avoid the charity that makes anyone uncomfortable, and we have quietly filed your most threatened neighbors under discomfort. A consistent version would manage something better: we already approve volunteering for health, shelter, and human wellbeing, so we will not pretend those principles switch off the moment the beneficiary becomes politically inconvenient.
Until one of those versions arrives, the day sits there: one annual unit of permitted goodness, redeemable only against causes that were never in danger. I will probably spend it at a shelter, do real good for real people, and mean every minute of it. And I will spend it knowing the list let me through precisely because I had agreed, in advance, to want nothing it was afraid to give.