CSU, Chico freshman Martín Mojica (right) mentors Chico High School freshman Samuel Hernandez through CAVE’s Hermanas Y Hermanos Unidos Latinos program.

A Community of Volunteers

Community Action Volunteers in Education celebrates four decades of serving children and adults in Northern California

By Stephen Metzger

Rick Rees leans back in the swivel chair in his Student Activities office on the second floor of the Bell Memorial Union and takes a long breath. “I’ve always wondered what it is,” he says, “that fosters this extraordinary volunteerism. Something about this town? The campus? The community itself?”

Rees (BA, Speech, ’74; Credential, ’75), current associate director of Student Activities at California State University, Chico, and also president of Chico Unified School District’s Board of Education, is talking about Community Action Volunteers in Education (CAVE), its history, its long and storied list of staff members, and its startling success. This year, CAVE is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Rees, director of CAVE from 1977 to 1979 and currently on the organization’s advisory board, is one of dozens of former CAVE staff members who still embody the passion and commitment which brought them to CAVE in the first place and who continue to do the kind of work that passion and commitment led them to do.

A new generation takes the lead

On a crisp, clear Friday, Jan. 20, 1961—the coldest inaugural day on record—John F. Kennedy stood at noon before the Capitol and beseeched the nation with his now-famous words: “[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans … unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today. … And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

Four years later, in the fall of 1965, CSU, Chico student Tim Tregarthen (BA, Economics, ’67) began meeting with local school district administrators and teachers to try to identify children who needed help. The following spring, Tregarthen and Carlene St. John (BA, Math, ’66; Credential, ’67) won their bids to be Associated Students president and vice president, largely on a platform that included promising community service opportunities to the student body. Once in office, they formed a committee—along with student representatives Karen Angel (BA, Political Science, ’67)) and Bob Potter (BA, Social Science, ’66; MA, Social Science, ’69)—that would, over the next four decades, morph into what we know today as CAVE.

“When I became A.S. president, I appointed Ron Luyet (BA, Speech and Drama, ’67) to run CAVE,” recalls Tregarthen. “In many respects, it was Ron who really got CAVE going on a much larger scale. He was very aggressive in getting federal grants to expand the program.”

But Angel credits Tregarthen with much of the organization’s early success. “Tim was very good at going to meetings with well-written proposals, and President Hill—who was very supportive of our efforts—put Tim on his advisory cabinet,” she says.

CAVE’s pilot project—a tutorial program for children in Chico public schools and the children of Gridley-area migrant workers—was born of those early meetings. That first year, 1966–1967, 16 students volunteered to work as tutors, according to Tregarthen. “My role,” says Potter, “was to establish an ongoing liaison with the schools and district office, then set up a process to interview and place the tutors and do follow-up and evaluation. It was a mighty education process and sharp learning curve for me and all involved.” Original funding was provided by the Associated Students ($200), community members, and the tutors themselves, who donated whatever they could.

“It was a very exciting time,” says Angel, whose idea it was to call the program CAVE, after Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” “I’m absolutely thrilled that our vision expanded beyond our wildest expectations and 40 years later has been embraced by the larger community.”

A period of expansion

The following year, Potter become CAVE’s first official director and wrote a grant that provided funding from the Coalition for Youth Action through the U.S. Department of Labor. “I was highly motivated and believed in helping people help themselves,” notes Potter. “Also, I had the sense the college had the obligation to serve, help, and be a resource for the community. Not to tell them what they should think and do, but to work with and help develop their everyday aspirations.”

The $22,000 grant, and $3,500 from the Associated Students, bought the organization’s desks, chairs, office equipment, and supplies for its first home, on the corner of Second and Hazel streets. In the 1967–1968 school year, 450 CSU, Chico students volunteered for the Tutorial Program, working with students in 22 schools in Chico, Oroville, Gridley, and Hamilton City. That same year, CAVE added the Adult Education Program; using community centers and libraries in these communities, CSU, Chico students tutored nearly 100 illiterate adults, helping them develop skills needed to find employment.

In 1968, CAVE developed three more programs:

The Big Brother Program, in conjunction with the Butte County Welfare Department and Aid to Families With Dependent Children, provided volunteers to fulfill a variety of needs for local children.
The Napa Project, the first regular CAVE weekend project, sent CSU, Chico students to Napa State Hospital to work with developmentally disabled children.
The Encounter Program enlisted campus counselors and psychology professors, local professionals, and consultants from the Esalen Institute to conduct intense interpersonal communication workshops for CSU, Chico students.

Other CAVE programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s included the Draft Counseling Program and the Conscientious Objector Placement Program. The mid-1970s also saw the development of the Personal Growth Program, which hired instructors from the Chico community to teach classes ranging from bicycle maintenance and beginning flute to reflexology and “Creative Regeneration and Relaxation Through Affirmations and Yoga Postures.”

Jim Jessee, CAVE’s director from 1972 to 1974, recalls CAVE’s early days. “People tend to forget that here at Chico State, we had the same factions as campuses did all around the country,” says Jessee (BA, Speech, ’70; Credential, ’72; MPA, Public Administration, ’74), who today is director of CSU, Chico’s Academic Publications, Facilities, and Database Services. For a speech he gave at CAVE’s 25th anniversary, Jessee wrote:

“From 1969 to 1973, the domestic effects of the continuing war in Vietnam came to bear upon CAVE, its staff, its volunteers, and programs. The campus was increasingly polarized by the war and the various movements of the ’60s. It was the hippies, liberals, do-gooders, anti-war protesters … and other freaks vs. the frats, jocks, Aggies, shit-kickers, and Nixonites. CAVE was even infiltrated by an agent of the Nixon-era domestic-espionage efforts, who compiled dossiers on the CAVE staff and volunteers.”

“But there were others who were sort of in between,” he says today. “I mean we wanted to change the world, too. But we were a little more focused. We’d been in Boy Scouts and 4H and had leadership experience. So we looked out there at what needed to be done—we took Kennedy’s words very seriously—and worked hard to do it.”

Jessee’s commitment as director was 30 hours a week. He laughs softly. “But we lived and breathed CAVE,” he says. “Remember,” he continues, “a lot of the original CAVE staff were COs [conscientious objectors] who needed their 40 hours a week of community service to maintain their status.” Jessee, who had applied for CO status himself before learning that he was exempt from the draft, saw how hard they were working and says that he “felt like I had to make the same commitment.”

Growing on its own

During the 1970s, CAVE continued to grow, spawning a number of other highly successful and well-regarded community service programs. In 1972, Jessee, assisted by Rob Hanford (attended until ’82), Kevin Campbell (’72, ’78), John Tiernan (’73), Keith Hopkins (’70), and Bill Murphy (’72), worked with the Chico Housing Task Force to create a housing assistance program. In 1973, the Chico City Council, in partnership with CAVE and CSU, Chico, created the Chico Housing Improvement Program (CHIP). Hopkins had had extensive experience in construction and became CHIP’s first director. The second CAVE house, at 218 Chestnut (now a parking lot), also provided office space for Forces to Restore Earth’s Environment (FREE), which became the Butte Environmental Council (BEC), as well as for students Dane Cameron (BA, Political Science, ’76) and Paul Persons (BA, Political Science, ’73), who, with political science professor Ed Bronson, established there the first home for pre-law interns, and in so doing founded both the Public Law Internship Program and, in 1975, the Community Legal Information Center (CLIC). CHIP, BEC, and CLIC are all still going strong. The Public Law Internship Program is now the Public Law/Paralegal Program, with Persons, now faculty in the Department of Political Science, directing.

“Volunteer organizations on campuses in those days were not unusual,” says Rees. “But CAVE was. Most student organizations looked around at their communities at existing programs—Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Red Cross—and placed students in them. CAVE looked around at its community and saw needs and worked to fill them, by actually starting new programs, getting funding, training volunteers.”

Perhaps the most familiar name associated with CAVE is Jane Dolan, A.S. president in 1972–1973 and CAVE co-director from 1973 to 1977. Dolan (attended ’67–’74), currently serving her sixth term as a Butte Country supervisor, says, “CAVE’s core value of ‘life is for learning’ is with me every day. I try to learn and be involved and help and nudge and not just complain that things could be better, but try to make it so.” Widely credited with CAVE’s mid-’70s development into a more professionally run organization, Dolan adds, “CAVE’s success is people giving of themselves and helping and caring and trying and initiating and hoping for a better world, one person at a time.”

Karl Ory came to Chico in 1974 and was almost immediately hired to do recruiting for CAVE. Soon, he had worked in a number of programs (including Kids, Personal Growth, and Project Respond) and was appointed CAVE co-director in 1976. Ory (BA, Political Science, ’93; MPA, Public Administration, ’98) attributes CAVE’s success largely to the demographics of Chico’s student population and also to the times.

“First of all, Chico’s not a commuter campus,” he says over coffee one late June afternoon in downtown Chico. “Most of the students who go to school here come from somewhere else. They’re young, and they’ve been uprooted, but they all live near each other. CAVE gives them a chance to belong to a real community. Plus, until the late ’60s, students would go away to college and get involved in fraternities or athletics, but by the ’70s they were more interested in getting involved in their communities.”

Ory, who served on the Chico City Council from 1977 to 1985, including two terms as mayor, today is housing manager for the Self-help Home Improvement Project, overseeing the annual construction of 20 homes in Corning, California. “CAVE has affected everything about my life,” he says. “In fact, I always see employees as volunteers, and I probably act like a volunteer when I’m an employee: you’re at work because you want to be!”

Ory pulls out a photo of the CAVE staff taken on the steps of the Chestnut Street house (see back cover). There he is, almost dead center, smiling broadly, Rick Rees over his left shoulder. He shakes his head. “I’m truly humbled to have been a part of that program,” he says.

Ory’s co-director in 1976 was Bob Feaster, current assistant superintendent of Chico Unified School District. Feaster (BA, Psychology, ’70; MA, Psychology, ’80; Credential, ’80 and ’95; Services Credential, ’89) first volunteered in 1973 for the Big Brother Program and then “really got hooked in summer of ’75,” he says. “We got to work with the kids who hadn’t been selected for the previous semester’s Big Brother Program. We’d visit them at home, take them up to Lassen sometimes. It was an incredible feeling of family.”

Feaster smiles as he looks at Ory’s old photo, picking out familiar faces. “People looked at us and thought we were a bunch of hippies,” he says, “but these were bright, creative people, and it was very important to us that despite people’s perceptions—that we acted professionally. Jane [Dolan] was really big on that. She made sure we all spoke well, smiled. We even had training in how to answer the telephone.”

A singular vision

In 1988, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) presented to CAVE its prestigious G. Theodore Mitau Award for Innovation and Change in Higher Learning. The award, which the AASCU presented annually from 1979 to 1989, was given to a state college or university that “demonstrated a strong commitment to academic improvement, innovation, and educational excellence … expressed in high-quality programs that break new academic ground in order to meet challenging educational needs.” In distinguishing CAVE from among the 63 other nominees that year, the award committee wrote:

California State University, Chico is one of the few universities to recognize the value of the co-curricular experiences of the staff and volunteers and supports this by offering 1–3 units of credit through the departments of health and community services, social work, sociology, and education. …The enthusiastic student volunteers in the early years of CAVE helped the program grow from a small-scale community volunteer program to the largest university program of its kind in California.”

Alysson Satterlund (BS, Business Administration, ’95; MA, Information and Communication Studies, ’99), special assistant to the chancellor and dean at City College of San Francisco, first volunteered for CAVE with the Adopted Grandparents Program in 1992 and was CAVE’s assistant director from 1997 to 1999, when she left for graduate school in North Carolina. There, while doing her doctoral work on corporate volunteerism and philanthropy, she wrote “umpteen papers on service-learning, engagement, and volunteerism,” and her department referenced her work in volunteerism, civic engagement, and philanthropy “all of the time.”

“I could not have done any of what I’ve done without CAVE,” says Satterlund. “At CAVE, the motto was ‘life is for learning.’ I say this to myself when I need a push to take a risk or when I make a mistake—I also say it to my own children, to remind them of our primary purpose on the planet—to learn and grow.”

Chris Porter graduated from CSU, Chico last May with a BA in journalism and currently works for OutCast Communications in San Francisco. As a student, Porter held several Associated Students offices, including commissioner of community affairs (2004–2005). He also volunteered through CAVE for United Way and the Boys and Girls Club. His primary involvement with CAVE, though, was through the first Alternative Spring Break trip, to Mississippi in March 2006, following Hurricane Katrina.

“Our experiences—whether playing with kids in an after-school program in Hattiesburg or knocking down a house completely filled with mold and standing water—were truly humbling,” he says. “We got to meet survivors, other volunteers, and people whose lives are still being influenced by the hurricane. I realized how much more help our neighbors need.

“I’m a firm believer in giving more than taking in any possible situation, and my work through CAVE reaffirmed these values, teaching me how to be a steward in my own community.”

Bringing out the best

It’s a warm afternoon in June 2006. Rick Rees shows me an Aug. 10, 1990, letter to CAVE from President George Herbert Walker Bush, which includes the following: “Word has reached me of your outstanding record of community service. I congratulate you on your achievements [and] commend you for making a difference in the life of your community.”

Rees shakes his head softly as I look up after reading the letter. “Part of CAVE’s success has come about largely because the students have always taken responsibility,” he says. “Obviously, sometimes there are risks, and it even gets messy sometimes, but the outcome is always worth it. Maybe that’s what it is, what makes CAVE so extraordinary. When people collaborate, it’s risky, but borders disappear, and so that makes it part of something bigger. Honestly, there’s a heartfelt bond I see among the volunteers on this campus that I just don’t see on other campuses or in other campus communities.”<

Rees is suddenly pensive. “You know, we used to resist change at CAVE, but then we realized how resilient it is. In fact, you couldn’t get rid of it if you wanted to. It’s part of this institution. It will go on.”

Perhaps because, as Satterlund says, “CAVE captures the positive energy that is created when people are focused on something greater than themselves. CAVE is about the very best in all of us.”

Where They Are Now

Karen Angel, 60, was executive director for the Faculty Association of California Colleges before moving to Papua New Guinea, where from 1995 to 1997 she was acting president of the Papua New Guinea Orchid Society. She lives today in Eureka, California, where she is the executive director of Humboldt Botanical Gardens Foundation and construction manager for the Humboldt Botanical Garden.

Ron Luyet, 60, is vice president of consulting and training for the international consulting firm Business Consultants Network, with affiliates in 17 countries around the world. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, Seagram’s, and Procter & Gamble and is currently doing leadership training and collaboration training for the United Nations and NASA. He is also the author of Where Freedom Begins: The Process of Personal Change; and the co-founder of The Institute for Personal Change in San Francisco.

Bob Potter, 62, worked for the Butte County Employees’ Association before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for the State of California in human resources, employment training, and staff recruitment. He returned to graduate school in history in 1991. Potter’s passions today are meditation and the natural world, including his “beloved garden.” He lives in El Cerrito, California, with his wife, Sally Pincus, whom he met at CSU, Chico in 1967.

Carlene St. John, 62, went to work as one of Bell System’s first female engineers. She served on private school boards in the San Francisco Bay Area and today lives in Berkeley, serving on the Public Works Commission and the Creeks Task Force. She also contributes articles to historical and genealogical publications.

Tim Tregarthen, 60, earned his PhD in economics at the University of California at Davis and began teaching at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in 1971. In 1975, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which he held mostly at bay until the late 1980s, forcing him into early retirement in 1998. Since January 2005, he has lived, quadriplegic, in a nursing home in Colorado Springs. Using a voice-activated computer, he has just finished a revision of his popular college textbook, Economics.

CAVE Today

As a student, Deanna Berg volunteered at the California State Veterans Home in Yountville.

Today CAVE is housed in the spacious, air-conditioned third floor of the remodeled Bell Memorial Union, just a few hundred yards from its old Chestnut Street home.
“The nature of service in higher education is changing,” says Deanna Berg, current CAVE director. “The field has moved from campus-based volunteer centers, to curricular integration (service-learning), to campuswide efforts at civic engagement.”

Berg (BA, Liberal Studies, ’95) first got involved with CAVE in 1991. A roommate had signed up for a weekend trip to work with children at Napa State Hospital but didn’t want to go alone. “I thought it sounded fun, so went along to keep her company. I was hooked.”

Today, Berg oversees more than 20 different programs, 80 staff, and some 2,200 student volunteers each year. It’s impossible to estimate how many people have been affiliated with the organization over the years, she says, but since 1991, when data began being more systematically collected, more than 26,000 students have volunteered for the various programs, and CAVE has employed nearly 1,000 staff members. In 2004–2005 alone, CAVE volunteers racked up 89,000 hours.

“The CAVE volunteers have a huge impact here,” says Scott Dinits, the Chico Boys and Girls Club volunteer coordinator. Dinits, himself a former CAVE volunteer, will graduate from CSU, Chico in 2007 with a degree in communication studies. “Some of our kids have Down syndrome, some have ADD,” he says, “and we’ve seen tremendous improvement in them, thanks to CAVE volunteers.” Last year for the first time, a parent saw such improvement in her child that she requested a CAVE Special Pal for her child. “I can’t say enough about CAVE,” says Dinits. “It’s huge.”

In the past few years, CAVE has also dramatically increased its involvement with university curriculum. Many faculty use service-learning in their courses, and CAVE helps provide community placements, in-class orientations, student-led reflection, and other services. Currently, Berg and her staff are working with faculty and administrators to develop a campuswide strategic plan for civic engagement. At the same time, Berg is trying to create scholarships for student staff, whose stipends are the same today as they were in 1968—$50 a month for 40 hours.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, CAVE is reconnecting with alumni, forming a National CAVE Alumni Chapter. Berg is working to bring back past directors to share the history of CAVE. Alumni interested in more information or in helping develop the scholarship program can contact Berg at her CAVE office at dberg@csuchico.edu or 530-898-5818.

About the author

Stephen Metzger (BA, English, ’78; MA, English, ’81) teaches in the American Studies, English, and Journalism departments at CSU, Chico. As a student, in 1976, he worked in the Housing Affairs office of the Community Legal Information Center.