Soon after I moved to Chicago in the mid-1960s, those heady days of civil rights activism, I became the volunteer public relations director for the North Shore Summer Project, an effort sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee to integrate the northern lakeside suburbs. All that summer I wrote news releases, gave interviews, got hate mail, and, as my high point, helped coordinate a Chicago visit by Coretta Scott King.
The publisher of Community, a small church magazine, asked me to write about the Summer Project. As an English major, I had penned umpteen papers, but I had never written a full-length complex article, so I spent hours and hours writing, editing, and rewriting. Community loved my story – and I can’t say I didn’t get paid: I received 100 copies of the magazine. (You don’t know how hard it is to give away 100 magazines!)
My real pay for that piece came when the AFSC’s national PR director told me that Parents Magazine wanted to run a story about another AFSC project and asked whether I’d like to have a go at it. She taught me how to write a query letter and held my hand during the writing of the article – and its revision when Parents said, “We like it, but …” And thus I was launched into the crazy career of the freelance writer.
Over the years I’ve always made time for volunteering. Besides feeling that this is a way to give back to society, it’s sometimes a way to write about topics that matter to me. There are other rewards too – putting your name out there, making contacts, building your resume.
In 1996, after I had been interviewing for some 30 years, I heard about Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Project, videotaping Holocaust survivors, and I decided to use my skills to make a contribution to history. This stint also turned out to be not purely altruistic, since I received valuable oral history training and went on to do some paid interviewing.
Now I write and edit a newsletter for a women’s organization and enjoy the easy, no-pressure, interesting work. And, of course, there’s ASJA. Besides an article for the January newsletter, the words you just read were paid only by the satisfaction that after all that ASJA has done for me, I can give back a little. But now you might get a financial payoff in writing for the newsletter – from the monthly lottery, in which you just might win a year’s dues.