Volunteer 'army' to answer the call on Martin Luther King Day

He was the American prince of peace, and yet on the day set aside to honor the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., the third-largest army in the world will rise up in his name. This great summoning is a miracle beyond the muster of any army in history.

On today's National Day of Service, more than a million volunteers will answer the call, carrying trowels to plant gardens, ladles to feed the hungry and linens to line the beds of the homeless. The only armies larger than this one-day wonder are the People's Liberation Army of China and the United States military, the latter an all-volunteer force that costs nearly $700 billion a year to maintain. MLK Day volunteers, by contrast, work for the sheer joy of it.

Last year, the National Day of Service fell on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, and the new president called upon his skills as a former community organizer to create a kind of "volunteer chic." The Corporation for National and Community Service estimated that more than 1 million volunteers joined forces that day, and the number of organizations working under the agency's umbrella jumped from 5,000 to about 15,000.

"There was this incredible Obama high," recalled Marianne Mueller, a Palo Alto computer scientist who on Sunday led a coalition of the willing in a frenzy of stall mucking and composting at Homesteaders Ranch in Santa Clara, which is trying to preserve a piece of Santa Clara Valley's agricultural past. "I mean, people got
confused and were calling it the Obama Day of Service."

But as the poetry of Obama's grass-roots campaign gave way to the mossy prose of governance, there was some concern going into today's event that the volunteer spirit might decline in lock step with the president's poll numbers. The pool of local organizations partnering with the Corporation for National and Community Service this year has fallen from 15,000 to 11,000, according to Stephen Goldsmith, the agency's chairman. And after attracting 106 volunteers in 2009, Mueller got only 15 this year.

Still, most local groups experienced a surge of volunteers again today, leaving only the bad weather to dampen enthusiasm for outdoor events in the Bay Area. Rain or shine, Sacred Heart Community Service expected 175 volunteers to plant 70 organic, raised-bed gardens in the yards of low-income families as part of its La Mesa Verde (The Green Table) program. Last year, Sacred Heart closed its doors to honor King's legacy, but this year, the nonprofit has embraced the national campaign's "day on, not a day off" ethos.

"We definitely want to do it on the day we honor Martin Luther King's birthday," said Todd Madigan, Sacred Heart's director of development and communications. "When Dr. King said, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,' we really feel like there's an example of that in our own backyards. People in our community don't have enough to eat."

That's the same impulse driving 50 volunteers from Canopy, a nonprofit urban forestry organization in Palo Alto, to plant 25 fruit trees in East Palo Alto. "Creating a healthy food option has been a challenge in East Palo Alto," said Sharon Kelly, the organization's program director.