Cecilia Dockendorff

Seeking to reactivate latent altruism and to bridge growing divisions in Chilean society, Cecilia Dockendorff is creating new mechanisms to stimulate volunteerism and philanthropy in Chile. Key tools in that undertaking include a highly successful "Guide to United Action," distributed with all phone books, and a parallel media campaign.

Cecilia Dockendorff is deeply troubled by a growing gulf between rich and poor in Chilean society and by the absence of concern among many Chileans in relatively comfortable circumstances for the well-being of their less fortunate neighbors. As she puts it, "there are two Chiles and they never meet." But she also believes that the widespread passivity and failure to respond to pressing social needs that characterize the current moment in Chile's history can be overcome, that additional and much-needed human and financial resources can be channeled into social action and that the country's ailing civil society can be reinvigorated.
Working through a nongovernmental organization that she established in 1993, Cecilia is engaged in an ambitious program to reawaken concern for the well-being of the community at large and to stimulate engagement in social action. The centerpiece of her effort is a widely distributed "Guide to United Action" that acquaints its readers with a broad array of community service organizations and projects and invites support, in the form of volunteer service and financial contributions, for those undertakings. The guide has met with an immensely encouraging response and Cecilia is now developing several other initiatives with similarly promising potential for spurring volunteerism and philanthropy in Chile.

By some important measurements, Chile has made remarkable progress in recent years. In the political realm, after seventeen years of oppressive rule by an authoritarian military regime, democracy was restored in 1990, human rights enjoy renewed protection and the rule of law again prevails. In the economic arena, the country's per capita gross national product is increasing at a faster rate (an average of 6.5 percent per year over the past decade) than that of any other country in the Americas.
But those accomplishments have been accompanied by more disturbing trends. Chile's much-touted "economic miracle" has indeed produced rapidly rising incomes for "the fortunate few." Unfortunately, however, most Chileans have not shared in those gains and the gap between the country's rich and poor is widening at an alarming rate. (According to World Bank statistics, in 1994, the most fortunate ten percent of Chile's population received 46.1 percent of total income, while the least advantaged ten percent received only a 1.4 percent share.) That mounting gap is evident not only in sharply divergent lifestyles between rich city-dwellers and poor rural families but also within the country's major urban areas, where some live in splendor while growing numbers of people inhabit sprawling, miserably poor areas at the cities' outskirts.
Chile's widening socio-economic gap has been accompanied by a deepening and even more disconcerting, cultural gulf. More difficult to describe (and impossible to portray in statistical terms), that gulf is characterized by a palpable indifference on the part of many (or perhaps most) of those who are better off economically then the far from enviable situations of the majority of their fellow citizens. The origins of that indifference can be traced, at least in part, to the country's turbulent political history over the last quarter-century: the failures of Allende's "socialist experiment" and the consequent tainting of the notion of collective action; the harsh and repressive response of the Pinochet regime to attempts at social mobilization; and economic policies initiated in the Pinochet era, but continued under Presidents Aylwin and Frei, that rely very heavily on "free market" mechanisms bound to a philosophical outlook in which the welfare of the poor is not a prominent concern.
But whatever its origins, what Cecilia describes as a "progressive numbing of our innate concern for others" is a major obstacle to the mobilization of the talent, energies and financial resources that effective remedies for major social problems require. It is also tearing at the nation's "social fabric" and posing mounting threats to the continued evolution of a stable, democratic polity.

In 1993, Cecilia created a new organization, SOLES (Solidarity and Spirituality), to serve as an institutional base for a concerted and unusually imaginative effort to address those ills. The first important building block in that initiative was a "Guide to United Action." A directory of more that 1,300 community service and social change organizations (addressing the needs of children, young people, women, the elderly, the disabled and the community at large), the Guide describes their purposes and needs and how they can be contacted. It also encourages its readers to volunteer their services and/or make financial contributions to those organizations. The Guide is distributed free of charge to more than one million homes and offices in Santiago with their telephone books and it serves, in effect, as the "yellow pages" for community service opportunities. The underlying information base that SOLES draws on to produce the Guide is regularly updated, and a third edition of the Guide will be produced in mid-1998.
Within a few months of the Guide's initial publication in 1995, more than 70 percent of the organizations listed received calls from people willing to help. When the guide was launched, Cecilia also established a "hot line" to field questions. In addition to the calls that the organizations receive directly, the hot line has received as many as 100 calls per day, roughly half of them from people offering various forms of assistance–volunteer services, equipment, food and other supplies and money. Although it was not anticipated when the Guide was being readied for publication, the other half of the hot line calls were from people seeking help. Responding to the needs of that group, Cecilia is now developing additional orientation materials that will help point them to appropriate organizations and public agencies.
Cecilia has also developed a multimedia communications campaign to complement the guide and attract additional attention and resources to community service and social change groups. An important element of that campaign is a weekly television program that features the work of individual organizations, the role of volunteers in those organizations and SOLES's work in bringing them together.
Cecilia has ambitious plans for the expansion of the institution's programs. In the near future, using the successful format of the Santiago publication, additional guides will be developed for other cities and regions throughout the country. Cecilia also intends to organize training programs for volunteers and to develop teaching materials on community service and social action for use in school curricula.
In addition, building on the experience that she has gained in enlisting the cooperation of more than a dozen business firms in the production and distribution of the Santiago Guide, she plans to develop a sustained campaign to promote the concepts of social responsibility and philanthropy in Chile's business community.
Cecilia's work is attracting increasing attention both at home and abroad. As a member of the technical committee of a National Council for Overcoming Poverty that President Frei has established, she has an added forum for enlisting support from fellow Chileans for her organization. And as a participant in seminars and workshops organized by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation's "Leadership in Philanthropy" program and the Women's Leadership Conference of the Americas, she is also sharing her ideas and experience with social activists in other Latin American settings.

Although one of her great-grandfathers, a United States citizen, fought for the abolitionist cause during the Civil War and an activist cousin "disappeared" during the dark days of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, Cecilia's immediate family was not significantly engaged in social and political endeavors. Her early experience, growing up in comfortable circumstances in a conservative Chilean household, did not foretell the role that she would later play as a tireless social entrepreneur.
Cecilia's university studies in the field of anthropology were interrupted by the Pinochet government's "interventions" in Chile's universities, but she resumed her studies at the Catholic University in Santiago, from which she received a degree in sociology. For a brief period after completing that degree, she was employed as a researcher at the Santiago headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. She soon discovered, however, that working in a bureaucratic setting, poring over dry statistics and writing reports on social issues was not her calling.
What Cecilia sought instead, even then, was a more direct engagement in addressing social needs–an opportunity to make a more tangible contribution to setting things right. Unfortunately, such opportunities were in short supply under the authoritarian military regime that ruled Chile until 1990. But Cecilia spent the decade of the 1980s in a series of institutions, including the United Workers' Front, that were attempting to forge connections between social research and social action in fields ranging from trade union organization to human rights and poverty alleviation.
The inauguration of a democratically elected government in 1990 presented new and promising possibilities for a person of Cecilia's bent. Although the advent of democratic rule couldn't immediately remedy the many, deep-seated problems that seventeen years of repressive rule had left in its wake, it did open up new space for individual activists and nongovernmental organizations to tackle such problems. Cecilia thus began to search both for a new role for herself and for a mechanism and strategy that would enlist the talents, energies and commitments of large numbers of her fellow citizens in social action addressing a broad spectrum of pressing needs.
By early 1993, Cecilia's thoughts had jelled and the outlines of the strategy that she would resolutely pursue had fallen into place. She then moved briskly forward with the creation of the needed mechanism, "SOLES,"and the innovative program described above.
Cecilia's unmistakable charisma and her ability to spur others into action are legendary and the concluding section of her Guide for United Action reveals the formula that is embodied in those traits. "Promoting social change," she tells her readers, "is simply organized sedition: you must go out, propose, negotiate, dialogue, move about, excite, seduce." Those words are also an apt description of a typical day in the life of Cecilia.