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The Another Way logo suggests we need not depend on money to reach goals. Too much time and energy is spent waiting for funding—talking about problems and seeking subsidies or lobbying for new government programs. Another Way acts as a matchmaker and operates on trades, not grants. Trade is an important concept and should be something that people automatically think of in connection with the Volunteer Corps. Responsibility is reinforced when trade is substituted for the entitlement mindset.
In 1961 LIFE magazine photographer did a story on a 12-year-old boy who lived in a one-room shack in Rio de Janeiro with his parents and seven brothers and sisters. A photograph of the exhausted boy, accompanied by the words, "I am not afraid of death, but what will they do after?", referring to his younger siblings, evoked letters and financial contributions from thousands of LIFE's readers. The boy's family was moved into a new house in Rio de Janerio and the boy was flown to Denver where for two years he lived a comparatively idyllic life in the United States while receiving treatments for asthma. Thirteen years later he was married and working as a security guard in Brazil. He soon had three children and a house of his own. Thirty-five years later he had lost his job, separated from his wife and was living in the house LIFE's readers had purchased, which was now run-down and providing shelter for three generations---16 people in all.
In 1968, LIFE magazine photographer, Gordon Parks, lived with a black family in Harlem in an attempt to show America why black America was angry. He produced a 16-page portrait of a middle-aged couple living in "a crumbling rat-infested apartment" with eight of their ten children. The man, referred to as an unemployed laborer, drank and beat his wife out of frustration in not being able to retain a job. LIFE purchased a home in the suburbs for the family with the hope of giving them a fresh start. Unfortunately, the house burned to the ground, killing one son and the father who, while smoking, had passed out from too much alcohol, consumed in celebration of a new job. The wife moved the rest of the family back to Harlem where drugs, alcohol and AIDS killed all but two of the children. The wife/mother died there in 1990.
In 1987 LIFE once again sent a photographer-writer team to spend a week with a homeless couple living in their car with two young children. They described the following "cruel obstacles" which kept the family "from making headway, despite their energy and optimism—the bureaucratic foul-ups, the scarcity of day care, the Catch-22s (a job applicant with no address can't be hired; a would-be tenant must have a job), and the sheer bad luck." And again the photographs—especially of the children—elicited gifts and job offers from sympathetic LIFE readers. A revisit eight years later revealed the couple had squandered the generosity of the well-intended and "had two more children and a soul-ravaging drug habit, and Linda's daughter Crissy had accused her stepfather of fondling her." The text accompanying the photos from the second visit asked, "What to do when kids must be saved from their parents?"
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