Anybody can give money.

We on Bainbridge Island certainly have a lot of it to give, and we tend to offer it up fairly generously – as any number of wildly successful fund-raising drives attest. Pritchard Park and other big-dollar capital campaigns, the tremendous annual support for the Bainbridge Foundation, the periodic, more personal causes that come out of nowhere and earn the spontaneous support of the community – all demonstrate the willingness of individual islanders to offer up their resources for a good beyond their own immediate needs.

So there’s no great surprise to the ongoing positive response of Bainbridge folk moved by the unimaginable need in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities, and particularly heartening has been the empathy of local youths. Even as floodwaters ravaged the Crescent City and the extent of the destruction had yet to find clear focus, youths on Sunrise Drive set up a lemonade stand to raise funds for the Red Cross. A used-toy sale in West Blakely raised more than $300 for relief efforts, while we’re told of a similar sale in the Seabold neighborhood that brought in several times that amount. Somewhere along the line, our kids are picking up the right values.

As the entity most directly charged with reflecting our community’s shared values and goals, our city has wrestled with its own proper response. In several recent discussions, our City Council has considered committing $75,000 in public funds to the relief effort, while elsewhere in this issue, readers will learn that perhaps three dozen public employees – following the lead set by Fire Chief Jim Walkowski, who has just returned from a tour of duty in the South – have volunteered to lend their time and expertise to help relief efforts on the ground. Lance Newkirk, operations manager for the public works department, has packed his toothbrush and duct tape and leads a vanguard of city volunteers over the coming months.

There is a pragmatic side to such a response, namely, the unusually direct experience in post-disaster cleanup that volunteers will get on the scene. Based on his experiences in Louisiana, Chief Walkowski already cautions that should the Big One strike the Puget Sound region – a near certainty, given our position in the plate tectonic scheme – the island will have to fend for itself for longer than previously thought. The disruption of ferries or failure of the bridge, coupled with the likely disruptions of regional services and suppliers, will leave the island in an isolation more literal than the most strident no-growther could ever dream of. We need to plan accordingly.

There is too the symbolic value of sending island hands and minds into the disaster zone to help restore the lives of our neighbors in the South. Not to diminish financial donations – more of us should be writing more checks, for more causes, more often – but there’s often a certain detachment to monetary giving, as if simply opening the wallet or purse absolves us of further responsibility or thought.

But anybody can give money; it seems so much more meaningful to give time and self. That some three dozen of our public employees would volunteer to head to New Orleans, that says more about Bainbridge Island than any check cut by the city ever could.