Volunteers of America

I am an officer and on the board of directors of two non-profit organizations and a volunteer in a third. Every non-profit board member I talk to complains about the same problem: lack of volunteer help. One of the articles of faith in the non-profit world is that volunteerism is on the wane. This is often linked in many people's minds to the demise of a feeling of community, particularly in the suburbs that house an increasing part of the country's population. The perception is fueled by books on the topic like Bowling Alone.

I've always wondered if this was really true. It's been my suspicion that people are still volunteering but there are a lot more non-profit organizations than there used to be. Take (non-school) organizations for kids. The main ones in most places used to be Little League baseball, Pop Warner football and character-building organizations like the Scouts. But as kids' lives have gotten massively overstructured, there are now soccer, basketball, swim team, karate, reading groups, writing groups, youth theatre... the list goes on and on. Many of these are year round activities. Each of these requires volunteers to run them. And that's just organizations for kids.

This piece in The Christian Science Monitor confirms my suspicions. It reports that in 2005, some 29 percent of Americans served as volunteers. This is the highest figure in 30 years.

While 'conventional wisdom' disparages baby boomers as selfish and teens as apathetic, the piece notes that these two groups, along with seniors, are driving the boom in volunteerism. Older teens now volunteer at nearly the same percentage as the population as a whole.

Some attribute this to the fact that the US hasn't had the welfare state of many Western European countries so people have to pitch in for their neighbors to pick up the slack. They contend that social democracy (usually mislabelled 'socialism') infantalizes people and renders them unmotivated to volunteer. Interestingly, social democratic Sweden's volunteerism rate (28 percent) is nearly the same as America's and social democratic Norway's rate (52 percent) is almost double.

But the United States appears to rank second on the list with a 29 percent volunteer rate so maybe Americans aren't quite as selfish as we appear to outsiders... or to ourselves.