Volunteers are being drawn to youth and community

The Corporation for National and Community Service has released their annual survey of volunteerism in the U.S., showing a small drop in volunteer hours from 2005 to 2006. The broader context has been growth in volunteerism rates for a couple decades now; the data source is the Census Bureau's monthly surveying of about 60,000 households.

The report offers a variety of breakdowns on volunteerism which are interesting. For example when they compare 2006 to 1989 in terms of the different types of non-profits people are volunteering for, the big growth is for education/youth service groups (almost a doubled percentage of all volunteers now compared to then) and social or community service groups (a third more of all volunteers now than then). The recent losers of this particular sort of market share have been civic and professional groups, sports/hobby/arts groups, hospitals and health groups, and religious groups a little bit.

The report has a variety of rankings of the 50 states by volunteerism (hours, volunteers, rates of change, etc.) which shows generally that Midwesterners are volunteering at higher rates than any other part of the country. Utah is a huge outlier at the top end, I assume due to the Mormon theological emphasis on volunteering. But it would be interesting to see those breakdowns correlated with various demographics, e.g. are the states with older populations the ones with the highest volunteerism rates? And presumably various folks are busily crunching these new numbers to try to support or debunk the Charles Brooks theory about religious conservative folks volunteering more than any other group.

Boomers are volunteering more -- for now

A large U.S. federal study says that as the Baby Boomers moved into middle age they sharply ramped up their rates of volunteering, but that they are also less willing to consider stereotypical envelope-stuffing as worth their time. Since there are more and more opportunities today to do more than that, it follows that non-profits which still think in the older terms will increasingly fall behind in volunteer recruitment.

The Corporation for National and Community Service, which was created in 1993 as the parent agency of AmeriCorps, used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau to compare volunteerism rates in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000s. They concluded that "Boomers in their late 40s to mid-50s are volunteering at higher rates than members of the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation did at the same age. Boomers were volunteering at lower rates than their predecessors while in their 30s, but that trend has reversed."

The study found that volunteers today are most interested in making active, challenging contributions with their time, in particular "professional activities – such as managing people or projects", "music or some other type of performance" and "tutoring, mentoring and coaching". The researchers concluded that volunteers who are asked to do general simple labor for non-profits are far less likely nowadays to return for more.

That research fits with a couple of trends in the non-profit sector. One of them is the success in certain niches of programs where a relatively complex mission is carried out entirely by volunteers. I've participated in one spectacular example which was in large part invented here in the Chicago area: intensive ecological restoration carried out by self-governing volunteer groups who follow the scientific advice of trained ecologists. More and more civic efforts in other fields, such as disaster relief and public-schools improvement, are accomplishing things via similar structures.

A related concept is that of non-profits whose mission is to formalize professional volunteerism and thereby enable more of it. Such a group takes responsibility for recruiting professionals who want to do some volunteering with their particular professional expertise (marketing, accounting, legal advice, information technology, whatever) and matching them up with non-profits which really need the specific help and which are equipped to make good use of it. This gets at the problem that we've all seen of well-meaning professionals who end up feeling like their time and energy was wasted or that the non-profit they volunteered at was really just trying to cultivate them as a donor (both feelings often being, alas, accurate).

One type of this sort of "volunteerism broker" group is service groups organized by subject, such as Lawyers for the Creative Arts and their analogues in numerous other cities. A new organization which is attempting to take the concept to scale across professional disciplines is Taproot Foundation (which makes "service grants" of volunteer time, not money grants), founded by the son of the original designer of the Peace Corps.

If that federal research is right then more such organizing efforts could yield major long-term benefits for the U.S. non-profit sector and for that matter for American society in general, and could like the formal civic sector itself become an American invention which spreads around the world.

Fundraising in the buff addendum

OK so the volunteers-posing-almost-nude-for-the-fundraising-calendar thing is officially no longer just a big-city concept, if it ever was. In fact for at least one photographer it's a specialty. In fact now there's a website (naturally) tracking the whole trend. This is either a fun example of the grass-roots dynamism of today's non-profit sector or one more sign of the West's slide into decadent indolence. Your call.

"Men of Mortuaries"? Gah, if you keep the website photo on your screen their shirts melt away. No I'm not kidding, wish I was....In Wisconsin people got naked with their family dogs to raise money for the local animal shelter. Ah but the cat people are in on it too.

In Louisville it's local restaurant chefs (thankfully that guy posed with a trout in his lap not a perch). For breast-cancer research this idea has perhaps already become a cliche. The U.K. apparently has enough "lady jockeys" to fill a whole year. And they have un-shy farmers too. A local Lion's Club, sure why not. But Rotarians?? FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE NOT THE ROTARIANS!!!

Let's recruit board members to hold cultivation events in their virtual houses

By now you've probably heard of Second Life, the online virtual world that now has more than 2 million "residents" and rising fast. It now includes businesses which make both virtual and real-life money, houses, clubs and societies, virtual sex (of course), arts and music and filmmaking communities, GM opening a car dealership, educators opening schools, and more. Like it's own reality TV show (wait, so that's a "reality" show which is watched in a non-real universe er um....existential conundrums give me a headache).

It also has a non-profit sector. Established non-profits are extending events into Second Life, or simply exploring it and recruiting volunteers there, taking real-world fundraising events into Second Life, conducting charitable-giving drives...for all I know somebody's right now organizing Second Life's first sector conference at which the cocktail-hour chatter will be all about whether "there are too many non-profits chasing too few donors..."

Kids today! They're volunteering, a lot

A comprehensive national study has concluded that volunteerism in the U.S. is booming, including an eye-popping doubling among teenagers compared to the late 1980s. The study also found that folks aged 45 to 64 are volunteering at higher rates than their parents did at the same age, as are senior citizens.

The study's authors think that this growth is driven by "social trends such as the rise of service and service-learning in the schools, higher education levels among adults, delayed child-bearing, and longer life expectancy." I wonder if another factor isn't some maturity in the non-profit sector in terms of how well we recruit and manage volunteers. That's one of the ways in which, in my current role as a foundation officer, I am often impressed with how much smarter young non-profit staffers seem now than my age group was at the same professional level a decade or two ago.