A report released last month by AmeriCorps and the U.S. Census Bureau shows that a smaller share of the American population is volunteering now than it did two decades ago and devoting fewer hours to such activities. While the recent data is attributable in part to the pandemic, the larger issues at play were decades in the making.
From September 2020 to 2021, less than one-quarter of Americans age 16 and older volunteered for an organization or association, according to the survey. That’s down from 30 percent in 2019 and from 27.6 percent 20 years earlier, when, as head of AmeriCorps’s predecessor, the Corporation for National and Community Service, I helped launch the survey — the first official count of volunteering in the United States.
The drop-in hours donated each year by volunteers was especially sharp during the past two decades, plunging from 52 in 2002 to 40 in 2017, and 26 in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. Data from the latest survey put the number of hours Americans devote annually to volunteering at just 25.
The impact of Covid-19 is of course a significant factor in the latest data. The volunteer rate among parents of school-age children, for instance, dropped more than that of parents with no children at home. The decrease was also sharper among people with higher levels of education who were generally more likely to comply with Covid restrictions.
On the other hand, although the percentage of people volunteering went down in most states, the relationship to state pandemic policies is unclear. For example, in California, where Covid policies were relatively restrictive, the volunteer rate declined less than in Florida, where Covid restrictions were more relaxed. And informal types of helping, such as doing favors for neighbors, remained steady at nearly 51 percent even during a period of lockdowns and social distancing.
Regardless of the reasons, a decrease in formal volunteering is costly to the nonprofit world. Work previously done by volunteers must be handled by paid staff or not get done at all. Giving to nonprofits also suffers since people who volunteer are likely to contribute money as well. Moreover, this decline was in the works years before the pandemic — despite ongoing efforts to reverse it.
Since the 1990s, scholars such as Harvard University’s Robert Putnam have called attention to stagnant or falling participation in elections, social clubs, unions, and other groups, as well as in charitable giving and volunteering. The creation of AmeriCorps was one of several government and private efforts to respond. Starting in 2002, the survey of volunteering sought to measure progress and was joined later by another one that tracked civic engagement more broadly. The two were merged in the mid-2010s and are now administered every two years.
The early findings were encouraging. Though lower than many had hoped, the volunteer rate grew from the initial 27.6 percent in 2002 to 29 percent by 2005. For the next decade, however, it hovered around 27 percent before jumping to 30 percent in 2017, an increase that may partly reflect revisions to the survey that year. The first civic-engagement assessment in 2008-09 found that almost 58 percent of the population claimed to “directly” help their neighbors through activities such as watching each other’s children and running errands. About one-third of these informal volunteers gave time to formal organizations or associations as well.
Shift in Trends
This year’s report tells a different story. Despite two decades of population growth, the 60.7 million people who reported volunteering for nonprofits was just 1 million more than the number who did so in 2002. Although nearly 51 percent of the population reported helping their neighbors in the latest survey, only 10 percent did so daily or weekly. An AmeriCorps/Census Bureau report on other kinds of civic engagement, such as voting in local elections, attending public meetings, participating in boycotts, and posting views online, is due to be published in March.
In “A Less Charitable Nation,” an analysis of the Census Bureau survey through 2015, the University of Maryland’s Robert Grimm Jr. and Nathan Dietz concluded that underlying reduced rates of volunteering and civic engagement were three social trends: declining religious affiliation, delayed family formation, and the aging of baby boomers. A population that is less religious, has fewer children, and includes more people who have left the workforce will also have a harder time maintaining volunteer participation in organizations and associations. Since 2015, these trends have continued.
As the pandemic recedes, the short-term obstacles to recruiting volunteers should lessen. Indeed, nonprofit leaders participating in an AmeriCorps webinar about the new survey said their organizations were beginning to see a return of volunteers. But the longer-term trends are more challenging. In a report released last week, Grimm and Dietz found that nonprofits are still struggling to recruit volunteers and that the problems they faced 20 years ago have only worsened. For example, they found that 46.8 percent of nonprofit leaders regarded recruiting sufficient volunteers as a “big problem,” twice as many as similar surveys found in 2017 and 2019.
Few Success Stories
In part, this is because efforts to increase civic engagement have had minimal impact. AmeriCorps, the principal national service program, remains relatively small and voluntary. Its alumni do express a great deal of interest in continuing to serve their communities, but these were folks who signed up for AmeriCorps in the first place — meaning they were already more inclined toward volunteer work than their peers.
Schools at all education levels have tried a vast array of ways to encourage philanthropy, volunteering, and other types of civic engagement among students. Little agreement exists about what works or how to conduct these programs at a scale that involves students who might not otherwise participate — or are among the growing number who attend school remotely. And with education now a battleground in the so-called culture wars, recent efforts to restore civic education to the curriculum seem likely to generate more heat than light.
Americans clearly want to lend a hand — at least on an informal basis — as the two decades of surveys on volunteering and civic engagement consistently show. The challenge for the nonprofit field is to find ways to transform these occasional acts of kindness into a regular commitment to their organizations and community life.
