Young Adults and Volunteering

“Volunteering absolutely makes a difference. Whether you're volunteering as a tutor at
school, or like me, as a Boy Scout leader, or whether you're volunteering to read to somebody in a nursing home, it affects people's lives. And it makes your life more
fulfilling. It makes you have a good feeling, which probably makes you a happier person, which probably makes you better to be around.”

Tom was a 29-year-old computer analyst living in St Paul when the Network interviewed him a few years ago. Although he holds a full-time job, three times a week he teaches swimming to youth at the community center in the neighborhood where he grew up. He also sits on the planning board of the local Boy Scouts organization, which meets once a week. Tom started volunteering for both these programs when he was 18.

Americans are a nation of volunteers, but some have raised concerns that young adults today aren’t doing their part. The “me” generation is too cynical, too isolated behind their computers, or too selfish to pitch in, some say. Others see their volunteering as just a way to pad resumes for college applications.

Solid numbers are hard to come by, but it appears that the skeptics are being challenged. Young adults who started volunteering in high school, often to fulfill their “service learning” requirement, are continuing to pitch in during college. Volunteering by college students is growing at twice the rate of all other volunteering, according to a recent report by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The Obama campaign, and the Howard Dean campaign before it, have shown that youth do get involved in politics.

Yet, we still know relatively little about why young adults get involved, and more important, how—through which channels, which approaches speak to youth, and what keeps them interested. One thing is clear. Youth like Tom who start early in life are much more likely to become life-time volunteers. What is less clear is how institutions and organizations can hook that interest early and sustain it.

The Network recently opened the topic up for discussion at the biennial meetings of the Society for Research on Adolescence. Psychologists from Germany, Chile, Switzerland, and the United States spent the morning discussing how and why young adults volunteer, its effects on their well-being, and how the field can work to better understand their efforts and the benefits of civic participation both to society and to individuals.

“I think volunteering can be frustrating at times. People don't appreciate what you're doing,” said Tom. “But I think it's meaningful, especially if you're working with young people like I do. You make their lives, hopefully, one little bit better each week. And it makes your community better.”

In an existential sense, being a part of something bigger gives us meaning, it helps to shape our ideas of who we are and how we fit into the world. The need to matter remains central to the human condition. Perhaps modern society—paradoxically more connected technologically than ever before—is piquing our need as humans to matter and stand up and be counted. Down with anomie, up with people. After a few decades of rising materialism, disenchantment, distrust, and misanthropy among young adults, perhaps the reaction has begun.