New-wave volunteerism

“We’re eager to help, but not to join.”

That was the headline of an Oregonian article on Sunday, May 4, about new nationwide trends of volunteering. More often, people are choosing to volunteer their time in an a la carte sort of way. Instead of joining civic organizations such as an Elks or Rotary Club, altruistic individuals are spending their time day to day, here and there, dropping in on projects and causes when they can make it work.

“Volunteers might pull an all-nighter for an issue close to their hearts, but don’t ask them to join a subcommittee,” Laura Oppenheimer wrote. “It’s about the experience, not the institution.” “Episodic volunteering,” as the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) calls it, is on the rise.

While the downswing of civic organizational membership is definitely due to a generational gap (a paltry 10 percent of the downtown Rotary Club chapter is aged 35 or younger), American adults are actually volunteering more than at any other time in the last 30 years, with a 28.8 percent volunteer rate in 2003-05, according to the CNCS.

That figure is up from a historic low of 20.4 percent in 1989, when, it’s theorized, the “Me Culture” of the ’80s helped people disconnect and lose touch with community. But a volunteering America has been resurgent in recent years, though it has taken a very different shape.

Not only are people volunteering their time under less bureaucratic and organized conditions, they’re doing it in ways that fit their lifestyle. In true 21st century style, volunteers take interests or skills, from cooking to organizing to bicycle repair, and look for a way to make them useful when they can, streamlining selflessness into their busy modern lives.

In fewer places is this more evident than the Web-based organization Hands On Greater Portland (www.handsonportland.org), which connects volunteers with projects of their liking. You can browse through a master calendar of volunteer opportunities, or search through projects by region, time commitment and type of skill needed.

There’s even a “My Volunteer Page,” which tracks the current things you’re involved in, the courses or projects you’ve headed up and the number of hours you’ve spent doing good works, all broken down by the type of volunteering you’ve done. It’s almost like a social networking site, just without the friends page, and a lot better for the world around you.

It’s a strange thing when technological entities such as Hands On Greater Portland get us out of our homes and into the community, and not real-life community organizations. (Whatever “real-life” means in 2008. That term’s getting muddy, too.)

The isolationist cable-TV culture of the ’80s and ’90s that was bemoaned by every axe grinder from Jonathan Franzen to Garrison Keillor has been inverted on its ear by the Web 2.0 culture of this decade. Technology is now cutting us off and connecting us to each other. We don’t seek out people to do good works with over and over, we find the good works online and meet strangers to do them with (and friend them on Facebook afterward).

Some of this is a generational thing. Millenials have been characterized in generational studies as compassionate, energetic and fervent to help and make a difference. According to Strauss’ and Howe’s theory of generational types, Millienials are a “hero” generation, considered to be optimistic, hard-working and vigorous institution-builders, spurred by 9/11 and a shitty administration to fix our mess of a country.

In other words, we want to save the fucking world, and indeed much of the growth in volunteering since 1989 has been spearheaded by teenagers, according to the CNCS report. The rate of volunteering among college students grew by 20 percent between 2002 and 2005, more than double the 9 percent growth rate of all adult volunteers during the same period.

Yet Millenials are also characterized as impatient, sporadic, demanding and too flexible for their own good. We want to save the world, but we’d really like to do it today, and we’re not quite sure what form that’s going to take, because there are a lot of things we’d like to do to help, and we can’t pick just one. Oh, and don’t call us, we’ll call you, because we’re sort of busy.

One of the more intriguing findings of the CNCS report was that college students who work part-time jobs volunteer at a significantly higher rate than college students who don’t work at all. Trying to do it all, I guess.

Sites such as Hands On Greater Portland may not have been designed with Millenials in mind, but they are tailor-made for this new world where individualism and altruism are making for some strange bedfellows. For weirdness on an advanced level, look no further than my.barackobama.com, the campaign’s social networking site that gives you points based on how much you’ve done for the campaign, then uses them to rank you comparatively with other users.

You may have heard that Obama’s online support has given him some oomph this past year (and I’m moving up in the world at 124,105th place, in case you were wondering).

It’s invigorating and refreshing that the nationwide uptick of volunteering is occurring not in spite of, but in part due to, modern technology. So let’s keep it going. There are so many ways to make this world a better place, even if it’s just an hour here or there.

The Elks and Kiwanis and their ilk might well be fond memories come a few decades, gone the way of the dodo and Polaroid film. The spirit of what those organizations have done don’t have to be memories. Let’s sign up, log in and carry on.