Volunteerism and Unemployment: The Surprising Inverse Relationship

USA Today reported today that the number of volunteers in America dropped by 600,000 from last year, bringing the national volunteering rate down by a half a percentage point, to 26.3%. The data was from Volunteering In America, a government website that tracks and reports on -- what else? -- volunteering in America. Last week, we got the new jobs numbers out, and although they weren't as cringe-inducingly dismal as expected, they still mean we have an unemployment rate at 9.1% This got me thinking, if more of us are unemployed, then shouldn't we have more spare time to do other things, like volunteering in our communities?

Volunteerism: it's not a function of spare time!

For a number of reasons, I don't really like to track the unemployment rate, but rather the civilian labor force participation rate. This is a measure of everyone of working age that is either actively employed or seeking employment. It doesn't include students, retired people, stay-at-home parents, people in prisons, informal workers, or people who have given up looking for work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the current U.S. participation rate stands now at 63.9%. This is as low as it's been in the past 30 years. This means that more Americans (about 36% of us) are not working and not looking for work than anytime since the early 1980s. One might think that working-age Americans have more time on their hands than usual.

So, given that (1) there are a lot of Americans suffering in the current economy (2) both State and Federal governments are pulling back resources from social programs, and (3) it would appear that Americans have more time than usual to volunteer, shouldn't we expect to see rates of volunteerism up?

According to Volunteering In America, the national volunteer rate now stands at 26.3%. This is down from 28.8% in 2003, 2004, and 2005. In other words, there are over 2.5 million fewer Americans volunteering today than just six years ago. What's going on? Do people just volunteer less when they are unemployed?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that's exactly what's going on. In a report released earlier this year, between 2006 and 2010, employed people volunteered at a rate 6-7 percentage points more than unemployed people. So, we shouldn't be too surprised then that we see rates of volunteerism falling as unemployment rates increase.

If we were to graph unemployment rates and rates of volunteerism together, they'd make an "X", which reminds me, you should read my other post from today, "Generation X -- the heroes of volunteerism in America."

 

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Comments

[Edward Wilkes]

03:21 AM on 09/10/2011

I am not surprised. I know some that have stopped volunteering, because now that they are unemployed many charities will not help them.

[KFservewell]

05:24 PM on 08/12/2011

Surprised to see this trend. Makes me wonder: which primary demographic is volunteering less? In our work with year long service volunteer programs, millenials seem to be bucking the trend. Some service organizations are seeing a record number of applicants (JVC-Northwest, for example, had a 50% increase). Unfortunately, Congress recently took the wind out of these sails, which threatens the quantity and quality of service volunteerism by making drastic cuts to AmeriCorps ($22.5 million in cuts to AmeriCorps Education Awards). In spite of debt and budget challenges, prioritizing funding for young adult service volunteerism has critical economic and social implications. Under-funding AmeriCorps discourages young adults from opportunities to develop professional skills and an ethic of service. Squeezing service volunteer organizations threatens not only the quantity of volunteers, but also the ability of organizations to provide quality service volunteer care (including proper training and debriefing).

[OCSLK]

12:03 AM on 08/10/2011

Recently, I have been considering volunteering at my local public library since I only work about 30-35 hours a week. Then I started wondering if volunteering in such a capacity would enable the library to get by with fewer employees. If you figure that four library volunteers do the work of about one assistant or page in a week, volunteerism could be swallowing up jobs in some settings. On the other hand, if a library only has the budget to hire a "skeleton crew," and the library and, by extension, the community it serves can be bettered by volunteer workers, volunteering would be a good thing. However, I remain ambivalent. Anyone else have thoughts about this?

[Aaron Ausland]

11:56 AM on 08/10/2011

This is a good question, do volunteers displace employees? I haven't looked at the data on this (good idea for future post), but my experience is that they don't. Organizations like to hire people for core functions - they need to know that they can rely on that function getting done and only a contracted fully-vetted employee can provide the stability and certainty they need. Trained employees tend to stay on longer than volunteers, accumulating experience and competency. They use volunteers for work that, while important, if not not done wouldn't put their core functions at risk. So, things run a lot smoother with the volunteer, but they don't necessarily fall apart as they would without their employees. So, I think volunteers make life better for the organization and for the employees, without displacing them. My guess then, is that the library and your community would welcome your generous gift of time at the library - more things would get done well and on time, and it is very unlikely that you'd be helping to keep someone unemployed.

[Julie Edwards]

06:10 PM on 08/13/2011

As someone who is a paid employee of a non-profit, I can tell you that most volunteers do not bring the full set of skills needed for a particular paid position that requires specific skills. Also, volunteers cannot be relied upon as a paid staff member because they are not subject to discipline or termination; thus, truly relevant positions that need a dedicated person for a specific number of hours cannot be replaced by volunteers. That said, I agree with Aaron that things run a lot smoother with volunteers, but they don't necessaril­y fall apart as they would without their employees. I know we are always grateful for help....there is always more to do than their are people to do it. Many people who work for non-profits, in particular, wear multiple hats and can use assistance with everything from answering phones to writing thank you notes to chores specific to their non-profit (i.e. I work for a humane society so we always need people to socialize with the animals and man weekend adoption events). I say find a cause you are passionate about and find out how your talents can help them. You and they will be better for it!

[UnderempAmerica]

11:02 PM on 08/09/2011

Why do people think the unemployed have time to volunteer? Finding work in this economy is a full-time job. Why would you think people have time and resources to volunteer right now?

I wish I had the luxury. The places I used to volunteer and donate to really want no part of the unemployed/underemployed because we need the services now. There is major discrimination against both groups by volunteer agencies.

[Aaron Ausland]

11:44 AM on 08/10/2011

UnderempAmerica,

I'm afraid you've been unnecessarily offended. You raise a very important point, which is that those who are looking for work are in fact participating in the labor force, they just don't have a paying job yet. This is actually one of the main reasons I used the Civilian Labor Force Participation rate instead of the unemployment rate in my analysis. The CLFP rate includes both those who are working and those seeking work, while excluding a whole bunch of other people, (people not of working age, stay-at-home parents, people who've given up on looking, etc.) In other words, the issue you raise is taken into account by the data I used.

[Amanda Magee]

05:05 PM on 08/09/2011

Fascinating. I suppose that when we feel down and out, the impulse is to sulk, rather than extend a hand and help ourselves by helping someone else.

[susanjellis]

04:39 PM on 08/09/2011

Not sure who said it first, but "statistics are like bikinis -- they reveal what is interesting, but conceal what is essential." The stats we have on volunteering in the U.S. must be taken with a grain of salt for many reasons, but here are two important ones.

1. Many, many people have divested themselves from using the word "volunteer" in favor of other terms such as pro bono work, community service, etc. So respondents to surveys talking the language of "volunteer" often self-edit themselves out, even though they do many things in the community without pay (just consider where the Web would be without unpaid bloggers or open source programmers, for example). People do many things for their kids which help all kids in the neighborhood, such as youth sports coaching, but are likely to consider this good "parenting" rather than volunteering.

2. When we collect data on employment, we ask EMPLOYERS about their hires. But when we research volunteering, we ask INDIVIDUALS if they volunteer. The data from those surveys is never balanced with information from nonprofit and government agencies about how many volunteers they "have."

Anecdotally, I and most of my colleagues in volunteer leadership roles, have always seen an increase in volunteering during bad economic times. Look at this site for all the articles in the past year about how job seekers find volunteering a great thing to fill a gap on their resumes and to keep them active while looking for paying work.

[Aaron Ausland]

07:30 PM on 08/09/2011

Thanks for your comments Susanjellis. I like the bikini quote - an effective and risqué metaphor. You bring up an important point about the accuracy of the statistics on volunteerism, but for my conclusions to hold, I need reliability more than accuracy. In other words, I'm looking at change over time. Even if the measure is flawed in terms of being accurate, if the same measure is used over time, it should be inaccurate in more or less the same way. So, unless it is wildly inaccurate, especially in ways that correlate to other unrelated things that change over time, then we can assume that, at a minimum, the direction of change we see is reliable. So, whether the actual percent figures are accurate or not, we have a strong indication of a direction of change that is downward for volunteerism and upward for unemployment.

As for your anecdotal evidence, well, statisticians and economists have all sorts of sayings for that, but none are as clever as the bikini, so I won't bother. But, you can imagine the point of them, you don't have to discount the truth of anyones experience, but discounting any extrapolation from a data set of n=1 is pretty standard fare, as compelling as the story may be.

That said, as a point of interest, what sort of volunteering are we talking about? And why do you think it bucks the trend (assuming the trend I presented here is true)?