Why I changed my mind about volunteering

Last fall, a reader asked me what they could really do, as one person, to aid people living on the streets. “I often feel helpless to enact change,” they wrote.

I’d been covering homelessness in America and knew that even the sprawling support organizations that have been working on outreach for decades had failed to end the crisis. My mind immediately went to systemic solutions, like voting for candidates who prioritize building more housing, or supporting efforts to loosen zoning codes. 

But when I called experts, their answers surprised me. Some of our ideas overlapped, but many of their suggestions were ones I had admittedly not entertained: passing out socks or hand-warmers, donating items like sleeping bags to local shelters, or giving office supplies and bus passes to nonprofits serving unhoused people. 

The reporting left me uneasy. Why did I think only about structural change and disregard more immediate help? And why don’t I do more of those day-to-day charitable things, or know many people who do, either?

I did growing up. I have clear memories of bagging meals at food pantries, of cleaning up parks, of Walking for the Cure. I sold lemonade for Darfur and baked brownies for victims of Katrina. In Hebrew school, I learned about giving tzedakah, a form of charity, and our obligation to “repair the world.”

But over time, those childhood activities started to look, well, childish. My coming of age in the 2010s coincided with critiques of individual action that were gaining prominence in media, politics, and academia — overlapping with a growing national focus on inequality and the climate crisis. It was the era of Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, and our whole country grew more fluent in rebukes of billionaires and plutocracy.

Different arguments began to emerge: Volunteering, donating, and modifying one’s personal behavior were, at best, unproductive; at worst, they were harmful distractions from the change we really need. Be wary of those tote-bag shoppers at Whole Foods, championing recycling and reducing one’s carbon footprint. Didn’t they know that BP coined the idea of the “carbon footprint” to shift blame off its own oil production? Didn’t they understand that “lifestyle politics” was not the answer? Volunteering or bake sales didn’t threaten the status quo. They were what people in power wanted you to be doing. 

Real social change would come only from mass protest and collective pressure on governments and corporations. It didn’t hurt that such protests against poverty, police brutality, and rising global temperatures were also exciting, and seemed to offer young people better and more visible ways of making a difference. 

As a left-leaning college student, I was persuaded by leaders who warned that personal consumer choices would never amount to real social change. I also grew familiar with arguments by activists and intellectuals that nonprofits were too often complacent and even disincentivized to solve real problems, since doing so could threaten their own funding streams. Contributing my time and money to this “nonprofit industrial complex” would be a mistake. Cutting checks wouldn’t change anything other than the balance in my savings account. For real social progress, we’d need systematic policy shifts, comprehensive legislation, and political power. 

Since I received the reader’s note about homelessness last fall, I’ve been thinking more about the cost of all this cynicism. Were the arguments against individual action even helpful? 

I also started to wonder if these beliefs contributed to the American “friendship recession” and loneliness crisis I kept hearing about. Back in 2000, in his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam highlighted declines in American church attendance, volunteering, civic associations, and team sports; it seems our “social cohesion” had only gotten worse since then. Gen Z and millennials volunteer at lower rates than adults born in earlier generations, even though there is pretty overwhelming research that volunteering and donating makes people happier, and boosts their self-esteem, physical health, and lifespan.

It’s not considered socially acceptable to tout personal benefits derived from charitable acts. It’d be unusual to hear volunteers say they’re going to a soup kitchen to improve their self-esteem. Perhaps this is because those gains suggest that there are more selfish motivations for behaviors we want to think of primarily as selfless. But wealthy philanthropists don’t seem shy about citing their self-interest, and often say their humanitarian work leaves them with deep feelings of pleasure, optimism, and agency. 

It struck me as rather sad that those of us who are not billionaires may have convinced ourselves that volunteering or fundraising was mostly a waste of time. 

When did I become someone who placed such exhausting value on optimizing my time, anyway? It suddenly felt much more arrogant than altruistic. Convenient, and uncaring. 

Perhaps most importantly, had distancing ourselves from charity and service made the world a better place? Has it made my own life better?

A few developments helped sour so many in my left-leaning generation on individual action.

The climate movement over the last 15 years played a leading role, rejecting solutions based on individual responsibility, and emphasizing the limits of forgoing meat or driving hybrid cars. Activists organized worldwide youth climate strikes and pipeline protests, focusing the public’s attention on governments, oil companies, and fossil fuel lobbyists.

In the 2016 presidential primary, where he captured over 70 percent of the Democratic youth vote, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders took aim at “corporate polluters” driving the climate emergency. And perhaps no claim had more cultural influence than the widely shared, though misleading, statistic that just 100 companies were responsible for 70 percent of the world’s emissions.

There was also a largely successful effort to link curbing climate change with anti-capitalism. The 2011 Occupy protests got an even bigger boost following Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014. (Vox called it “the most important economics book of the year, if not the decade.”) Naomi Klein’s influential book This Changes Everything, also published in 2014, made the case that capitalism itself was an existential threat, that saving the planet would not be possible without overhauling the economic order.  

In many ways, the growing emphasis on collective action felt clarifying, righteous, and long overdue. Student debt activists who emerged from Occupy helped millions of people process their feelings of shame and guilt over falling victim to predatory loans. New and influential left-wing outlets, like Jacobin, helped shape my generation’s consciousness and inspire us to demand more from those in power. 

At their best, these collectivist messages inspired hope, agency, and empathy — spelling out a concrete playbook for a more just planet. At their worst, though, they fueled despair, cynicism, and nihilism, promising a better world only if near-impossible political changes were made, and fast. Social and economic conditions were characterized as terribly as possible, to galvanize more people to upend them. Even those who weren’t necessarily looking to foment a revolution contributed to growing negative attitudes around individual action. The Effective Altruist movement, for example, argued that most charities were wasteful and ineffective, save for some rare exceptions. 

A recent Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that young people are far more fearful than hopeful about the future: They worry about the moral direction of the country, don’t think their vote will make a real difference, and don’t volunteer for community service. It’s not that people today are choosing to protest instead of recycling; it’s that in our current environment, many people are doing neither. Despite all the attention on collective action and solidarity, many young adults are isolated and pessimistic about social change.

I set a New Year’s resolution to volunteer. Here I was, a self-motivated journalist with professional research skills; finding charitable work I could donate my time to shouldn’t have been too hard.

But it was more difficult than I expected. I’m not a member of a faith-based organization, neither my workplace nor my union organizes volunteer events, and my initial inquiries to nonprofits through volunteermatch.org went ignored. Lacking something I could easily plug into, I felt the poverty of my institutional connections in a new way. Robert Putnam would be nodding sagely, I thought.

Finally, I stumbled on something called a “giving circle,” where people donate money collectively, mostly to local nonprofits. It resembled a book club but for philanthropy, and I found one focused on women and children in the DC area.

The full group, roughly 250 people, convenes annually to vote on donating their pooled membership funds, though those who want to be more involved can participate in subcommittees that review grant applications to help narrow down the list. Since I report on housing, I decided to join the housing subcommittee and our group of roughly 20 began meeting weekly on Tuesday nights. ​​It was unfamiliar work, but I appreciated it and all the women involved who took the reviews so seriously. I learned about extraordinary groups in the DC area, like Together We Bake, which has trained hundreds of women in food production, and SafeSpotDC, which helps victims of child abuse.

I also started reading books on volunteering, grasping for new ways to make sense of what I was feeling. I read in Arthur Brooks’s book, Who Really Cares, that secular liberals like myself are stingier givers — less likely to donate to charity or volunteer than the general population, and much less likely to donate or volunteer than religious conservatives. The larger decline in organized religion loomed over this research. 

“For many Americans, political opinions are a substitute for personal checks,” Brooks writes. He even observed that proponents of income redistribution were less likely to give blood. “If everyone in the population gave at the same rate as government aid advocates, the supply would drop by about 30 percent,” he reported.

I squirmed when I read this. I’d never given blood. I found a study that said among first-time blood donors, the most frequently cited reason for giving was “influence from a friend.” I couldn’t think of anyone encouraging me to donate, but that felt like a weak excuse. 

Around the same time, the Red Cross declared an emergency blood shortage; donors had dropped by 40 percent over the last two decades. With Brooks’ book fresh in my mind, I decided to sign up. In early February, I went downtown to a blood donation center; the whole thing was relatively quick, and I felt happy when I left.

I caught a charitable bug. None of this was hard, I realized. I just hadn’t prioritized any of it. I found a local homeless organization that had an Amazon wish list of needed items. I sent them tampons, pads, wipes, underwear, and hand-warmers, and chided myself for not having done such easy things sooner. 

The US has long been defined by its culture of volunteerism. When French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s he marveled at the many civic groups, later arguing that such volunteer organizations were integral to American democracy. Our bustling nonprofit sector would become a global symbol of entrepreneurialism and freedom.

It’s become common to say this vibrant civic fabric has since frayed. America is hanging out less. Our “social fitness” in shambles. But over the last year, I’ve found plenty of data that complicates this narrative. 

Volunteer rates have not fluctuated very much over the last 75 years. There were declines in the 1980s, then surges following the 9/11 attacks and again during the Trump presidency. Researchers find mixed evidence that social capital is declining, though there’s more consensus that volunteering itself has become more episodic and time-limited than before. Nonprofit donations are down, but crowdfunding contributions keep soaring. 

Some scholars say the Bowling Alone thesis was always missing the forest for the trees, that Putnam’s analysis privileged the kinds of activities white people of means were most likely to do.

“You had the largest immigration rights mobilization in 2006 ever, and then the white people were all reading Putnam,” Erica Kohl-Arenas, a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, told me. “Numbers are not down in terms of people as part of associations, groups, or affiliated networks, but they might be down in terms of those who say, ‘I’m going to go look at the Yellow Pages to do five hours of service a week.’”

In contrast to the Yellow Pages form of service, so-called informal volunteering — meaning unpaid acts of service not coordinated through legal nonprofits — is harder to track, practiced more by communities of color, and almost never included in official counts of philanthropy. 

“There’s lots of volunteering that doesn’t involve an organization,” said Mark Snyder, the director of the Center for the Study of the Individual and Society at the University of Minnesota. “When neighbors on a block shoot a message to your group text asking if someone can keep an eye on your kid, or bring over a meal, these things aren’t considered volunteering. But do you get paid for it? Do you get a sense of benefit by helping?” 

Paul Schervish, a retired sociologist who directed the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, spent his career urging colleagues to take interpersonal and intra-family caregiving more seriously. He noted that while charitable giving is measured at roughly $500 billion annually in the US, remittances to relatives in poorer countries exceed $100 billion per year. 

“None of those payments are included in what we talk about when we talk about philanthropy,” he told me. “Furthermore, Hispanics rank lower on charitable giving than other ethnic groups, but part of that is they are offering their homes up to family and living with extended family members so much more often, and carrying out these remittances. Care for each other, and even within your own family, is something that we don’t pay attention to.”

Schervish argues that a proper understanding of philanthropy has always been more vast than the way Putnam and conventional theorists have sliced and diced it. It should encompass both informal aid for friends and family, and acts of service for people more distant from you. Look no further than the Greek word philia, he says, referring to non-romantic love, that shares the same root as our modern word philanthropy. 

“Philia or friendship love, for Aristotle, extends out in concentric circles from the family to the entire species,” Schervish has written. “Friendship love is a relation of mutual nourishment that leads to the virtuous flourishing of both parties.” 

Or put differently, rather than debate whether acts of philanthropy are motivated by selfishness or selflessness, or whether it “counts” if it’s service for your aunt versus your neighbor versus a child in Africa, Schervish encourages thinking about donors, volunteers, and all caregivers as people who take action in connection with others, who “view others in need as familial.” 

I took the point that the popular view on social cohesion may have oversights. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that people today are feeling more despair, especially younger people.

I know firsthand that many Americans are overwhelmed by negative news stories, which compound in exhausting ways. It’s become far too hard to know what’s true, and all the contradictory information leads some to give up trying to make sense of the world altogether. The proportion of readers who say they avoid news is close to an all-time high.

Volunteering wouldn’t solve these problems, but given what we know about volunteering’s benefits, it seems it could certainly help. One University of Oxford researcher surveyed over 45,000 employees whose companies offered wellness benefits like massage classes, coaching sessions, and mindfulness workshops. The only option that seemed to actually have a positive effect on well-being, the study found, were those jobs that provided workers with opportunities for charity or volunteering.

A friend from my giving circle pointed out that the vast number of activities billed as self-care are pricey beauty treatments, boutique fitness classes, and other ways to “treat” ourselves. They all tend to advance the idea that feeling better, and even simply feeling good, is found in helping oneself rather than each other.  

Still, it can be harder for young people today to volunteer, Snyder, from the University of Minnesota, told me. “Young people are scrambling more than cohorts before to make a living, making ends meet through multiple jobs,” he said. “There are fewer discretionary hours available in a day.” 

I reached out to the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. In 2014, it found that a large majority of American teenagers value personal achievement and happiness over caring for others, priorities they felt their parents also shared. Richard Weissbourd, who directs the center, told me they’ve re-surveyed youths several times over the last decade and found similar results. Teens consistently rank happiness and personal achievement most highly, and caring for others and concern for the common good at the bottom.

“The irony of course is that by encouraging everyone to prioritize individual success and happiness, people are getting further from the kinds of activities and mental frameworks that drive satisfaction, fulfillment, community, and peace,” Weissbourd said.

While most news stories on mental health tend to focus on youth struggling in middle and high school, Weissbourd said his research has him worrying most about people ages 18 to 25, who he finds doing “twice as badly” as younger teens. “There’s a lot of apocalyptic thinking and not a lot of action there,” he said. “It’s like a deep tiredness, a feeling like people are in deep winter.” 

Meanwhile, though the climate crisis drove people like me to be more distrusting of calls for individual action, some climate leaders have been calling for a different approach. More activists now stress that systemic and individual change should be understood as two sides of the same coin, and that individual action can be necessary for building sustainable, transparent political movements.

“A fixation on system change alone opens the door to a kind of cynical self-absolution that divorces personal commitment from political belief,” Jason Mark, the editor of Sierra magazine, wrote in 2019. “This is its own kind of false consciousness, one that threatens to create a cheapened climate politics incommensurate with this urgent moment.” 

In his book Giving Done Right, Phil Buchanan, the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, refers to a longstanding debate over whether it’s useful for donors to spend money on alleviating effects of problems, rather than attacking the problems’ underlying causes. Philanthropy certainly has some great victories in funding “root” solutions, but Buchanan urges against the mentality that only permanently eradicating a problem is worth doing. “You shouldn’t assume that a focus on roots is necessarily superior,” he writes. “Trimming branches is also important.”

In a way, it can feel safe to distrust the value of individual action. Being wary of philanthropy and charitable groups that promise to better the world resonates with the skepticism I’ve been trained to have, professionally and culturally. It also allows me to avoid making sacrifices; there’s no real vulnerability or bets required.

But as time goes on, and as I think about the family I might one day raise, I’m coming to appreciate the value of letting go and taking gambles on hope, as long as they point generally in the moral direction I want to go. 

With all these questions swirling in my head, I cold-emailed a local rabbi. She offered to meet and pointed me to a story in Exodus about Jews who agreed to accept the Torah from God before really knowing what was in it. “Naaseh v’nishma,” the Israelites said, which roughly translates to “we’ll do, and then we’ll understand.” The lesson, the rabbi told me, is about diving in with imperfect information, of learning through doing. 

Schervish, the retired sociologist, thinks I should worry less about carving time outside of my regular routine to volunteer, and to count acts of service I take for my friends, partner, colleagues, and others just as much as philanthropy organized through 501c(3)s.

“Meeting the true needs of others is how you nourish somebody, but what that nourishment is, and what those true needs are — we’re always going to find people debating about that,” he told me. “And you’re going to have debates within yourself. But it’s always the right question.”

This was his gentle reminder that determining how to live morally requires wrestling that is messy, personal, and evolving. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But I don’t want imperfect information to stop me from diving in, now. 

Naaseh v’nishma, I signed up to donate blood again.