Volunteerism Figures Fall to Four-Year Low, Federal Study Finds

By Ian Wilhelm

More than 61 million Americans donated their time to charity last year, the lowest number of volunteers in four years, according to new data from the federal government.

The figure represents a drop from the 65.4 million people who said they volunteered in 2005, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 4.4 million more than in 2006. Last year's number of volunteers was the lowest since 2002, when the federal government first began collecting such data.

The White House announced the 2006 level last week to mark the five-year anniversary of President Bush's effort to get more people to volunteer. In his 2002 State of the Union speech, Mr. Bush called on all Americans to contribute 4,000 hours over their lifetime to charity or in service to the nation. He established a new White House agency, the USA Freedom Corps, to oversee the push.

President's Response

The decline in volunteers aside, the Bush administration touted several signs of increased interest in public service since the president's "call to service." For example, the AmeriCorps service program will reach 75,000 members this year, and nearly 2,000 cities and towns have set up programs to train local residents in emergency preparedness.

As part of the anniversary, Mr. Bush gathered scholars and nonprofit leaders at the White House to discuss volunteerism and civic engagement.

"We've got a lot of people volunteering in the country, and one of my calls is for people to do more of it," said Mr. Bush.

One of the participants at the White House event, Robert D. Putnam, a Harvard University professor of public affairs, said he suggested the president do more to help get working-class youths involved in volunteering, the political system, and other aspects of civic life.

The nation risks creating a "caste system" if middle-class children are far more engaged than their less affluent peers, he said.

As for the volunteering drop, Mr. Putnam. author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, said that he could not speculate on its cause until he looked more closely at the data.

Role of Disasters

Other experts, however, tried to shine some light on it.

John M. Bridgeland, former director of the USA Freedom Corps, said the 2006 figure fell most likely because the interest in volunteering spiked after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and now is starting to erode slightly.

"Over time, it is pretty hard to keep sustaining the post-9/11 wave of volunteers," he wrote The Chronicle in an e-mail message. "Many expected the numbers to fall off much sooner than they did."

He also suspected Hurricane Katrina may have played a role. While an estimated 500,000 people have traveled to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild it, Mr. Bridgeland said that surge may have been offset by the destruction of many charities in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas that utilize local volunteers. The disaster "wiped out volunteer infrastructure, so it may not have generated a net positive in volunteering," he wrote.

While the decrease may concern some charities that rely on volunteers, the information should be treated with a healthy skepticism, said Susan J. Ellis, a volunteer-management consultant in Philadelphia. She said the surveys are specious because they rely on Americans to report their own volunteering work and have not been conducted for enough years to form a good snapshot of how many people donate their time.

"I would be skeptical about any data and conclusions from this," she said.