On Volunteering
The use of the time that has been given to us…
Some of our time is taken up with demands. Our bodies need sleep, so we sleep. We need the financial resources for food and shelter, so we work. Our children need to be bathed or protected, so we parent.
But the consolidation over the last two centuries to a reduced 40-hour workweek, plus the ubiquity of infrastructure that simplifies daily life (indoor plumbing and clean drinking water chief among them) means many of us (thought certainly not all) have more free hours than previous generations.
The majority of Americans spend the largest chunk of that free time watching television. In other words, outside of sleeping Americans spend the majority of their time (even slightly more than working) watching television. My home state of Arkansas ranked third in the nation for amount of time watching television, at 3.38 hours per day.
Note this is just television, not total screen time, which is closer to 5.5 hours per day. And although we all might rejoice that we have so much more leisure time at our disposal, the reality is we eat up about 2/3rds of that leisure time watching television.
Without getting moralistic about it (I mean there are some really good shows and television isn’t inherently bad), I’d probably argue that we spend an inordinate amount of time watching television, and we could shift some of that time in new directions.
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I’m interested here in how and why we decide to use some of our free hours to volunteer. I’m also to a certain extent interested in defining what counts as “volunteering.”
Social scientists have long noted that volunteerism plays a significantly larger role in American civic life than it does in other countries. Statistically we spend as much as 25% more time volunteering than people in many European nations, for example. Anecdotally, when I used to live in Slovakia the pastors there would talk about visits to the United States and how remarkable they found the amount of time people here give to church and non-profit volunteerism.
Keep note, if you looked at the Popular Science chart above, volunteering still falls into that small purple circle at the bottom of the chart, “Other.” We volunteer far less than one hour per day. We collectively spend far more time watching television, playing sports, playing games, etc. Volunteering is one small portion of “other.”
But we do volunteer. And that volunteering plays a crucial role in the quality and breadth of our common life, and supports three institutions in particular: religious organizations, educational institutions, and non-profits.
Imagine, if you would, if all Americans simply turned the television off for one day and volunteered that day. By my math, with the US population at 333 million Americans could volunteer 1 billion hours per week!
Any church of the size of the one I pastor would be utterly transformed if every member volunteered three hours per week. In fact I and my staff would have to completely shift how we work, because that would be about 1200 volunteer hours per week we’d have to help coordinate.
Imagine if a city full of people all devoted three hours per week to showing up at a city council meeting campaigning to fix a local economic injustice.
Imagine how literacy in a school might improve if every adult affiliated at that school gave three hours to tutoring.
And so forth. I think you get my point. Many of our most crucial community organizations like schools, churches, and non-profits live or die based on volunteer support, and the support that currently makes or breaks them is a tiny fraction of the amount of time that might be given if the average American simply gave one day of their television watching to volunteerism instead.
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Although some kinds of volunteer opportunities are clearly defined and delineated (form a refugee resettlement team, usher at Sunday worship, tutor after school), it’s also the case that more things may count as volunteering than immediately come to mind.
Let me offer some examples.
In 1956 African Americans boycotted the Montgomery buses. In order to avoid riding the bus, the community organized carpools. Many also walked to work or other destinations. And black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep the community informed.
In this scenario, is walking to work a kind of volunteerism? What if you have to walk two hours each way and lose all the time you otherwise would have used to prepare to teach a Sunday school class?
Or consider what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about volunteerism when he visited America and then wrote Democracy In America:
In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded.
A group all publicly aligning around a common cause may impact the world and make for change. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this would be Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate in which she staged a Friday school strike in front of the Swedish Rikstag. By March of 2019 more than one million strikers gathered in 2,200 strikes organized in 125 countries.
I offer both of these examples because they are counter-examples to a traditional understanding of volunteerism. Volunteering is “doing something.” Boycotting and striking are “not doing something.”
What they share in common, however, which I believe to be crucial to any step toward volunteerism, is the realization by those who volunteer that they can “use the time given to them differently.”
I don’t have to watch television. My church needs me.
I don’t have to ride the bus. We need to end segregation.
I don’t have to go to school. The climate is in crisis.
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Let me share with you how volunteerism sometimes feels to me, personally. I’ll use this weekend as an example. Yesterday I volunteered my time walking door-to-door for a county election campaign. This morning I volunteered as a soccer coach aid. This afternoon I am volunteering to help with a marching band project.
In each of these instances there is a part of me that rebels against using my time in these ways. I may feel like the religious leaders who passed the traveler on the side of the road. “I don’t have enough time.” “I sure wish I could just read my book.” “Once again I don’t have enough time to watch season 4 of Stranger Things.”
then I’m reminded that the reason the Samaritan was a “good” Samaritan had mostly to do with him perceiving that he "had time” to give to help his neighbor in the ditch. Being a Good Samaritan has less to do with being an inherently good person and more to do with simply giving your time and perceiving you have the time to give.
I don’t honestly know what the interior life is like of the average person, but I’m guessing some reading this feel similarly when they think about volunteering. There’s a kind of selfishness (which may be healthy and self-protective or may be genuinely selfish) that says, “Why do I have to do that? Can’t someone else?”
But then in most instances once I go do the thing, I honestly feel better.1 Walking my neighborhood campaigning for a county judge I really believe in has its own internal political rewards (our lives will all be better if he gets elected), but I also had the chance to see my neighbors and talk with them. It was good.
So also with coaching soccer. I met new kids. I got some exercise. It wasn’t hard even if there was a small voice in my head that said, “Sure wish I could just stay home.”
If I’m being wise and also selfish, I could also keep in mind that volunteering has tremendous health benefits. It’s good for your mental health and even good for your heart because it reduces hypertension.
But as someone who organizes volunteers (with greater or lesser degrees of success) I’ll admit I’m especially awe-struck by the power of collective organizing and volunteerism. The Montgomery Bus Boycott’s changed the world. So do clean-up crews at disaster sites.
I don’t know the last time I watched another episode of a Marvel series and had such a positive and measurable impact on my own health and my neighbor’s well-being. I mean I like some of the shows Disney produces, but the proof is in the pudding, and general analysis of quality of life and flow seems to indicate television just isn’t a great use of our time. It makes us less happy. As Victor Frankl said, “What [humans] actually need is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of [them].” That sounds like volunteering to me.
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Statistics tell us that volunteerism is on decline, as is religious worship attendance and also, to a degree, television viewing (not by much but a little). So apparently we are in a moment when people are shifting how they use their time.
So where are people shifting their time? Are they just working more? Given the low rates of unemployment and the decreased value of our earnings to pay for what we need, I think that’s probable.
Is it also social media? Are we all doom-scrolling now? Some of the data indicates at least some of our time is given over now more to video games than television, but it’s hard to find clear data on what we are doing with our time if we are doing less of the things we had been doing.
Maybe everyone is just relaxing and thinking more? What is the collective shift that is happening? There’s some pretty interesting data out there, including a world-wide time use survey and the America Time Use survey.
I’d be practicing magical thinking if I thought I’d show up at church tomorrow with a sudden flood of folks all wanting to volunteer. But I remain curious what a great awakening of the use of our time might produce and transform among us. It would certainly be a revolution from below rather than above.
I guess this makes volunteering sound a lot like exercise, which is also good for us but sometimes inertia keeps us from doing what we know is good and will make us feel better.