Shhh. Big Brother is on.
The “Fabric of society” is broken down in Iraq, the Sudan, and places like that. Society’s “fabric” breaks down when there is no regard for order or civilized behaviour and social goods no longer function. You know a societal fabric is broken when there’s armed mobs in the streets and you’re afraid to go out at night.
What everyone here is describing is a change in the way society organizes itself. And I’m not convinced it’s necessarily a bad thing.
And at that, we’re getting nothing but subjective claims as to the idea that volunteerism is down. As Bryan Ekers poiints out, when you’re judging community involvement by how many people show up for a parade - I hate parades - you may want to ask yourself how accurate your data sample is. My best friend’s parents work for an organization that builds and renovates homes for the poor (it’s not Habitat for Humanity and I am embarassed to say I forget the name) and according to them the oreganization has grown in leaps and bounds, and now had ten times as many volunteers and donations as it used to. They don’t hold parades, though. So are we figuring them in our calculations? I know plenty of young people who’ve joined their local Chambers of Commerce; does that count as volunteerism or community involvement?
It’s very unfortunate that something like a suicide crisis hotline would be short of volunteers, but for all we know there’s a simnilar hotline in Phoenix that has a surplus of volunteers. There could be other factors at work, too. When I look around me I don’t see a social fabric that’s pulling apart, I mostly see people working hard and taking care of their families, which is pretty much what people have always done.
As far as Rotary, Lions, etc., as a 32 year old person who has lived in both urban and rural environments I have no idea what “service-oriented” mission these groups have. I thought they were just social clubs, and I have an image of these clubs as being unwelcoming to women (no offense, but I will never be part of any “ladies auxillary” just the term makes me furious). So they clearly have an image problem, if they do indeed exist to promote community service and are open to all.
Another factor is that people move around to new cities for jobs, school, etc etc than a generation ago. It’s hard to have a sense of community when you have only lived in a place for a couple years.
My grandparents lived their entire lives in the same community, as did my parents. They went to school and church with the same groups of people so seems only natural that they would care more about their locality…it was a part of them. Growing up, my grandfather took us to every parade and local event in town.
I understand what the OP is saying…seems like parades are just not popular anymore. I can only think of one “big” parade that goes on here in KC…and that’s the St. Patrick’s Day Parade!
I’m completely ignorant of municipal structure in WI. In PA, there is realistically no obligation placed on the municipality per township, borough, city, or county code. They may fund fire and EMS organizations located inside or outside their boundaries through the general millage, or they may enact a special tax to do so, or they may not. If your area has an ISO rating of 9 (the worst), the elected officials aren’t obligated to take action to improve it.
Of the 2448 fire companies in PA per the same report referenced in my OP, 22 are career, 72 are combination career/volunteer, and the remaining 2354 are volunteer, which translates to 96.1% of the whole.
Particularly here in the lower tier of the Commonwealth, we have a steady influx of people from MD who move to PA to escape the higher taxes, but who are shocked to learn that the level of municipal services isn’t the same. Sorry, folks. If you wish to dance, the band needs to be paid. If you don’t want to pay, step up and play a set, e.g. volunteer 
When I ran the college level Kiwanis club (go CKI!), we ran into the same problems over and over - no charismatic leaders to get new members. In college, especially Community College, it’s a high turnover every year. Eventually, the question arises of why pay to join the organization so I can do service. I know from Rotaract that they’re experiencing the same problems.
Mostly, people are more willing to donate their time than their money, and organizations overwhelmingly only want CASH. I had a group of 15 semi-skilled workers ready to help habitat for humanity, all with our own tools. Their reaction was that we could pay THEM for the chance to help build someone’s house. They’d MUCH rather have the money to “help others in need”. We offered supplies, and were promptly turned down. So, we took our know-how elsewhere and we got free cookies from the blood bank and even a free meal from the Lunch Stop in Red Bank. The Monmouth Day care Center was overjoyed to have free labor painting the rooms and doing the landscaping. So, for the next 3 years while I was there, those were the only places we channeled our efforts toward. We eventually gave them money, but we wanted to make sure they wanted help, not a handout. Unfortunately, that’s the state of volunteering today - please stay home and mail us the check.
As for civic pride, the culture which we’ve developed where every individual has a say, but the general populace is forgotten is really killing any notion of involvement, emotional or otherwise. Why get involved to get elected to the town government to get a stop sign put up when you can just sue the town? Another big one in my tourist town is that a clear majority of the homeowners are merely landlords who rent to the university brats (they ARE brats, at least 98% of them) whom have no interest in actually getting involved except to back members of their congregation that promise to break the zoning rules for them so they can get out of paying full property taxes on the 2nd (3rd, 4th, nth) home they own.
From the Rotary website:
No mention of gender. A dear friend of mine, who unfortunately passed away last fall, was quite active in her local Rotary chapter, in addition to her full time position as Township Manager.
Oh, almost forgot. The town I live in has under 25,000 people. We have 2 fire districts - 1 with 1 firehouse, the other with 2. The chiefs from both districts enjoy the “perq” of using the municipal gas station for their own vehicles, in addition to the use of the Chief’s Car they get for the year. On top of that, District 1, with 1 firehouse and 4 trucks or so, has a worse response time than District 2. So much so that a fire in District 1 is likely to see the #2 guys show up first. On the flip side of it, the First Aid for both districts are considered to be fairly good, if understaffed. The big problem for them is that people would rather donate money than time.
I blame the 60s. (And not 'cause I’m a neocon, 'cause I ain’t.) We polarized culturally around then. Being a Joiner, which had always meant Elk-Rotary-K of C-Soroptimist-what have ya to most, split off from being an Activist, which came to mean some flavor of longhaired lefty hippie puke. The fraternal groups, led by the once immensely influential American Legion, moved waaay to the right, stagnated, and began to age out of influence. The hippies turned out to be mostly tourists who transitioned into the Me generation. The hardcore lefties went back to their niches in ivy walls.
Everybody else was left in the mass middle, losing their connection to each other through suburban sprawl and fear of the rising crime rates. They turned inward. Their children were born inward. Community feels all pokey and nervous-making to them, as if they’re going to have to spend hours drinking mung bean tea with cranky aging flower children, or interacting intimately with crazed and smelly drug addicts, or having the iPod snatched off their head by some prunefaced public librarian.
Aother thing, there are more causes now. In 1969 you didn’t have the Nature Conservancy, Amnesty International, AIDS charities, Doctors Without Borders, Breast Cancer Research charities, etc. etc. etc.
I thought Susan G. Komen Foundation does very well with participation for the Breast Cancer walks. Do all those people “not give a shit” if they choose to participate in a national charity with a good reputation rather than a local charity of indeterminate reputation (because they haven’t lived there long enough to know)?
Do people “not give a shit” if they give money to put land in some other state or country in conservancy rather than put that money into local elections?
I don’t think so. I think they just give a shit about different things than you’d like them to.
I wonder if it’s something to do with immigrant population as well? I know of at least a handful of organizations - particularly all the local fireman’s clubs around here - that are clearly an Old [White] Boys’ Club, and make it clear in many ways that they don’t want anyone else in there. You only need to get burned like that a couple of times before you say fuck it, they don’t want me anyway, let’s move on.
On the other side of the coin…I work for an organization that deals with prematurity & birth defects. The rate of preterm birth in blacks is extremely high, much higher than the white population. Yet we do not have a single black person on our board, we do not have a single black volunteer who is involved more than a year and that’s only because someone asked them to. Black people have preemie babies, too, but somehow we’re not convincing them what we do is worthy. I don’t think we are unwelcoming towards blacks, but perhaps when they look at us and see all whites - I am the only Asian hired by them in the entire upstate area, that’d be from Yonkers to Buffalo - perhaps it turns them off. But you can’t get more black people (and Guyanese people, and Indians) without getting some first.
Plus many immigrants don’t come from a volunteer culture. You don’t really volunteer in India, everybody’s out for a rupee. So my parents were heavily biased against the idea of volunteerism. Do something for free? And me being a hedonist a lot of that mindset has been passed down to me as well. I work for a not-for-profit. I don’t think I’d volunteer for one.
I agree with Hello Again that there are too many causes. The individualist in us would rather not get into long hopeless bickerfests around a table trying to Do Something for Somebody. Far preferable to check a box and charge a card, though lacking in human interaction.
I also agree with Anaamika that the volunteer ethic is, unfortunately, mostly about being settled, middle-class, and homogeneous with your community. The working-class male orgs are often outright exclusionary; I think volunteering is often just an excuse to keep huddling up for them.
In earlier times, tho, community orgs tended to take the form of “(Insert Ethnicity Here) Mutual Aid Societies,” where you took care of your own, on the premise that nobody else shared your language, faith, or culture, or indeed gave a damn about your kind as human beings. But those depended on a shared ethnic identity that was, again, stronger than the individual. Not the thing these days.
I agree that it has a lot to do with lack of time and money.
My church (the one I grew up in but haven’t attended regularly in 15 years) did this massive building project over the past 2 years. It was definitely a project that would benefit any church member directly - not a national thing, not an international thing, not a community thing. If you were a member you would benefit directly by having a newer/nicer/bigger church.
What the project needed was money and volunteers. The only way we could afford it was if the church members donated a good bit of money and also worked alongside the hired professionals as volunteers.
Everyone put in as much money and time as possible and the project still fell short. I was never in a position to give any money so I volunteered time. Looking at the tiny volunteer turnout, it was obvious that many people could not give time so they gave money. The project sits half-finished still, a year later.
I consider our church to be squarely in the middle of the midwestern American population - middle class people of all ages (granted, all white but many of them European immigrants). Our little cross-section of America is short on time and money.
There’s a church next door that has more affluent members than ours. They started a building project a year after ours, and finished a year before. They had more money to get it done (they didn’t need volunteers). I suspect too that if there was another church in another town where the town had a very strong sense of community (everyone from town went to the same church), and the church was too poor to get by on just hiring professionals, their project could have been done by volunteers and not money.
But in Real World Suburbia…there’s just not time and money to get everything done.
I’ve been deeply involved in a couple of volunteer-based organizations so I have something of a different perspective. Here’s why it’s hard for us to get and keep volunteers:
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internal administration battles. These are rampant in every organization I’ve ever seen, and in non-profits it’s way worse because at least in the private sector, there is one indisputable common goal: making money. In non-profits, the common goal is much fuzzier and up to lots of debate, resulting in astonishing (and really destructive) levels of internal politics. I don’t know if this has changed over time, but it’s been my experience in every org I’ve been in. It’s probably related to:
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unworkable structures of non-profits. You get volunteer board members who are technically the “boss” of the staff, but as the staff are there full time they have a much better idea of what’s going on in the org so the board often isn’t able to make the decisions they need to. Also, the interests of the staff (i.e. to keep their jobs) do not always align with the interests of the organization (which may well be to shed staff members), but because of the relative power/knowledge of the board and staff, there’s nothing that can be done. So you have staff raking in huge salaries while the organization stagnates. Again, I don’t know if this has changed over time.
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Organizations need a certain minimum level of organization to be able to support volunteers. I’ve found that a lot of people expect to be able to call up their favourite organization, say “I’d like to volunteer” and be put to work at something that uses their skills and makes a difference. At the very best of times this requires a strong organization, usually represented by a volunteer coordinator who is familiar with what skills the org needs and what kinds of people can fill them, and is prepared to supervise volunteers. It also requires volunteers with specific skills and an understanding of how to put them to use.
In the absence of a volunteer coordinator (which requires a good organizational basis to support), and if your work goes beyond stuffing envelopes and distributing fliers, volunteers need quite a lot of initiative and skill in order to be useful. I hate to say it but unskilled and undirected volunteers can easily be more of a burden than a help if there is nothing prepared for them to do.
When the above crap is going on (i.e. unworkable organizational models and internal politics) it is even more difficult to create these volunteer positions.
From my perspective as a (volunteer) project leader for a large volunteer-based organization, I can tell you that it was quite exhausting to keep up with the well-meaning expressions of interest from random volunteers. While managing this project (while not at my full-time job), I had to receive these requests, find out what skills they had to offer and what they were interested in doing, brief them on the organization and the project, figure out where to put them and put them in touch with other people they’d work with, follow up regularly to see how they were doing, and scramble to fill in the gaps left when they wandered away from the project. This was simply far more work than I was able to do so I ended up turning a lot of them away. The ones I didn’t turn away were the ones who took initiative, recognized what was needed and did it and brought something back to me. I think this might be more of a “sign of the times” than the others: lots of people perceive that we are socializing kids these days to be more passive and expect to be handed stuff rather than figuring it out for themselves.
- Also keep in mind that the burden on non-profits has been increasing steadily. Right-wing governments (at least here) have removed a lot of community supports so the non-profits have to pick up the slack. The community non-profit I work for hasn’t had funding increased in years, but service demands are increasing so staff keep getting paid less and less.
Some might disagree but to me it’s clear that some of our problems (i.e. environmental destruction and global justice) are getting worse and require increasing amounts of work to solve. More organizations are fighting for a smaller pot of available funding and are fighting to piss off their community by repeatedly going back to ask them for more money.
So the pressures I listed above just get worse and worse, and then you get into ugly feedback cycles: A good leader leaves a non-profit, leaving a void in the organization. Organizational capacity suffers and it becomes harder to attract funding and volunteers, especially considering how busy everyone is working to pay off their student loans (as discussed above). Less funding and fewer volunteers means organizational capacity suffers. And so on.
I dunno, but I just joined the local Moose, went to the parade yesterday and every emergency vehicle in our town was out in full force, and floats have been worked on for months. Our community still cares very much and I’m proud to be part of it.
I should expand as well- this community takes care of it’s people very much. If someone is in a bad situation, benefits are organized, donations are made, and people are helped. When people die here, there’s almost always a public celebration of their lives. We have organizations like the Moose, a local Civic Club, Elk, etc. We have an organization called Kids in Special Situations to help abused/neglected/orphaned kids. Homeless help, battered women’s help, etc. It’s a small community and the majorty of people take helping each other out very seriously, whether that means donating time, money, a skill, whatever. It’s the big reason I love living here.
I’ve been in other communities that are not like this, and I think it’s because people were just scattered so far apart and it felt like anything you did didn’t really make an impact. It’s one thing to be asked “can you donate some money for the kid’s shelter?” and another to hear “Can you donate some money/time for Joe Citizen’s kid who was hit while riding his bike last week?” I think that the bigger communities get, the less we know each other and the less we feel that other people’s problems impact us.
Personally I blame the hippies.
My generation (I am almost 30) grew up being told all about the hippies, how they cared about the world, how they wanted to make a change, how caring about teh community rather then yourself was a good ideal.
Then we grew up, and what did we see?
People who had grown up as hippies, who had spread the ideal of community, peace and love selling out to giant companies, to no longer caring about anything but money and personal gratification. In other words the 70s/80s.
This showed us that having ideals is all well and good…until the bills come in. It use to be much easier to get a well paying job. Today you have to struggle to get a decent job, one you know you could very easily be fired from (at will) or laid off or what have you. The bills keep coming in. We learned screw the ideals, when it all comes down to it it is “every man for himself”. My $0.02.
I’m not really into my “community.” I’ve lived here for going on 12 years and have never been even slightly welcomed, so it’s fairly hard to care about the place.
I still volunteer for places that don’t require too much structured time. I used to be a reading tutor for adults, but I fell away from that after I “graduated” all the students I had.
I read an article in the local paper a few years ago about shrinking membership in service clubs, as well as the aging membership. One club mentioned that it had, out of desperation, passed an amendment to their bylaws to get rid of a rule requiring men to remove their hats at the bar. They had come to the conclusion (probably accurately) that many of their bylaws were waaaaaaay out of date culturally. The hat thing was just an example of a little old-fashioned rule that make the clubs less appealing to younger generations.
I work at the local convention center, where the local Lion’s Club meets for a luncheon every Friday. I’m 41 - much younger than most Lion’s Club members, and I also love to sing. However, I have no interest whatsoever in sitting around a lunch table singing corny little ditties about how wonderful it is to live in my town (“We’re from Wenatchee/Famous for its apples …”). The friendly singalong at social gatherings is out of date. When was the last time you heard the patrons of a tavern joining together in a drinking song? There’s a reason “drinking songs” are all more than a century old: there are other forms of entertainment available these days, so most people don’t bond by singing together.
Edited: Reason: Poster didn’t care enough to finish the answer