Commentators such as former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, contend that Americans who came of age during World War II are the “greatest generation,” shouldering more than their fair share of civic duty and patriotic discipline. Meanwhile, observers criticize the baby boomers—Americans born in the years following WWII—as selfish whiners and disenchanted laggards.
But when it comes to volunteering, “this basically isn’t true,” finds DePaul University sociologist Christopher J. Einolf in a recent research article. “Not only are baby boomers volunteering at a higher rate than the cohorts before and after them, but also the sheer size of their cohort means that the number of elderly volunteers is going to double,” he says. “If anything, nonprofits will soon have more volunteers than they know what to do with,” he predicts.
Einolf compared rates and amounts of volunteering for three distinct generations: the long civic generation (also called the greatest generation), which was born between 1926 and 1935; the silent generation (so-called because of its small size and relative absence from public discourse), which was born between 1936 and 1945; and the baby boomer generation, that sudden swell of Americans born between 1946 and 1955. Using data from the 1995 and 2005 waves of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) survey, he not only examined participants’ self-reported volunteering and giving in their 50s and 60s, but also predicted how much boomers would volunteer in 2015, after most of this cohort will have retired.
As the chart above shows, Einolf discovered that more baby boomers donated their time during their 50s (that is, in 2005) than did silent generation members at the same age (that is, in 1995). (Because long civic generation members were in their 50s before the MIDUS study began, data for this group are missing in this analysis.) When he statistically modeled rates and amounts of volunteering in 2015 for the baby boomers, he further found that this allegedly self-absorbed cohort’s volunteering would outstrip that of both preceding generations during their retirement years.
Previous studies of generational differences in volunteering have confounded age with cohort, says Einolf, and have therefore underestimated baby boomers’ altruistic moxie. Comparing 60-year-old members of the greatest generation with 40-year-old baby boomers is fraught because the older cohort is already retired, while the younger generation is still embroiled in earning a living. A more accurate analysis is to compare different cohorts at the same age, which is what a longitudinal study such as MIDUS allows.
To take advantage of the mounting tide of volunteers, nonprofits should start cultivating 50-somethings now, says Einolf. “People who volunteer in retirement are the same people who volunteered before retirement, only they give more hours,” he notes. “If you want to get retired volunteers, recruit them now before they leave the labor force.”
Read more stories by Alana Conner.