(Illustration by David Plunkert)
At the dawn of every Sunday last winter, my teenage son paired up with his ski patrol mentor to learn how to prepare the mountain for the day’s visitors. Throughout the day, he responded to calls to help children who had lost their parents and skiers who had suffered injuries requiring emergency medical care. At dusk, he swept the icy mountain again, ensuring that all had safely left for the day. In one season, he completed more than 120 volunteer hours as a young adult ski patroller. After the season was over, I asked him if he wanted to continue next year. “I want to help people,” he responded.
Enabling others, especially young people, to engage in such volunteer work is my career. I serve as the director of analysis and impact at DoSomething, a digital hub for youth-centered activism and service. Since 1993, we have helped millions of young people discover their civic spark and equipped them to make an impact on the issues they care most about. Volunteering enables young people to acquire skills and traits that they wouldn’t have gained in a classroom and the confidence and capacity needed to serve our communities.
Yet young people’s access to volunteerism is fraught with inequality. Many young people lack the opportunity and encouragement to serve. At DoSomething, we are determined to build bridges to social, economic, and human capital for young people so that they have access and can realize their potential as leaders of change.
Lack of Capital
For volunteers, the benefits of participation range from higher reported happiness and life satisfaction to lower levels of stress and anxiety. The perception that volunteering is for the greater good of society and a broader meaning of life also correlates with higher self-esteem, self-control, and confidence. These findings were reinforced by a DoSomething focus group whose participants said that taking part in DoSomething volunteer opportunities resulted in a sense of pride, increased self-awareness, and a feeling of connectedness with their communities and peers.
Volunteering is also a vital contributor to the economy. In April 2023, the Independent Sector estimated the latest value of a volunteer hour to be $31.80, an increase from 2018, when it was valued at $24.69, equivalent to $197.5 billion per year.
We at DoSomething have found that young people are very keen on volunteering. In fact, last spring, in our semiannual Pulse Check Survey, 81 percent of DoSomething members who were minors said they were very interested in community service and volunteering. And although girls and women are usually overrepresented in volunteering activities, our survey found that 62 percent of boys and men were also interested. (By contrast, 78 percent of women and girls said they were interested in volunteering.)
While most states require students to take civics courses, only 11 states require students to be involved in service learning projects.
Many young people, however, are excluded from volunteering because of a lack of social, human, or economic capital. Some simply cannot afford to volunteer, because they cannot give up paid work or duties such as caring for members of their family. The inability to balance the needs of the family due to lack of personal resources makes the path to volunteerism prohibitive and a real factor for those whose families struggle financially.
In addition, volunteer opportunities are disproportionately advertised to those with larger networks, which often make access to technology, professional memberships, mentors, or coaches a prerequisite. So young people with limited social capital are more likely to have fewer connections to institutions that either facilitate or provide opportunities to participate in civic life.
Pedagogy also influences young people’s access, or lack thereof, to volunteerism. While most states require students to take civics courses to graduate, only 11 states require students to be involved in service learning projects. What’s more, only one state, Maryland, requires community service hours for graduation. And even then, the depth of experiences is inconsistent. In the 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education, 70 percent of 12th graders reported that they had never written a letter to give an opinion or solve a problem, crucial skills for a civically engaged citizenry.
In addition to these barriers, we in the social sector could do a better job of offering richer volunteering experiences. Instead of having young people gain agency by learning, doing, and connecting to their communities, we have opted for transactional experiences. We have treated volunteerism as a proxy to reach our communities with sporadic, disconnected 30-minute activities. While nonprofits commonly track volunteer volume—numbers and hours—we often don’t ask deeper questions, such as what volunteering teaches us about ourselves and our communities. And in doing so, we have missed opportunities to use volunteering to deepen a sense of commitment for young people to become members, partners, problem solvers, change makers, and leaders of our communities.
Enabling Community Engagement
At DoSomething, we are conscious of our own complicity in how structural impediments of volunteerism models have blocked many from participation. In alignment with our strategic plan, we are responding to this shared challenge with a renewed commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, as well as to building bridges to social, economic, and human capital so that more young people have access to these opportunities and can realize their potential as leaders of change. Drawing inspiration from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to service, we are guided by the following principles in our efforts.
Use inclusive language. | To motivate young people to lean into volunteer opportunities, we use language that recognizes their existing strengths. For example, DoSomething’s brand guidelines deliberately avoid terms like “empower,” acknowledging that young people have power—our role is to shepherd and guide them in exercising it effectively.
Improve civic education. | To build more civic-minded leaders at scale, we must also turn to upstream solutions in the classroom. As part of our broader work on equity and justice, DoSomething mobilizes young people to support the Civics Secures Democracy Act, which broadens access to US history and civics education by providing funding to states and districts. Additionally, in our work co-leading the NYC Civic Coalition, we are collaborating with New York City-based organizations to drive adoption of the Seal of Civic Readiness, a formal recognition that a student has attained proficiency in civic knowledge and participation.
Resource existing leaders. | By bringing financial and social capital to existing leaders, we can help reinforce the idea that they can use their time and expertise to be part of the solution and to create a ripple effect, influencing their peers and communities to join them. In 2023, DoSomething launched our Civic Fellows program to address the barriers posed by limited social and economic capital that hinder young people from participating in service. Each month, young leaders, being compensated for their contributions, were provided with training, mentorships, and resources enabling them to scale interventions to address problems affecting their community and attract their peers as volunteers and participants.
For instance, one of our inaugural fellows, Arnold Ludd, used the fellowship to strategize the expansion of his initiative Jiggabite Gloves Up, Guns Down. Running in multiple New York City schools, the program offers a youth-led solution to counteract the gun violence that he and his peers face in their communities. The initiative provides boxing and fitness training, as well as a safe space for teens to discuss community safety issues and learn new skills from experts such as conflict mediation and other alternatives to gun violence.
Forge collaboration to build community. | Our programs aim to integrate young people’s experiences, guiding them to harness these valuable assets as tools for contribution and leadership in their communities. Last year we introduced the E.M.B.E.R. collective, a cohort of DoSomething members engaging in a community of practice. The model brings together young people with common interests to engage in collective learning to develop their own individual mental health projects and advance the shared goals of the collective. The collective is developing a range of initiatives, from increasing access to books addressing eco-anxiety to youth open-mic nights for sharing collective grief. More important, our members are learning from their peers and integrating each other’s perspectives into their projects.
Our country’s meager investment in young people’s education has contributed to social disconnection, reduced upward socioeconomic mobility, and diminished innovation and progress. It behooves all of us—the social impact sector, private-sector employers, elected officials, and adult community members—to invite and ensure that young people have a meaningful seat at the table. This can and will change lives.
Read more stories by Yasmine Mahdavi.