{"id":5013,"date":"2006-07-28T16:26:41","date_gmt":"2006-07-28T16:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5013"},"modified":"2006-07-28T16:26:41","modified_gmt":"2006-07-28T16:26:41","slug":"is-volunteering-an-elite-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5013","title":{"rendered":"is volunteering an elite activity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Census data on volunteering show that there are big gaps by race\/ethnicity and especially by educational background. Almost half of college graduates say they volunteer, compared to less than one in ten adults who dropped out of high school. I didn’t attempt any statistical analysis, but it appears that educational background is the important factor. African Americans might volunteer at higher rates than Whites if you controlled for educational background.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Volunteering has advantages for those who do it: it educates and connects people to their fellow human beings. That’s one reason to be concerned about the gap in volunteering. We might also worry that, if most volunteers are well-off and White, there will be inadequate volunteer services in disadvantaged communities. And privileged volunteers may misunderstand or patronize those they serve.<\/p>\n

If we are concerned about this gap, we could try to close it by providing more service opportunities and support (including perhaps financial support) for less advantaged Americans.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there is a class-bias inherent in the concept of “volunteering.” If a person with a paid day-job helps other people’s kids at the local school, that’s volunteering. However, if a stay-at-home Mom carefully monitors the neighborhood kids, she is unlikely to describe herself as a volunteer. And if a person chooses to work as a public school teacher, she isn’t a “volunteer” unless she also helps after-hours at a soup kitchen or cleaning up a park.<\/p>\n

Thus it’s possible that it’s not actual volunteering that’s mal-distributed, but only the way we define it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Census data on volunteering show that there are big gaps by race\/ethnicity and especially by educational background. Almost half of college graduates say they volunteer, compared to less than one in ten adults who dropped out of high school. I didn’t attempt any statistical analysis, but it appears that educational background is the important […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}