{"id":5131,"date":"2007-01-23T17:34:14","date_gmt":"2007-01-23T17:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5131"},"modified":"2007-01-23T17:34:14","modified_gmt":"2007-01-23T17:34:14","slug":"volunteering-down-in-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5131","title":{"rendered":"volunteering down in 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(from Wingspread, near Racine, WI) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the volunteering rate for the United States as a whole slipped by 2.1 percentage points in 2006, having been stable for the previous three years. The Bureau adds, &#8220;The largest decline was among teenagers.&#8221; This trend matches our surveys from 2002 and 2006, which showed a decline in youth volunteering after a long and substantial increase during the 1990s. The BLS and other federal agencies are not making much of the 2006 results, which appear on an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/news.release\/volun.nr0.htm\">obscure web page<\/a>. That makes an interesting contrast with 2005, when the Corporation for National and Community Service <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalservice.gov\/about\/newsroom\/releases_detail.asp?tbl_pr_id=534\">announced: <\/a>&#8220;Volunteering Hits a 30-Year High, New Federal Report Finds.&#8221; As a matter of fact, the rate had not increased in 2005 compared to the plateau of the previous two years:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.peterlevine.ws\/images\/census_volunteering.GIF\"><\/p>\n<p>And now we see a decrease. For my part, I&#8217;m not convinced that the rate of volunteering is an important indicator. It tells us nothing about the seriousness of the work being done; and it arbitrarily excludes paid work of public value. I much prefer such questions as: &#8220;Have you worked with others to address a community problem?&#8221; But if we are going to draw a lot of attention to an increase in the volunteering rate (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalservice.gov\/about\/newsroom\/releases_detail.asp?tbl_pr_id=534\">David Eisner called<\/a> the level in 2005 &#8220;a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get more Americans engaged in making their communities stronger&#8221;), then we ought to pay equal attention to a decline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(from Wingspread, near Racine, WI) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the volunteering rate for the United States as a whole slipped by 2.1 percentage points in 2006, having been stable for the previous three years. The Bureau adds, &#8220;The largest decline was among teenagers.&#8221; This trend matches our surveys from 2002 and 2006, [&hellip;]<\/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-5131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5131","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=5131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}