Today, Explained - Why volunteering is worth it

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Many of us think our individual actions can’t combat systemic problems. Vox's Rachel Cohen and Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam explain why volunteer work, no matter how small, can make a difference for you and for us all. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette and Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A volunteer serving a Thanksgiving meal at the Long Beach Rescue Mission. Photo by Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rachel Cohen had decided that volunteering her time wasn't really worth her time. I'm 32 years old, and I'd say really since I was in late high school, junior, senior year, I started to see volunteering as kind of pointless. It wasn't going to make a big difference on the things I cared about. It wasn't going to move the needle. So I just stopped doing it. But then she changed her mind. And then that changed her life.

Hi, it's Rachel with We Are Family. I have groceries and produce. Ahead on Today Explained, you will need something good in 2025. And we have an idea for you. I'm Ashley C. Ford, and I host Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative. For the past few years, I've seen a lot of hand-wringing about Governor Ron DeSantis' agenda to end what he calls woke indoctrination. But we wanted to know, what does that mean? And how does this agenda actually affect the people living and

working there, especially those who have benefited from the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that DeSantis' policies would uproot? Check out the latest mini-series on Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast. Subscribe now. Today! Today Explained! I'm Noelle King with Vox's Rachel Cohen. Rachel covers some of the most fraught topics in America. Abortion, child care, housing. Then earlier this year, she wrote a more personal essay that got a very big response.

It was about how she changed her mind about volunteering. Rachel had grown to think it was kind of a useless thing to do. And then she came around in a big way. Well, when I was growing up, I did volunteer. You know, I have these clear memories of bagging food at food pantries, of cleaning up parks. I actually asked my mom about this recently. Okay, Mom, fact check me. What do you remember of me volunteering growing up?

Well, Rach, I don't remember your volunteering to do too much around the house, but outside the house, you did a lot. You tutored. You visited seniors in assisted living facilities. You did park cleanup. Okay, sort of a savage burn by your mother, but you were like a little volunteer. Yeah. And then I went to college in 2010. And that was this time when all these critiques of individual action were just becoming really prominent both on campus and in society. It was the era of Occupy Wall Street. Systemic change. Bernie Sanders.

We're going to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%. And I was reading writers like Naomi Klein who were saying that climate change just wasn't going to get solved by whether you recycled enough. And I really believed it. You can't do anything as an individual. And in fact, that very idea that we as atomized individuals, even groups of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system is objectively nuts. And it wasn't just that I felt doing the little stuff wasn't going to be helpful, but it was that actually it might be harmful,

and that donating to charity or volunteering your time with these smaller things, changing your diet or, you know, focusing on your shopping bag material. Like that was a real distraction from the important work that we needed to be doing to upend the system and change things. And I think we saw also after 2020, there was this really big, you know,

national focus on systemic change and structural problems. And all of this, I think, really compounded to having people just become more skeptical, cynical, doubtful about the value of volunteering. Was it just you that stopped volunteering when you were hearing those messages? No. And I mean, if you think about who really resonated with the Bernie Sanders campaign and a lot of these ideas and climate activism, it was young people. It was my generation and it's continued to follow with Gen Z. Volunteering is complicated to study, but we know it's been falling off, even with the rise of all these virtual opportunities that really exploded in the pandemic. You know, just as one stat, just 20 percent of Gen Z volunteered per AmeriCorps data compared to almost 30 percent of Gen X. And there's actually this newish group called the Generosity Commission that formed a few years ago. The Giving Institute launched the Generosity Commission in 2021 to understand what generosity looks like today and how to respond to declines in giving to

and volunteering with nonprofits. Jane Wales, the vice president of philanthropy and society at the Aspen Institute, she served as the co-chair of this commission. Most of my life, I've been either running a nonprofit, serving in government, or volunteering myself. She's in her 70s. She's had a long career. It's a very polished and accomplished woman. Lives in San Francisco. Has a little yappy dog.

There goes the dog again. She spent many years working primarily with rich people, trying to get them to give more money. And she says that rich people today are not really the real problem. I think that the moment of sudden concern was when we learned that year over year, with a few exceptions, there's more money given in our society, but by fewer givers. And year over year, with rare exception, more volunteer hours have been donated by fewer volunteers. Okay, so rich people are not the problem.

I never said they were. You never said they were. What is the problem? What does Jane say? Well, Jane's group with this generosity commission, they told me that their research suggests that the decline in volunteering and charitable giving, that it's all downstream of other themes that we have sort of heard about, rising social isolation, church attendance is down, less trusted institutions, we're all bowling alone.

One of the things that has worried us is we conducted focus groups with everyday givers, everyday volunteers, and several of them said, look, the problems are too large for me to make a difference, or I'm not Bill Gates, I for me to make a difference. Or I'm not Bill Gates. I can't possibly make a difference. It's important to feel you can make a difference in a democracy so that you do play your role of civic engagement. We're depending on each other to be involved. All right. So Jane is speaking directly to someone like you, someone who said it isn't worth it. What made you change your mind? Well, I got that reader question about a year ago, and it made me think, you know,

am I making the world a better place by not doing this stuff? Am I happier by not doing this stuff? You know, I'm busy, but I'm not that busy. I always find time for fitness classes and traveling and seeing my friends and popular TV shows. I just hadn't been carving out much time for or any time for serving others. It's, you know, it's the strange feeling to feel busy. We're always running around with errands and juggling work and social gatherings, but at the same time kind of disconnected from our local community. And yeah, so I started thinking about this loneliness recession we're always talking about. The U.S. Surgeon General today declared a new public health epidemic in America, loneliness. And I work from home most of the time. And I know, you know, federal data shows Americans spend more time alone at home than they did 20 years ago. So all of this just led me to do some hard thinking about my life and my own schedule.

And I was like, I need to make some kind of change. Okay, so what'd you do? Well, I didn't really know what to do. But I was like, I'm going to start with a New Year's resolution. So at the start of 2024, I just set a New Year's resolution to volunteer. And how did that go? Well, it was also a little harder than I expected. I'm not really religious.

I didn't have a faith institution to plug easily into. Vox doesn't facilitate this sort of thing. We don't have corporate volunteering events on the weekend to go to. I sent out some emails of inquiry on sites like VolunteerMatch.org, but I didn't hear anything back. So I was kind of at a loss for a while. And eventually I stumbled on a couple of groups, including one called We Are Family in D.C. It's this nonprofit that's been around for 20 years. They deliver groceries once a month to low-income seniors. Hi, Mr. Diaz.

Hey, how are you? How are you? I've been out with them a few times now. The people are really sweet. Have your produce. Thank you. Yeah, how are you doing? I'm fine. How are you?

Good. I hope, well, that's next month. What? I was going to say, I hope you have a good holiday. Oh, you too. I'm anticipating myself. Oh, that's great. Yeah, you too.

I'll see you next month. You as well. I like that, Rachel. I like that a lot. Me too. It was really nice. He's really nice, and they all are just, I mean, not everyone wants to talk, you know, for a while, but many of them do and many of them seem, you know, it's nice to see people come and show care. Yeah.

That's kind of the idea behind it. Yeah. Tell me about this group. The group was co-founded by this guy, Mark Anderson. He directs it now, but he originally started out as a volunteer. Everybody, unless it says produce only, which means they just get produce, everybody gets a plastic bag of non-perishables. I asked Mark after the last time I went what he's learned about recruiting and retaining volunteers, since for so many other groups, it seems like it's gotten harder than it used to be. But We Are Family has kind of been able to buck the trend, and they really do seem to continue to be able to engage loyal volunteers.

Essentially, if volunteers have a meaningful experience, and for us, we would ideally prefer that it would be a transformative experience. At the end of it, they look at the world in a different way and they feel part of it in a different way, then they tend to come back. And I mean, the experience has been meaningful to me and I've been coming back. It definitely caught some sort of charitable bug through this. I have donated blood three times this year after having never donated before. And I recently accepted an invitation to join a local nonprofit board, which I'm really excited about as kind of a new way to get involved. So yeah, it's been a really positive shift. And I just I feel better prioritizing these things and actually making time for them. You know, I'm very happy for you. It sounds like you changed your own life for the better.

I want to ask you about something that you said earlier, which was when you were in college, you got the sense that volunteering really didn't mean anything in a larger sense. Is volunteering just a form of you taking care of yourself, or do you feel like the volunteering you're doing actually does have a larger purpose? I think one of the ways that I've come to think about this question is I just don't think we're actually better off when people withhold their time and their generosity. It's not an either or. It's definitely not about giving up political work or collective change. But I think for me, I think I was wrong. I think we've been wrong in concluding that those smaller acts of service were really the stealthy impediments to the broader world we want to build.

And I think actually they go together. And demonizing individual action as inconsequential or harmful was a mistake. These things do matter. I'm not solving our blood shortage, but it means someone who needs it can get help that week. Overall, I think it helps to not look at volunteering as something where you need to find that absolutely perfect activity that fulfills all your virtuous desires and perfectly utilizes all your skills. And maybe you won't even really like the first thing you do, but maybe through that you discover something else that you really do find meaningful. And I mean, contrary to what Mark Anders said earlier about how it has to be transformative, I think there's value in just doing something in that, you know, broad world of service, care and volunteering. And yeah, I think that's absolutely worth your time.

Rachel Cohen, thanks so much for volunteering to take the time for us today. Thank you so much. know about you, but I've seen a lot of headlines about how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to end what he calls woke indoctrination. Like in 2021, when Florida passed the so-called Stop Woke Act that would limit how schools and businesses could talk about race and sexual identity. But we wanted to ask, how does it affect the actual people and business owners in Florida? To find out, I talked to a man named Antonio McBroom. Antonio is a Black business owner who says he found purpose in uplifting marginalized people. He even started his own company with a mission to help people like him navigate bias in the workplace. If we literally cannot address the real challenges of our marketplace, the real challenges historically

that have led to this, if we can't be intentional and talk about that in the workplace, it's a threat to our democracy. Hear the story of how he and other business owners put the Stop Woke Act in legal limbo. Subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast. I'm Robert D. Putnam, but nobody calls me Robert. Nobody who knows me calls me Robert. They call me Bob. And I am a retired professor at Harvard University, and I write books. 25 years ago, Bob wrote a book called Bowling Alone. It was grounded in data, and it offered a simple premise. Once upon a time, Americans joined bowling leagues. Now, they're going bowling by themselves. He extended

the metaphor, positing that our declining social connections were leading to a decline in our democratic society. Lonely Americans, he wrote, are not great for America. The book was a strike. It's still influential today. Bob Putnam is nothing if not game. And so we asked him to read Rachel's essay and to give us his thoughts. I rejoice in millennials volunteering one-on-one. For many reasons, it's good for the people they're helping, but it's also good for them. There's a lot of evidence that if you're volunteering to help somebody else, you're probably getting more benefits out of it than they do, because there are all sorts of, I mean, even physiological changes. But certainly, people, after you've volunteered, you're happier than if you hadn't volunteered.

And probably also the person you're helping is better off. Rachel essentially is writing, and you've just said the same thing, volunteering is good for the person who is doing the volunteering, right? Correct. Is that the reason to volunteer doing the volunteering, right? Correct. Is that the reason to volunteer? It's one reason to volunteer. You don't have to choose between the reasons. I mean, it's good for you and it's good for, you know, those around you. In writing the book Bowling Alone, I talked about a lot of the consequences of our connections with other people, both our actual in-person connections and our connections through political organizations or whatever.

And that is a community in which people are more connected with one another. The whole community functions better, not just the two people involved in a given exchange. But let me give an example from education. If I, as a parent, get involved in my child's school, I join the PTA or I volunteer in the classroom or whatever, that turns out to be good for my child. But the astonishing thing is my getting involved has even more effect on the success and the happiness and so on of other kids in the school,

even the kids I don't actually see. That's this external effect, if I can put it that way. And in some sense, that's the big picture of Bowling Alone. And it's why I don't want to claim that I'm a prophet. But in the book Bowling Alone, which was written almost 30 years ago, 25 to 30 years ago, I talked about the decline in these connections, decline in what I called social capital. And I said, gosh, if this continues,

it's going to be bad for American democracy. You know, we're going to have more polarized politics and so on. That was 30 years ago. And the reason that there's now a little bit of a new wave of interest in my work is that I turned out to be right. I mean, even more right than I thought. And if you've not noticed, American politics is in a pickle right now. And the fundamental reason for that is because for the last 30 or 40 years, we as a country have become less and less connected with one another. In my jargon, less and less social capital. Does that make sense? It does make sense.

Does the data bear it out? Because it feels like we're more isolated now. It definitely does. And it felt that way when you wrote Bowling Alone 25 years ago. Is it true? Yes. Once upon a time, there was a debate, you know, probably now, 25 years ago, there was a thought that maybe, well, we don't actually have to be in somebody's presence. We could, you know, see them on Zoom or, you know, the social media would be just as good as actual social connections. For quite a while, the evidence has been that Facebook is not as good as bowling leagues.

That is, you don't get the same benefit from connecting with people via social media as you do from actually connecting with them face-to-face. That's what the evidence has shown. I can tell you when public opinion on that changed, and it was just about November 25th of 2020 at the height of the pandemic, and everybody in America realized that hugging grandma was not the same thing as actually seeing the scene grandma over zoom and it isn't okay so at the moment we're at a low point for

social connection what brought us here in the beginning of the 20th century around about 1900 america was very polarized politically. Our politics were tribal. We were very unequal. It was economically. Big gap between the rich who were living on the Upper East Side of New York and the huddled masses, poor immigrants, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Big gaps between rich and poor. We were very socially disconnected. And actually also, although I don't want to focus on this too much, it's a true fact, we were culturally very, very much self-centered.

We were a kind of an I society rather than a we society. We didn't think of ourselves as having a lot in common. And then, beginning about 1910, none of these things are super exact, but about 1910, all of those things began to change, and they moved in a different, better direction for a half century and more. So from roughly 1910 to roughly 1965 or 1970, every year we became less polarized politically, less socially isolated, less unequal or more equal, and more of a sense of a we society. So we went from being an I society around 1900 to being a we society around, roughly speaking, 1965. And the movements of the 1960s, which you referred to, but no doubt you don't remember, I do remember that period, that was the culmination of a half-century-long increase in political

participation, increase in connecting with other people, increase in cooperation across party lines, increase in equality. And then, and I have to say this is just about the time when I personally began to vote, so you may think I personally brought these problems on America, in the middle 60s, all those lines turned. And for the next half century up to now now, every year, we got more socially isolated, more politically disconnected, more unequal. We lost it all. At some point in her life, Rachel stopped volunteering.

Many people have done the same. I am one of those people, incidentally. But when she started volunteering again, she found that it really helped her. If the idea is we do have to get people back to volunteering for the sake of society. Yes. Could it work to sell joining clubs, volunteering, in-person engagement as this will make you feel good? I promise. And the side effect is that it's good for society. It's good for democracy. But if you're going to do it, do it for yourself. Think of it as a kind of self-care. The danger to your life expectancy from social isolation is as big a risk factor for premature death as smoking.

Huh. Now, you probably don't smoke, but if you did smoke and you had a choice, should I cut smoking or should I join a club? By all means, join the club. There are huge personal benefits from connecting with other people, including joining. So the reason that you or Rachel or anybody else, the most important reason actually that you should connect with other people, you will add years to your life expectancy. You're going to live longer and also you're going to save American society. By the way, you're also going to save American democracy. That's right. Robert Putnam. You won't find him bowling alone.

Miles Bryan knew that you needed something good in 2025. He produced today's show. Matthew Collette edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, and Patrick Boyd engineered. The rest of our team includes Avishai Artsy, Halima Shah, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Hadi Muagdi, Victoria Chamberlain, Andrea Christen's daughter, and Rob Byers. Amina El-Sadi is a supervising editor, Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer, and we use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Are you thankful for Sean Rama's firm this holiday season? I sure am. Why don't you drop him a five-star review on Apple and tell him I sent you?

We'll be off tomorrow, so you have plenty of time. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC, and the show is a part of Vox. You can support our journalism by joining our membership program. Go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Our archives, like our hearts, are free and open to the public, as it should be. Happy Thanksgiving to one and all. I'm Noelle King Ford, and I host Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative. When I first heard about

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passing something called the Stop Woke Act, I was curious what that would actually look like beyond just political rhetoric. In many reports, this new law would limit how people could talk about race and sexual identity at work and in school, which could basically uproot diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. So I wanted to talk to someone caught in the middle of all this. Like Antonio McBroom, a Black business owner who sued the state of Florida because, as he sees it, the Stop Woke Act hurts businesses like his that want to intentionally uplift marginalized people in the workplace. Check out Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast. New episodes out now.