Why do you volunteer? For most of us it is just part of our DNA to give our time and talent to bring about good works where we live. It is what we believe we should do for others plus, while we are helping others we are doing something to make ourselves feel better, too.
According to the Non Profit Times Weekly, 2/24/2014 the national volunteer rate continued to climb last year, with more than one in four adults volunteering through a nonprofit organizations and a total of 64.5 million Americans contributing almost 7.9 billion hours of time.
Highlights from the recently released annual study on “Volunteering and Civic Life in America” for the Corporation for National and Community Servic and the National Conference on Citizenship note:
- Generation X (born between 1965 and 1981) had the highest volunteer rate of any age trending upward for the last 11 years.
- Americans 65 and older donated nearly two times as many hours per volunteer than the population as a whole.
- Volunteering among teenagers is up almost 3% since 2007.
- More than half (50.7) of all citizens donated at least $25 to charity in 2012
Something else of note is the list of top five states by volunteer rates (based on three-year moving average from 2010-2012) were:
- Utah, 43.8%