Where are All the Young Volunteers?

CIRCLE recently released a new study* titled “That’s Not Democracy” to explore how out-of-school youth engage in civic life and what some of the obstacles are to their involvement in community life. The paper highlights the inequality of community engagement levels among young Americans, especially between young people who have attended college and those who did not complete high school. Of non-college youth, 37 percent are “completely disconnected,” while only 13.5 percent report engaging in any form of traditional civic life such as volunteering.

The survey raises important questions about the need to better engage youth early on and explore the role of higher education in cultivating civic engagement.

"That’s Not Democracy" concluded that non-college young people “lack organized and institutional opportunities to address large-scale social issues.” In addition, there was a repeated disconnect for youth between their activities, which may in fact qualify as traditional civic engagement, with the understanding that those same actions can create impact and positive social change.

Top findings:

• Most participants saw concrete barriers to civic engagement. For example, they perceived that institutions did not want their engagement, that their communities provided few positive role models, and that they lacked the money and connections to contribute.
• Many participants believed they had skills to make a difference in their communities, but they lacked opportunities to use those skills.
• Nevertheless, many participants served or helped other individuals in their own families and neighborhoods, although they did not think of these forms of helping behavior when asked about community-level change.
• Participants were highly aware of social and political issues, concerned about them, and likely to discuss them critically in their own social networks, even if they did not see how they personally could address such issues.
• A small minority of participants had been recruited into civic organizations, and they generally expressed strong support for these groups. Most other focus group members believed that such institutions were missing in their communities and reported never having been asked to participate.

"That’s Not Democracy" authors also offer some suggested strategies for reengaging youth who are not currently civically minded based on feedback and responses from their focus groups:

• Education for younger people (most often siblings or their own children); and
• Recruitment of non-college youth into organizations that assist and improve education.

At Social Citizens, we see the next generation as key to the advancement of how we identify, understand, and address our nation’s most pressing issues. Whether it is the fact that young people do not engage or simply do not realize that what they are doing is part of a larger change making form of engagement — there is clearly a disconnect that may produce serious repercussions for future generations.

In addition to the recommended ideas from CIRCLE, we suggest focusing on reinforcing the connection for youth specific to their importance, their role, and their impact on their communities and to creating social change as a broad way to influence their decisions and integration with civic life. One way this could be done is by focusing on the ways in which technology and social media have also changed the way people engage in their communities. As reported in this study, "once an individual is online, the barriers to participation in any particular site or group are often low." This is an exciting idea that we at Social Citizens believe has great potential for the next generation and may help redefine civic engagement.

What other suggestions or recommendations do you have?

 

*The focus groups and survey results included opinions from more than 121 non-college youth in four different cities that were interviewed between fall 2008 and June 2010. The authors of the report acknowledge that standardized survey questions may not be ideal in identifying true levels of involvement—especially when terms like “volunteering” and “civic engagement” can be confusing—and cannot provide explanation as to why young people do or do not participate.