Did September 11 Produce a Generation of Volunteers?

Hurricane Katrina has shown that Americans are willing to sacrifice when motivated.

Since the storm struck, more than 500,000 volunteers have worked along the Gulf Coast, according to estimates by the federal government. This unprecedented outpouring of people was facilitated in part by lessons learned after the 2001 terrorist attacks and some observers say it is the most recent sign of a surge in civic duty sparked by September 11.

Similar to Katrina, thousands of people from across the country traveled to New York to lend a hand after the World Trade Center disaster.

President Bush and others hoped that good will signified a sea change in the nation’s psyche, one that would lead to more Americans volunteering and being active in their communities.

“We have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like,” Mr. Bush said in the 2002 State of the Union address, in which he made his “call to service,” asking Americans to contribute 4,000 hours over their lifetime to charity or to serve their country.

But despite the recent flow of volunteers to the Gulf Coast, nonprofit leaders, government officials, and scholars who study civic engagement are divided over the outcome of such hopes.

Many of them argue that a “9/11 generation” has been fostered with a passion for nonprofit and public service, while other experts insist the United States continues to lack an active citizenry.

“In the wake of 9/11, many people expected a surge in civic consciousness,” says William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. “Taken as a whole, those hopes were not realized.”

A Historic Moment

Despite the disagreement, Mr. Galston and others say a window of opportunity still exists to engage more people, especially young people, in public life or serving the needy.

Yet both September 11 and Katrina point out the need for nonprofit groups to continue to spend time and money refining the way they make use of volunteers, particularly sudden surges of people motivated to help during a time of national crisis.

In the future, both the terrorist attack and the hurricane may be seen as watershed moments in a larger civic renewal, says David Eisner, chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency in Washington that oversees AmeriCorps and other national-service programs.

“It’s very possible that people will look back, if we are successful, and cluster 9/11 and Katrina together and say that between the two it really started a lift for civic engagement,” he says.

Signs of such an upsurge are starting to appear.

During the last four years, the number of Americans volunteering has grown. Last year 65.4 million people said they donated their time to a charitable cause, 5.6 million more than in 2002, according to a study released in June by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The findings are based on annual surveys of 60,000 households by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Other indicators point to a growing interest in volunteering. VolunteerMatch, an online service that connects people with charities, says the number of requests for information about volunteer opportunities has grown from an average of 30,000 a month before September 11 to nearly 45,000 today.

To be sure, other factors besides a refreshed sense of civic duty contribute to these changes. For instance, increased access to the Internet has allowed more people to use VolunteerMatch and similar services.

John Bridgeland, former director of the USA Freedom Corps, a White House office established in 2002 to promote the president’s call to service, acknowledges that multiple reasons are behind the increase in volunteers.

But he believes the Bush administration was largely successful in developing a new sense of civic responsibility among young people after September 11. “This is the beginning of a 9/11 generation,” he says.

Since 2002, the percentage of people age 16 to 24 who volunteer rose from 21.9 percent to 24.4 percent, the second-largest percentage increase in volunteering by any age group, according to the Census Bureau. (Volunteering by adults age 55 to 64 rose by the biggest percentage.)

Nonprofit groups that rely on young volunteers say they have benefited from this shift.

Applications to Teach for America, a charity in New York that recruits recent college graduates to work in poor schools, grew by 76 percent from 2000 to 2005. In addition, more Ivy League graduates and students from other elite institutions are applying, says Elissa Clapp, the organization’s vice president for recruitment.

While the changes are in part due to stronger recruitment efforts by Teach for America, Ms. Clapp says the disaster of 2001 has played a role. “No doubt 9/11 had an impact on the consciousness of the country, which helped Teach for America,” she says.

Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland, in College Park, says the rise in youth volunteering began before the attacks, but that the traumatic events of 2001, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have helped shape young people’s desire to serve.

Today, he says, more young people show concern for domestic and world affairs than in recent years.

For example, the number of people age 18 to 24 who voted in the 2004 presidential election grew by 11 percent from 2000.

“There had already been a rather steep increase in volunteering before 9/11, and so what you had was a group of young people who were concerned about society and idealistic and involved, but typically shunning large-scale issues,” he says.

A ‘Sticking Point’

To galvanize a mass movement of charitable and civic-minded youths, grant makers need to provide more money to help nonprofit organizations manage them, many charity officials say.

“There are two issues,” says Susan J. Ellis, a volunteer-management consultant in Philadelphia. “One is people wanting to serve, the other is the capacity of organizations to accommodate them to serve. And that’s always the sticking point.”

A 2004 survey of 1,753 charities by the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, found that 81 percent of the organizations use volunteers, but many find that recruiting and managing additional people is a challenge due to multiple demands on staff members, lack of money, and time conflicts.

One growing source of help for easing such strains is corporations, says Christine M. Kwak, who oversees the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s volunteerism program. “There was a surge in the nonprofit sector being approached by the for-profit sector” after September 11, she says.

But Michael Brown, co-founder and president of City Year, which provides year-long service opportunities to young people, says private efforts will not be enough to galvanize the 9/11 generation into action.

Mr. Brown wants the federal government to give every 18-to-24-year-old in America the opportunity to serve his or her country in the military or in a civilian program.

He envisions recruitment centers at colleges and malls, incentives similar to those offered by the G.I. Bill, and a “U.S. civic-leadership academy” to train government, corporate, and nonprofit officials along the lines of the training that armed forces academies offer.

Mr. Brown is confident Republican and Democratic candidates will embrace such a robust plan during the 2008 presidential campaign. A strong national-service program is “the missing institution in American democracy,” he says.

While approval of such a proposal may seem unlikely, volunteer efforts along the Gulf Coast are providing City Year and other groups a chance to make the case for more support.

City Year in February started a program in Louisiana in response to Hurricane Katrina, an approach similar to the one it took in New York, where it began operating a program shortly after the World Trade Center attacks.

In New Orleans and other hurricane-ravaged regions, volunteers appear to be managed better than they were after the terrorist attacks, when the government and nonprofit groups seemed to lack a coherent plan to coordinate the flood of good will.

“The unaffiliated community volunteers coming in are being utilized and are very much appreciated in a way that perhaps was a little more challenging in the different type of disaster that was here,” says Lisa C. Orloff, founder and executive director of the World Cares Center, in New York, which provides mental-health counseling and training to disaster volunteers, firefighters, and other emergency workers.

Ms. Orloff established the center after she was frustrated by her attempts to help victims of the attacks in Lower Manhattan in 2001. For Katrina, she is training New Yorkers who want to volunteer along the Gulf Coast and helping charities in Baton Rouge and New Orleans provide counseling sessions to overly stressed workers.

After Katrina

Government-run disaster-volunteer programs established after 2001 have received high marks for their efforts in response to Hurricane Katrina.

For example, 6,000 members of the Medical Reserve Corps, composed of retired doctors and other medical professionals, helped with relief aid in hurricane-hit areas and in cities where disaster evacuees fled.

“That’s the one thing that looked like it got together,” says Ms. Ellis, the volunteer manager, who has been critical of the Bush administration.

Nonprofit officials do say that more needs to be done to prepare Americans for volunteering during a disaster and that Katrina, which offers more opportunities for people to help out than September 11 given the nature of the disaster, may help build a stronger volunteer network.

For example, the Points of Light Foundation in May started a Web site (http://www.helpindisaster.org) for Americans to list their emergency skills, where they are willing to travel in a crisis, and how they can be contacted.

“There have been more lessons learned after Katrina than 9/11,” says Robert K. Goodwin, president of Points of Light, in Washington.

A few charity leaders hope that Katrina also will push more people to help out not just during disasters, but also with less immediate, yet still pressing problems, such as poverty.

“Let’s use this crisis as a catalyst,” says Marguerite W. Kondracke, chief executive of America’s Promise-the Alliance for Youth, in Alexandria, Va. The charity wants to expand to other cities a program it started in Houston to help children of hurricane evacuees, and it will need local volunteers to do so.

Similar to the sense of national unity after September 11, Katrina is motivating people like never before, says Ms. Kondracke. “There’s something bonding in a time of crisis, and the hope is we can tap into that all the time,” she says.