Welcome Message
The Corporation for National and Community Service is pleased to present Volunteering in America: 2008 State and City Trends and Rankings. This comprehensive report has again been produced along with our partners, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2008 report updates and unifies information previously published in separate state and city reports, and greatly expands local information, presenting data on more than 150 of our nation's cities. And, for the first time this year, the report is available only in an online version.
In the past eight years, Americans overwhelming responded by volunteering in the time following the tragedies of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, as well as enthusiastically answered President Bush's call to service in his 2002 State of the Union message, and served in myriad ways in their local communities. All across the country we have demonstrated our determination to "serve goals larger than ourselves" and build a culture of service and citizenship in the American tradition.
America's 61 million volunteers are the engine that powers thousands of nonprofit, community- and faith-based organizations across the nation allowing them to extend their reach in tackling the truly tough challenges we face as a society. They are proof that volunteer service is the solution to relieving the burdens of the 37 million Americans – including 13 million children – who live in poverty, reaching out to many of the 3.5 million Americans who have no place to live, creating opportunities for some of the more than 600,000 prisoners released into their communities annually, and mentoring children from disadvantaged circumstances. America's volunteers accomplish so much, yet there is still so much more to do: We will continue to rebuild the Gulf Coast for years to come. We must intervene now in the lives of the over 50 percent of high school students in our largest cities who are dropping out of school. We need to support the dramatically increasing number of frail elderly who want to live independently in their homes. And we need volunteers to accomplish all those things and more.
This report makes a significant contribution to finding and engaging those volunteers year after year. As in the past, the report provides insight into who is volunteering, what volunteer activities they are doing and what motivates them to begin and sustain their service. This year's report is an even richer source of information on America's volunteers with the addition of a newly created interactive Web site, the most comprehensive level of volunteering information available to communities across the country, which will house most of the Corporation's research, including previous volunteer reports. The Web site allows policy makers, community leaders, government officials, nonprofit organizations, and individuals interested in volunteering to retrieve data at one location and customize profiles that include both national service and volunteering data for their state.
While volunteer rates have been essentially static the last two years, volunteer retention continues to be a concern to organizations across the country as one volunteer in three fails to return to volunteer again the following year. Armed with information from this report and with the help of the Web site, local leaders and organizations can more effectively target their recruiting efforts, match local programs with available volunteer resources, determine service gaps, and do a better job of attracting and retaining their volunteers.
This report and new Web site represent a valuable investment in our national partnership with nonprofits, state and local governments, business, and faith-based and community organizations to grow and sustain volunteering across our nation. We are committed to working with all these partners to achieve our national goal of 75 million American volunteers by 2010.