Obama on youth volunteering

This article from Newsday is a good follow-up to my previous posts on the state of volunteering in the US, and to a smaller extent, even my post on the Generational Theory. President Obama signed the Serve America Act a couple of weeks ago and requested the youth of America to take part in volunteering huge numbers. He states the completely different circumstances of today’s younger generation, that grew up in ‘the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an economic recession without precedent’. The article questions whether Obama’s initiatives to increase volunteering among young people in America would be any more successful than those implemented by Presidents Bush or even Clinton, but then mentions how Obama himself has done a lot of volunteering in his lifetime and doesn’t utter empty words not backed by experience. The article also cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a book that documented the decrease in civic engagement from the 1960’s onwards, something that I personally think about a lot. (Putnam speaks of the concept of social capital and how that contributes to re-vitalising or improving the condition of a society). 

Indirectly touching on the Generational Theory, the article also mentions how people born during the difficulties that came about as a result of the Depression and the Second World War were more service-oriented than the baby boomers that followed, and therefore the young people of today who are struggling with the effects of terrorism, war, natural disasters and economic meltdown are, in a repetition of the characteristics of people born two generations before them, more open to volunteering. 

I thought this was one of the more interesting paragraphs of the article:

The generation entering adulthood is also the first one intimately acquainted with the most advanced communication technologies the world has ever known - such as cell phones, text messaging and the Internet. And we know that having a social connection to someone who is civically engaged is an important predictor of whether someone volunteers.

There aren’t enough youth volunteering organisations that reach out to young people on their terms. v is doing a lot to change this with vInspired.