Since posting about The Extraordinaires iPhone app, a number of people have pointed me in the direction of other ways you can volunteer without leaving your couch.  Both Help From Home and Charity Guide offer micro volunteer opportunities that allow to you to give your time on your own schedule.

This a very interesting development because it gets to heart of an issue that has been circulating aroudn in the nonprofit community. Usually in an economic downturn, people volunteer more, but in fact, over the last 18 months, we’ve actually since the opposite. The National Conference on Citizenship issued an August study showing that volunteering has dipped during the economic downturn. According to the group, “72 percent of people who took part in the national survey said they cut back on time spent volunteering, participating in groups and doing other civic activities in the past year.”

But contained in those numbers were some interesting positive trends even though the overall numbers were down. Young people seems have been vounteering more. As the report notes:

“Millennials may have more opportunities for formal volunteering than Boomers do (e.g., through high school or university), but less access to disposable income, as a significant portion of Millennials are currently unemployed or going to school.”

Young people, it added, are often seeking a chance to keep up or increase their skill levels, as they complete their education and find themselves going on the job market.

So there you have it. It could be that older people are more focused on finding employment or recouping lost income, and so are therefore not volunteer oriented. Whatever the particulars, hopefully we’ll see these number rise and volunteerism grow again.  And maybe micro-volunteering while waiting for a bus is the first step in that process.

Photo via Flickr courtesy betsyjean79 / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0