Various developments in social capital

Water Giggles by McBeth -- Flickr photo

Sorry I’ve been offline for a bit.

Here is a this-and-that post regarding various developments in social capital.

• The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) has a wonderful new revamped site on Volunteering in America.  They also headlined findings from the Current Population Survey data in 2008 on volunteering and civic engagement showing volunteering remaining steady in 2008 and “[t]he number of people who worked with their neighbors to fix a community problem rose by 31 percent, from 15.2 million in 2007 to 19.9 million in 2008″, a remarkable increase in a year, which CNCS attributes to the Obama Administration’s United We Serve initiative and Serve.gov website.
• The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) is releasing a new report “Civic Health and Hard Times” on September 9, 2009 at their annual conference on the “Opportunity Cost of Civic Engagement“.  Stay tuned for the findings.  We have some active research in this area on the impact of individual and aggregate economic hardship on levels of civic engagement which we have not published yet; a description of some of the literature in this area can be found in this earlier post.
• Various sites have blogged (here or here) or described an interesting conference in late July at Tufts (The Obama Administration’s Civic Agenda After Six Months), organized by Peter Levine at Tufts, and bringing together some scholars on civic engagement (including my HKS colleagues Archon Fung and Marshall Ganz) with folks from the Obama Administration (like Allen Solomont from CNCS) trying to set an agenda for the Obama Administration.
• Also in early August was the Strengthening Our Nation’s Democracy II conference in DC (organized by Demos. AmericaSpeaks and Everyday Democracy).  See descriptions of the content here.
• And BTW, my colleague Robert Putnam was quoted in a Forbes article entitled “Loneliness Can Kill You” about the research of University of Chicago neuroscientist and physiologist, John T. Cacioppo.

Thin-slice volunteering

Driven by concern that 73% of Americans do not volunteer, the developers of Extraordinaries have decided to try to enable smart-phones to be used with thin-slice volunteering.

It’s part of the ever-shrinking notion of volunteering.  Volunteering used to mean some regular commitment to a cause (mentoring a kid, working every Saturday in a soup kitchen, visiting an elderly shut-in weekly, etc.).  In the 1990s, the Cares organizations (NY Cares, Hands on Atlanta, etc.) realized that yuppie go-go Americans either wouldn’t make a long-term commitment like this or didn’t have control over their schedule.  This gave rise to monthly schedules of interesting one-off volunteer opportunities that members could sign up for.  The 1980s and 1990s also gave rise to corporate volunteering days and “Days of Service” like the one on MLK’s birthday before Obama’s inauguration organized by USAService.org.

Now the Extraordinaries ‘ founders focus on the fact that there may be millions of smartphone American users who can’t (or won’t) even make a day-long commitment to volunteering, but they collectively have billions of free hours in micro-slices (while waiting for or riding the bus, while waiting for a meeting to begin, sitting in an airport, etc.).

They are trying to invent lots of collectively useful tasks that Americans could be doing during those times (other than playing video games), and make the interaction fun and exciting, and change the culture of waiting into producing a collective good.

Applications use smartphone features  like  Internet, graphics, camera, GPS, video, audio and break tasks up into ones that can be done in a few minutes.  Possible tasks include:

• Translating micro-finance loan applications into other languages to find funders for the developing world (Kiva).
• Transcribing subtitles for human rights videos (Witness).
• Helping NASA find craters on the surface of Mars (Clickworkers).
• Tagging old photos in the Library of Congress so others could search them
• Collecting data on urban birds (Celebrate Urban Birds).

If this cannibalizes existing volunteering, I’m not sure that this will be a win-win for society, but if it augments the amount of volunteer labor in the US, it could have clearly beneficial results.

Note: some of the health benefits of volunteering undoubtedly stem from a sense of engagement in society that volunteers have and some from the inter-personal ties (social capital) developed through volunteering.  Virtually all of the existing applications that Extraordinaries plan to tap into are devoid of social capital (see above list).  We encourage Extraordinaries to be creative about thin-slice volunteering opportunities that could augment social ties and social trust.  For example, they mention the idea of using smart phones in thin slices to help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL).  Depending on how this was set up, it could have interesting bridging social capital implications.  We hope that more such social capital-friendly thin-slice volunteer opportunities will emerge.

For an interesting post by Extraordinaries co-founder Ben Rigby on TechPresident, read here.

More to Give: the unfilled potential of senior service

We worked with Civic Enterprises on a report, sponsored by AARP on the fact that leaders and government are not doing enough to fully engage seniors in service.  The report More to Give: Tapping the Potential of the Baby Boomer, Silent and Greatest Generation, with an introduction by our own Robert Putnam, ex-Senator Harris Wofford (a long-time champion for service), and John Bridgeland (head of Civic Enterprises), outlines seniors’ fears that they will leave the country in worse shape, but notes how many of this cohort expect to increase their service in their retirement years, and notes how various government or private-sector programs could play a big role in increasing this service (e.g., a better information pipeline of how to get involved, enabling those who serve to get educational awards that can be shared with seniors’ grandchildren or other young needy Americans, or expanding some of the cost-effective governmental programs).  The program reports on findings from focus groups and a new large-scale survey of Boomers, the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation.

Advances in social capital measurement

Here is an update on our great progress on social capital measurement.

We should begin with a word about the concept of social capital measurement in general. Since social capital refers to the value of social networks, in principle if you were going to measure social capital, you’d ask everyone to detail all their friends, contacts, acquaintances and then ask them all sorts of questions about these folks (the demographics of each friend, how frequently they contact each person, for what purposes, what they could use these ties for, etc.). It is an interesting approach employed by social networks academics and practical for a business work group, or a university class but far too time-consuming for a city or a country. [One interesting area, on which I have blogged before in "Life In The Network" and "Life In the Network II" is the emerging field of digital traces, where digital footprints like one's e-mails, call logs, locations recorded through GPS/bluetooth devices in cellphones, etc. might collectively reveal our social networks on a grand scale without requiring such detailed surveying. It raises lots of privacy concerns, but it is certainly an area to watch. In principle, one could watch them dynamically change over time, and with demographic information about each person could figure out which links are social bridges across various dimensions or how social patterns differed by demographic groups. Some interesting work of David Lazer has at least found that one can use some of this information to quite accurately gauge who work and social friends are. But these data are not generally available.]

Thus, for now, we have gathered social capital data at the individual level by gathering proxies for social capital: volunteering, religious involvement, neighborliness, trust, participation and leadership in voluntary associations, philanthropy, political participation, etc. For more on the dimensions of social capital, click here. One can then aggregate random individual-level social capital data at a neighborhood, or town or city or state to understand social capital strengths or weaknesses of places and which places have overall greater connectedness. Of course, since there are differential benefits of being in the networks (job leads, lifetime earnings) from the spillover benefits of networks to isolated individuals (lower crime in areas, better performing governments, lower corruption rates, higher public health, etc.), not all the residents in a community with high social capital will necessarily get the same benefits if they are relying on others’ social capital rather than their own.

One of the things we’ve been pushing (given the strong connections of social capital with so many of these public goods), is government measurement of social capital.

The good news is that the US government has agreed to start annually measuring social capital on the Current Population Survey (the largest government survey other than the Census). While we’ve been urging this for a while among high level government contacts, the 2 key breakthroughs were a meeting of Robert Putnam with President George W. Bush where he personally committed to make this happen, and then the extremely diligent work of Robert Grimm and Nathan Dietz at the Corporation for National and Community Service, working with the folks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics with background help and reinforcement from the Saguaro Seminar. It will be a terrific step forward for policy makers, civic leaders, academics and citizens.  [We're also grateful to the Ford Foundation and a consortium of about 3 dozen community foundations that partnered with us to measure social capital in 2000 and 2006 as the lessons learned from those surveys helped provide the answers to many of the questions that CNCS and the Bureau of Labor Statistics had.]

The US government began measuring volunteering annually (on the Current Population Survey September supplement in 2000), included questions on attending a public meeting and working with neighbors to fix/improve something (starting in 2006), but are now expanding the list by some 20 items starting this Fall (2008). This CPS is the gold standard as far as measurement and has a national sample size of about 57,000 households annually (although they obtain approximately 110,000 responses since they ask about other folks 15+ living in the household). The data is primarily used to construct monthly unemployment rates and has oversamples of larger cities. They plan to ask about volunteering and social capital every year (volunteering on the September CPS supplement and social capital mainly on the November CPS supplement).

As to the questions they are asking this Fall, we haven’t gotten a finalized list, but the likely questionnaire items for the September and November supplements are appended at the end of this message. It is likely to include many/most of the questions we would choose to ask, but will NOT contain some key social capital items (like religious attendance, generalized social trust, inter-racial trust, subjective wellbeing, etc.). These may be asked in future years, but no guarantees.

Much of this past social capital data has been made available on the Corporation for National and Community Service-sponsored website Volunteering in America [See blog post on that terrific new resource here.]

If you click on Select a City/State and then choose *All*, you can see all the cities that they have enough volunteering data on which to develop reliable estimates. Over the next several years, they will have reliable social capital measurement for similar middle sized cities, states, or regions of states.  This will function, as Robert Putnam calls it, as a “social capital seismograph”, always going in the background, that will be very useful to researchers who want to produce natural experiments:  seeing how baseline levels of social capital affect the ability of two similar communities experiencing different events (a major plant closing or a hurricane or…).

For those of you dealing with smaller level geography (rural areas, cities with populations of under 100,000), I’m not positive that the CPS data even when 3-4 years are lumped together will produce reliable estimates for you. You may, if you want to measure your social capital, have to figure a way to band together with some other community foundations or other local groups to commission social capital surveys in your community and to commission a national survey to compare these data to. You can also always e-mail the Corporation for National and Community Service and make a request for a lower level of geography if they have it. They might be able to provide you with data they have already run but didn’t put on the website.

Three researchers at Penn State University (Anil Rupasingha, Stephen Goetz, and David Freshwater) developed county-level social capital measures that are reasonably good based on the density of civic and non-profit organizations, voting turnout, and census completion rates, among other factors. [You should note however that we found higher correlations, r=.37, between our social capital measures in 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey and RGF county measures than the Corporation for National and Community Service did in their analysis of their own social capital measures with RGF data at the MSA level.]
- If you want the RGF data, you can download these county-level data here:
. 1990 data
. 1997 data
. 1990 data dictionary (explaining their measures)

A note to the wise: I would urge that you NOT try to compare local social capital data that you gather to these CPS measures. CPS numbers are typically far LOWER and LESS civic than what you would get in a phone survey (both because the government survey is not about community or civic engagement and because they garner a far higher response rate, they hear more from people who are uninterested in civic engagement). The CPS numbers are probably more accurate but thus hard to compare with what you would get from the phone survey.

If you are interested in doing your own survey, you can, as always, find a copy of our Short Form Social Capital Survey on our website. [Note: we may update this after it is finalized what questions are being asked on the CPS November 2008 Social Capital supplement] We ask you e-mail us if you do use the Short-Form so we can keep track of who is using this.

The latest Social Capital Survey we administered was the 2006 social capital community survey. The national benchmark banners (what proportion of total, men, women, etc. gave various answers to the questions) is also available.

For more information on social capital measurement in general, visit here. We’ll post on that site when the list of items to be gathered in September and November 2008 is finalized.

***
A not fully complete list of likely social capital questions on CPS Sept./Nov. Supplements

- how often politics discussed in typical month with friends/family
- how get news/information (newspaper, news magazine, TV, radio, other Internet sources), and frequency for each of these

In the last 12 months, have you
- contacted public official
- attended meeting at which political issues discussed
- boycotted/boycotted a product
- march, rally, protest or demonstration
- showed support for particular candidate (distributing campaign materials, fundraising, etc.)

- participation in any such groups in last 12 months
(a) A school group, neighborhood, or community association such as PTA or neighborhood watch groups?
(b) A service or civic organization such as American Legion, or Lions Club?
(c) A sports or recreation organization such as a soccer club or tennis club?
(d) A church, synagogue, mosque or other religious institutions or organizations, NOT COUNTING your attendance at religious services.
(e) Any other type of organization that I have not mentioned? (other specify)

And then:

-are you officer/committee members of any such group organization
- have you attended any meeting of any group/organization in the last 12 months

- frequency of family dinners
- frequency communicate with neighbors
- how often do favors for neighbors
-# close friends (outside of family)
- 2 political knowledge questions
- charitable giving
- voting
- registered to vote
- volunteering (whole series of questions on frequency, what type of activity, what type of organization, how you learned about volunteering, cause you volunteered for, etc.)

Find out where you stack up volunteering-wise

The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) revealed the new report on volunteering which shows that nationwide about 26.2% of Americans volunteered in 2007, a bit below the rate in 2006 of 26.9% and below the higher levels seen from 2003-2005 of 28.8%

CNCS also released new city rankings of volunteering (Miami gets the dubious distinction of now being the lowest in volunteering nation-wide with a 14.5% volunteering rate, beating out Las Vegas for bottom-of-the-barrel; Minneapolis-St. Paul, with a volunteering rate of 39.3% is in the #1 slot.

Among 75 mid-sized cities, Provo, Utah, was the #1 volunteering site with an impressive 63.8 percent volunteer rate, followed by Iowa City, Iowa, Madison, Wis., Greenville, S.C. and Ogden, Utah. CNCS noted that “For the third year in a row Utah was the top volunteer state with a volunteer rate of 43.9 percent, followed by Nebraska, Minnesota, Alaska and Montana.” After Minneapolis St. Paul, Salt Lake City, Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Austin were ranked #2 through #5 respectively.

Accompanying their rankings CNCS revealed a neat new website (Volunteering in America) that lets one explore these various volunteering statistics at the national, state or city level, with data on all 50 states and 162 cities. You can even customize a profile for a specific city by clicking on “Find a City/State” and then when you choose the state or city, select “Customize a Profile” and you can choose along what dimensions you want to look at the city or state’s civic performance. CNCS explains that the new site: “allows nonprofit leaders, policy makers and others an opportunity to get under the hood of volunteering and retrieve data and assemble unique customized reports which include both volunteering and national service data for their cities and states. The site also provides tools, tips, effective practices, and webinars to help nonprofits, communities and civic leaders strengthen their volunteer recruitment strategies, and deepen their volunteers’ commitment to service.”

CNCS data that compared volunteers and non-volunteers with the Census Bureau’s American Time Use data found that the biggest predictor was amount of television watched. Volunteers watched an average of 8 hours less of TV a week (15 hours for volunteers v. 23 hours for non-volunteers). This adds another nail to the coffin on the corrosive impact of commercial entertainment television on civic engagement from the evidence that Bob Putnam marshaled for Bowling Alone.

This is CNN’s story on the data: “Blame it on the traffic. Or the number of new immigrants. Or the allure of the beach. Whatever the reason, Miami, Florida, has secured the bottom spot — No. 50 among major U.S. cities — in new rankings of the percentage of adults who volunteer.

Volunteers sort through cereal boxes at a food bank in Washington.

“Nationally, the volunteer rate fell in 2007 for the second year in a row, to 26.2 percent, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is releasing its report Sunday. It showed Miami with a volunteerism rate of 14.5 percent, replacing Las Vegas, Nevada, in last place among major metropolitan areas.

“To be fair, the study found 620,000 volunteers were recruited in Miami last year, more than 60,000 over the previous year. And many local nonprofits say they have more volunteers than ever. But there’s no denying how far Miami lags behind other cities, particularly No. 1 Minneapolis-St. Paul, with a 39.3 percent rate.

“The study notes that Miami’s poverty rate and average commute times are slightly higher than the national average, while other factors influencing volunteerism — home ownership and education level — are slightly lower.”

Volunteering, family ties forestall mental declines

Harvard School of Public Health researchers Karen Ertel, Lisa Berkman, and Maria Glymour, in a paper to appear in the July 2008 issue of American Journal of Public Health, found that an active social life forestalled memory losses. Before you get too excited, they didn’t find that an active party life was associated with the same beneficial impact!

The study of nearly 17,000 people found that the least socially connected individuals experience memory-loss (dementia) declines at twice the rate of the most socially connected individuals in their study. They used data from a large national health and retirement study in the U.S. that followed individuals over 6 years and calibrated their memory four times over the study.

Their social integration scale was composed of factors like:
- volunteering at least one hour in the past year;
- contacting one of their parents and one of their children once or more a week by phone email or in person;
- getting together with neighbors once a week just to chat; and
- being married.

These results held even when controlling for age, income, health status and other factors. And they found no evidence that the relationship between socializing and memory went the other way: i.e., that those with the best memories became more social.

The mechanism is unclear. One theory is that “the sort of emotional validation and sense of purpose that comes from these social contacts may have neuro-hormonal benefits” for the brain, Ertel said. Another hypothesis holds that being socially active stimulates the brain in a way that either boosts memory function or protects it from decline. Or it may be that people with a strong social network have lots of friends who encourage them to stay healthy and to keep up with their medication, Ertel says.
See press advisory about this study.

Robert Putnam on corporate volunteering’s impact

My colleague Robert D. Putnam has a piece in the March-April 2008 Conference Board Review called “Way Beyond Volunteerism: Helping society is about more than building houses.”

In it, Putnam notes that corporate volunteering is important, but unlikely to be of the magnitude to really move society. For example, he talks about how a new Families and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) focused on enabling employees to care for their aging parents could have great effect both in keeping those aging parents engaged and healthy and also a huge decrease in the societal costs of Medicare by forestalling the age at which those aging parents need to be put in nursing homes. Putnam points out that left to their own devices, corporations will underinvest in the provision of this flexibility, since most of the benefits are borne by society and most of the costs of more flexibility are borne by corporations. Thus, without a large-scale effort to make employers whole for their costs in providing greater workplace flexibility, a Pareto-optimal solution will be lost.

The full article “Way Beyond Volunteerism” is available here.

Youth voice in ‘08 largely limited to the well-educated

CIRCLE (at University of Maryland) has a recent study showing that although youth participation is up in the 2008 primaries (which we’ve blogged about before) it is not coming from all swathes of the socioeconomic spectrum.

For example, CIRCLE found that in Super Tuesday, 1 in 4 college-educated voters under age 30 were participating versus 1 in 14 for youth that only had a high school degree or less.

CIRCLE chalks this up to several factors: 1) non-college youth are less likely to be involved in groups and associations and therefore less easily reached by candidates; 2) the quality of civics education that non-college youth have been exposed to is far less than the college youth (affecting both their civic skills and disposition to get involved socially); 3) non-college youth have lower political efficacy (a sense that their vote matters and they can achieve change); and 4) that youth disproportionately hear about candidates and get motivated to get involved politically through their friends and thus there is a compounding of this problem either as non-college youth are more socially isolated and if connected to other friends, unlikely to be connected to others that are encouraging them to vote.Distressingly, this is parallel to some evidence that then-Harvard-undergraduate Rebekah Crooks explored several years ago in her thesis that showed that while volunteering rates had risen among youth since the early 1990s, this was largely coming from the ranks of the “haves”, not the lower-middle class “have nots.” While the CIRCLE study is not a longitudinal study and hence does not address whether this rich-poor civic divide is growing, the gaps are alarmingly large nonetheless.

For more information, see: CIRCLE fact sheet or study; or NPR story (Audie Cornish, “Non-College Kids Outsiders to Rising ‘Youth Vote’ “.

Obama campaign: a seminal hybrid of ‘high-tech’ and ‘high touch’

Regardless of whether Barack Obama captures the Democratic nomination and/or the presidency (and I hope he does), there is an fascinating book to be written about how he has reinvented the art of campaigning. To be sure, much of his success is in the power of his charisma and the message about Americans seeking greater unity. (Polling that we have done over the last several years has shown that Americans feel deeply divided by race, economics and religion and deeply uncomfortable about that. Hence Barack’s message that Americans are “purple“, rather than a collection of “red “and “blue” individuals, resonates deeply.)

Barack has deeply reinvigorated Americans in his campaign, as seen from the broad swathe of younger Americans that he has enfranchised, or as seen by his shattering of records of the numbers of Americans who have been moved to donate (and most of them online!). It’s a trend that Howard Dean began, but which has been carried to a whole new level, as even Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager admits. The youth-vote director of the Obama campaign (Hans Riemer) acknowledged that the Obama campaign believed that unless they could ‘build a new coalition of voters’, they were destined to lose and hence took the mobilization goal extremely seriously.

What’s interesting is that Barack’s campaign is both off-scale on ‘high tech’ (use of MySpace, online contributions, supporters texting their cellphone numbers, etc.) and ‘high touch’ (as evidenced by Barack excelling in caucus states that require a lot of on-the-ground organizers). It’s an image of a Blackberry or iPhone toting community organizer. They have worked hard to create the structures that liberate the on-the-ground campaign activists, and married online campaigning with social networking.

Specifically on point, there’s a very interesting article on Barack’s campaign in Rolling Stone magazine called The Machinery of Hope (by Tim Dickinson, 3/20/08). The article is summarized in by my colleague David Lazer in the Social Networks and Complexity Blog. It discusses actually these themes; the blending of technology with a community organizing type of approach, working initially to build a large e-mail list of supporters that then could be tapped down the road for engagement and funding, but coupled, for example, with a 3-day period in which Obama’s campaign trained 4000 precinct captains across 20 communities.

The article is well worth reading; it highlights how the Obama campaign focused on creating local activists, but also discusses the risk of a more decentralized campaign — the same risks that Howard Dean faced — when local campaign volunteers might not be singing to the same sheet of music. [The article notes that in one Texas precinct, the right wing had a field day after a Fox news story showed a Houston Obama volunteer office decorated with a Che Guevara flag.] But the risks appear to largely have been worth it: Obama, through the use of volunteers trained in Camp Obamas (that mixed the best of community organizing and social networking), was able to have a strong presence in a host of states months before the Clinton campaign was. This has translated into an unanswered series of wins in virtually all of the caucus states that reward the grassroots organization of Obama over the more heavy media-message and drop-in appearances campaign of Clinton.

Moreover, it is clear that Barack, in the course of running, is building a large-scale movement of citizens yearning to be more engaged, to a degree that hasn’t happened since the early ’60s. To some extent, it’s the perfect formula for a new presidency. President Bush’s tax cuts and the devastatingly ineffective and costly Iraq War have left American government in financial shambles with enormous and mounting deficits and debts. Thus, Obama having an unprecedented volunteer force millions strong to solve some of the social ills he will want to tackle is not just convenient, but imperative. Obama can come to power with the message that the problems are too large for government to solve on their own; to solve these and make headway, all these Americans will need to be volunteer partners in this effort. Let’s hope he succeeds, for the future of civic engagement and the future of America.

Civic Petals Unfolding from the Ashes of 9-11

Alexandra Marks of the Christian Science Monitor reports on one group’s efforts (MyGoodDeed.org) to turn September 11 into an outpouring of good deeds for fellow Americans.  They have shown impressive growth (over 250,000 Americans pledged to do good deeds on 9-11-07) and if they find a way of knitting this into something throughout the year rather than a 1-day affair, they could be part of sparking a civic renaissance. 

We hope they succeed as it is a great opportunity to honor the countless acts of heroism of fellow citizens on September 11, sometimes for their colleagues and sometimes for complete strangers.  This heroism and concern for others is a key part of what makes America great.

Here are clips from Alexandra’s story:

“In 9/11 remembrance, a turning to good deeds: President Bush for the first time this year included a call for volunteering in his annual 9/11 proclamation. ” (Alexandra Marks, The Christian Science Monitor, 9/10/07)

“On Sept. 11, Jacob Sundberg of San Antonio has pledged to make eye contact and smile at everyone he meets. Kaitlin Ulrich will bring goody baskets to the police and fire departments in and around Philadelphia.  And 100 volunteers from New York – 9/11 firefighters and family members among them – are going to Groesbeck, Texas, to rebuild a house destroyed by a tornado last December.

“This is a minute sampling of the hundreds of thousands of people who have pledged to memorialize those killed on 9/11 by doing something good for others.

“The heroic acts of all those killed trying to save others that September morning has spawned a growing grass-roots movement. The goal is to ensure that future generations remember not just the horror of the attacks, but also the extraordinary outpouring of humanity during the days, weeks, and months that followed.

” ‘It was the worst possible day imaginable, and in some ways, a remarkable day, too, in the way in which people responded,’ says David Paine, cofounder of myGoodDeed.org. ‘We need to rekindle the way we came together in the spirit of 9/11: It would be almost as much a tragedy to lose that lesson.’

“Sept. 11 has inspired dozens of philanthropic efforts – from groups dedicated to building memorials to foundations designed to improve education in the Middle East. But myGoodDeed has a more universal goal: to turn 9/11 into a day dedicated to doing good – from small, simple things like Lisa Scheive’s pledge to help stranded turtles cross the road in Pompano Beach, Fla., to lifesaving efforts, such as John Feal’s decision in New York to donate one of his kidneys to help a seriously ill 9/11 worker.

“The idea has been endorsed by members of Congress, and at myGoodDeed’s urging, President Bush for the first time this year included a call for volunteering in his annual 9/11 proclamation.

“After major disasters, Americans have historically tapped a deep reserve of compassion and reached out to others. But in the months and years that follow, those compassionate and civic urges tend to recede. Studies at Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America found that in as few as five months after 9/11, most Americans had gone back to their daily lives and were not more engaged as they said they’d hoped to be. Part of the goal of turning 9/11 into a national day of service is to remind Americans of the inherent joy of giving and to hopefully spur volunteering and charitable acts throughout the year.

” ‘I don’t know of any research that’s been done on one day of service, but studies have shown that people who do volunteering in high school are more likely to volunteer throughout their lives,’ says Thomas Sander, executive director of the Saguaro Seminar.”

[Article goes on to highlight the impetus for forming MyGoodDeed.org from the heroism of volunteer fireman/lawyer Glenn Winuk who grabbed his medic bag and ran towards the smoke streaming from the World Trade Center.  His body was later found among the ashes.  His brother Jay Winuk launched MyGoodDeed.  It started in 2002 with a few individuals doing an act of goodness on 9/11/02 like donating a day's pay and then snowballed from there. The article highlights some sample volunteer projects like a New Jersey food drive, an Atlantan woman who now gives more personal philanthropy (less to organizations and more to needy individuals she knows) and how the giving has changed her, and an Anchorage bike-a-thon.]

Full story here.