August 26, 2002






Teens getting hooked on volunteerism
___By Mark O'Keefe
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--Sixteen-year-old Jon Stiles of Newfound, N.H., gives five days of his summer to fix rundown houses. He takes out a weekly ad in the newspaper offering free lawn care to the needy. He cleans homes for the elderly.
___"When I help someone, something inside me happens," Stiles said as he painted a house in Charlottesville, Va., for Group Workcamps, a summer youth program of 21,000 volunteers. "I don't know how to explain it, but my body literally changes. It feels so good."
___Across the country, teenagers like Stiles are becoming hooked on public service. Motivated by the high of doing good, the memory of Sept. 11 and the desire to appear altruistic on applications to college, today's teens are earning comparisons to other generations motivated to serve.
___Broadcaster and author Tom Brokaw dubbed the group that emerged from World War II "The Greatest Generation" in his best-selling book. But Steven Culbertson, president of Youth Service America, a Washington-based alliance of more than 300 organizations, calls today's youth "the greatest generation in American history," serving with more tolerance, thoughtfulness and technological know-how than any other.
___"When you compare this generation to the baby boomers, to Generation X or Generation Y, you see much less self-centeredness," said the 44-year-old Culbertson. "It's no longer, 'Be all you can be.' It's, 'Be all we can be.'"
___Other data also suggest a bull market for teenage altruism. For example:
___bluebull A survey of 411,970 freshmen entering 704 universities last fall showed an all-time high of 82.6 percent reporting volunteer work. That's compared with 66 percent in 1989, the low in the 36-year-old annual survey of freshmen conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles in association with the American Council on Education.
___bluebull Between 1984 and 1997, the proportion of students in kindergarten through high school who participated in "service learning" grew to 25 percent from 2 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. While definitions of "service learning" differ, it's clear that school curricula have exposed thousands of today's teens to volunteering.
___bluebull The percentage of 8- to 17-year-olds who report daydreaming about helping other people increased from 31 percent in 1995 to 37 percent in 2000, according to the Roper Youth Report. During that same period, kids' No. 1 dream, being rich, fell from 65 percent to 56 percent.
___"This is one of the most underreported stories of our time," said Mark Gearan, 45, a board member for the government-sponsored Corporation for National Service as well as president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a former Peace Corps director. "There's a burgeoning service movement in our country that has been evolving over the last decade."
___Despite the current upswing, there is a danger in forecasting continued public service by today's teens because the trend toward volunteerism may have something to do with a decade of economic prosperity, said Cary Silvers, a vice president at New York-based Roper ASW, an international market research firm.
___"When you're better off and feeling secure, you have more time to donate," Silvers said. "This could change with the economy slumping recently."
___But another youth trend, religiosity, may trump the economy. Roper surveys show that among 13- to 17-year-olds, participation in church groups soared to 28 percent from 17 percent between 1995 and 2001. Silvers said the trend shows "altruism and religion go hand in hand."

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