The Corporation for National & Community Service, a federal agency, yesterday announced that it has issued a new report titled Volunteering in America 2009 (Research Highlights). A portion of the research focuses on Volunteering in America's Faith-Based Organizations. It found that faith-based organizations attract the most volunteers. In 2006-2008, 35.9% of all volunteers worked with religious organizations. The percentages are even higher among older volunteers and African-American volunteers. Also, faith-based organizations had the highest retention rate of volunteers (70%) from year to year.

If 36% is "Most" volunteers, how should we describe the other 64% of volunteers who aren't associated with faith based organizations?

Sigh.. Which is meaningless, given that a) non-faith based organizations tend to get slandered pretty badly in some communities, if they do manage to form, and b) this is about as useful a statement (to sane people, unlike the loonies that will tout this as proof of the value of such programs) not much more exciting that proclaiming, "Random study finds that Maine Lobsters are more likely to be found near Maine."

Who the frack cares. I want to know if any of it actually does anything to improve more than a, comparatively, tiny number of people's lives, how many strings get attached, and how effective any of the programs they run are. Based on the evidence, that I have seen, the answers are:

1. Very few, or it wouldn't be so news worthy every time someone received some "huge" amount of help from such groups.

2. Entirely balls of string. In fact, if it was a tourist attraction, these things would delay Clark Griswald by weeks.

3. Depends. If the express purpose is to support a "tiny" number of people, then wave flags to prove how "great" the organization is for doing so, then yeh, its real effective. If their programs are intended to actually make a difference.. There is a reason Faux News is trying to make places like Amsterdam and the Netherlands, etc. look bad for being more liberal than the US, and all they have is a long list of whines about how unlike the right wing Christians those places are, while providing no "hard" numbers. Because a) their lying, and b) the US is ripping itself apart, educationally, socially, economically, and even theologically, because everything has bought the "there are two sides to every issue, and that other side is insane", argument.

Fact is, both sides "extremists" are nuts. One just happens to be in power now. Their top morons - one claiming that having one parent not a citizen mean you are not "naturally born", even if born in Hawaii, never mind that the constitution says that citizenship is granted if *either* parent is a citizen. The other, a halfwit that has also failed to read the document, and I mean the *original* one, even before amendments, which states that a state can't "be" one, unless it provides a method of public education, but insists that public education is "unconstitutional". Sigh..

The extreme edges of the political spectrum are, and this is imho, just fact, not insult, occupied by people either so brain washed that Jim Jones wouldn't have touched them, or so mentally deficient, that special ed teachers would refuse to have them in the class. I don't see how its possible to be so wrong about history, the constitution, economics, or even their own Bible, and not be either an idiot, or a trained zombie.

I think it's because the vast majority of volunteer organizations are based around faith. It's odd how our country gets so worked up around religion and
race. Oh well, such is life.

I think this is only valid for organized volunteers, which are, by far, in the minority among volunteers.

Indeed, most volunteers are just plain folks who don't make a big deal of "faith" or religion or race or anything else. They don't even make a big deal of their volunteerism.