Where have all the volunteers gone?

I spent a good chunk of yesterday at the Spring meeting of the Northland Historical Consortium. The Consortium is a loose organization of local historical societies and museums located in the western half of the Upper Peninsula and along the Wisconsin border. The membership includes county historical societies and special interest groups, e.g., the Painesdale Mine and Shaft, dedicated to preserving the history and physical structure of a particular site.

Champion Mine Shaft No. 4, Painesdale, Michigan

I was, for what its worth, moderately amused to hear the Painesdale representative describing their mission as "preserving the shaft." Strikes me as a simple task if you take her literally: just don't let anyone fill in the hole. What she meant, of course, was preserving the shafthouse, a building I don't recall ever seeing in the flesh, but obviously it exists. Also for what it's worth, every time I encounter folks who have dedicated themselves to preserving something like a shaft house, I find myself breathing figurative sighs of relief that the Baraga County Historical Society isn't the proud owner of a similar money pit.

The focus of yesterday's meeting was digitization. The archives at Northern Michigan University received a grant to help set up a collaborative network that would include members of the consortium and potentially other heritage organizations. The goal is to get us all started on digitizing our collections and making them available through the Internet. The project would allow people all over the world to access materials that at the moment they may not know even exist and would also serve as a bit of an advertisement for our individual institutions. You know, you go searching for a particular topic on the Internet, find that a copy of a photograph or a document relating to that topic is part of a collection at the Covington Township Historical Society, and become curious about what else that organization might have stashed in its filing cabinets.

Michigan is apparently a bit behind some other states in setting up this type of collaboration. North Carolina has an impressive program up and running; so do a number of others. I personally think it's a neat idea. At this point all it would cost our local historical society is a little bit of time so I can't think of a logical reason to refuse to participate. I know our museum has materials academic researchers would love to look at if they knew they existed, so I see the project as a Good Thing.

But the digital project isn't what was actually on my mind when I started typing this morning. It was Volunteers, or the lack thereof. I've been going to these consortium meetings since September 2012. I don't make it to every one -- as a group we do try to spread representation out a little -- but I've been to enough that I'm starting to recognize people. You know what?  I see mostly the same faces at every meeting. They're not getting any younger. Everyone has the same problem. Membership numbers are shrinking, people are aging out (it's hard to volunteer once you're in the nursing home) or dying, and everyone is having trouble recruiting new volunteers. The woman who is the computer geek for one group mentioned that she's now 85 years old. Quite a few of the representatives from other groups looked like they weren't much younger, if at all.

So where have all the younger potential volunteers gone? As usual, there was a fair amount of carping about how useless and self-centered the younger generations have become. Pshaw.

As a social scientist (or a retired social scientist), I'm inclined to give it a structural and economic explanation. I can recall being a Girl Scout leader back in the '70s. At the time I began volunteering, I didn't have a job. I didn't need one. The S.O. was employed full-time; he made enough money that I could enjoy the (remarkably boring) life of a Stay-At-Home mom. Most of my fellow leaders were in the same position: spouse worked, wives had plenty of free time for volunteering at church or with youth groups like 4-H and Scouting. The women who did work had good jobs with predictable hours. A few taught school, a job that wasn't nearly as soul-sucking and stressful as it is now (it was before the insanity over testing swung into full force and schools still had budgets that allowed teachers to make sure classrooms had the supplies they needed). No one was doing the juggling two or three part-time positions in the hopes of coming close to having the equivalent of a 40-hour work week. It's hard to volunteer for anything when you're dealing with truly bizarre work schedules.

Then when you toss in the unintended consequences of raising a couple of generations of kids, people who are adults now, who were told they HAD to volunteer. Two words that do not belong together: volunteer and mandatory. But that's what schools have done in a truly misguided attempt to get students engaged with the community. Forced students to volunteer. If you're a member of National Honor Society, you MUST volunteer. It's not volunteering if you're told you have to do it. But if you're a member of various other organizations (football team, DECA, whatever) you will be told you have to volunteer.

I do not doubt there are some kids who enjoy their volunteer assignments, but for a whole bunch of others "volunteer" has become associated in their minds with picking up trash along the highways or some other task they did not particularly want to do. If I'm talking to someone who is, let us say, in their 30s and I see them visibly cringe at the term "volunteer" I know that person was coerced into doing something unpleasant in order to satisfy a criterion for retaining their Honor Society eligibility.

So where have the volunteers gone? Between an economy where wages have been stagnant since Jimmy Carter was in the White House and an educational system that turned volunteering into a punishment detail, it's not much of a mystery. At this point, the more relevant question may be who's going to turn off the lights at our museums when the last of the geezers takes the dirt nap?