University of Minnesota Moment: Volunteering

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. This week marks National Volunteer Week, which pays special tribute to volunteers across the country who give of themselves to better their communities and the lives of others. U of M psychology professor Mark Snyder has extensively studied volunteerism over the last 20 years. He says there are two broad categories that can help explain what motivates people to volunteer.

[Snyder]: There are at least two main sets of reasons why people volunteer. One set is concern for other people: to help others, other members of their communities, to be a good, concerned, activist humanitarian. Another set of concerns—and these are, really, the less obvious reasons why people volunteer—is their concerns for doing something for themselves: to boost their self-esteem, to acquire some new career skills perhaps, maybe to make new friends, so that the volunteers themselves may get something meaningful out of volunteering at the same time as they’re doing good for other people who are in need of help and for their communities, and really for society at large.

[Moore]: Snyder says volunteerism is a big business in the United States.

[Snyder]: You know, in the United States there’s 100 million people who are serving as volunteers every year. About 25 million of them give 45 hours a week—every week—to it. And if you think of this as unpaid labor, you know, and you do the math and calculate it out, the value of volunteer service is in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

[Moore]: That's Mark Snyder for the University of Minnesota Moment