Why Volunteer?
by Douglas LaBier
Action News: The Newsletter of the National Center for Higher Education Social Action Committee, Washington, DC., Fall 1996
Why do we volunteer? And does it affect our own lives, or only those whom we help? Questions like these form the basis for a new project that we have been developing at the Center for Adult Development. We are working with groups of men and women to help them discover the meaning and impact of their volunteer work upon their own lives, both personally and professionally. We are learning about how volunteer work affects peoples’ values, perspectives, and life goals; and how it can develop them spiritually and emotionally.
Several years ago when I was doing research for a book I later wrote about the link between career success and emotional conflict, I found that many of the successful career-oriented men and women I interviewed spoke about feelings of inner emptiness. Interestingly, many said that their volunteer work was the only arena which provided a sense of meaning and human connection; far greater than their career, and - sadly - often greater than their intimate relationships.
This resonated with similar comments I had heard from men and women I was treating in psychotherapy, as well. In the years since, as I and others have studied adult development in our culture, we have been understanding what this means. We find that the main challenge of adulthood is cultivating meaning, purpose, and human connection, a sense of integration and balance between oneself and the world.
All of the new thinking and recent research in human devel-opment, as well as the newer, holistic perspectives in medicine, and the new thinking about chaos and complexity theory in modern physics point to the same theme: the interconnectedness of all life. We are one.
The interconnectedness of all life has been long acknowledged by physicists and spiritual leaders alike. For example, in the Buddhist tradition, the practice of compassion is viewed as a natural expression of this awareness. When we cut our finger, we don't deliberate about bandaging it; we know it is a part of us.
Healthy development requires practicing this "awareness," practicing healthy forms of connection. Volunteerism directly addresses this because giving of ourselves is a form of expressing and acting upon our fundamental connection with all living things.
A study of survivors of the death camps during the Holocaust found that most of those who survived had engaged in active attempts to help others in the camps survive; not just themselves. Volunteerism, then, helps the other as well as ourselves because it is an affirmation of our connection. Volunteerism is really just a more organized form of something we do all the time, every day. We are always giving of ourselves in some way, in some relationship, all the time -- as parent, partner, or citizen. In that sense we are always "volunteering," though we may not call it that.
Whenever we volunteer, in whatever form, we are helping redress the damaging affects of our culture of disconnection, which underlies much of the violence and indifference to life that pervades life today. When we recognize that whatever we "practice" in daily life becomes stronger, then we are able to see that all of our actions contribute in some way to shaping our own future and that of others. This is where we have choice over the kind of person we want to be. And this is where we can become full adults.