Sustaining our communities

Posted 8/21/12

It’s a bit of a bummer that the Thanksgiving season coincides each year with the formulation of our municipal budgets. While most of us are planning the menu for family gatherings, our town boards …

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Sustaining our communities

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It’s a bit of a bummer that the Thanksgiving season coincides each year with the formulation of our municipal budgets. While most of us are planning the menu for family gatherings, our town boards are crunching numbers and losing sleep trying to control expenses while ensuring continuity of the basic services that keep us safe.

This year, that process had made me more aware than ever of the people who volunteer their skills to help our rural communities thrive. The range of service is enormous, from our volunteer fire departments and ambulance corps to our neighbors who serve on planning and zoning boards and town committees, to our school and library boards, historical societies, service organizations, parents who volunteer as tutors and lead youth programs, beautification committees and those who volunteer at our animal shelters, food banks, soup kitchens, thrift shops and all the various efforts to provide necessities for those in need. For every person who volunteers through a church or community organization, there are many others whose contributions are unquantified, like the friend who drives a neighbor to medical appointments, or stops by to fix a hot meal.

The Corporation for National and Community Service, which collects statistics on volunteerism, reports that one in four adults in our country volunteers in some capacity in the course of the year. In 2012, these efforts totaled 7.9 billion hours of service, with an estimated value of $175 billion. Roughly 69% of the nation’s firefighters are volunteers—that’s more than 783,300 individuals. They not only save our lives; across the country, they save their municipalities an estimated $139 billion a year.

Volunteers aged 65 and over give the most hours per person, but the good news is that volunteerism continues to grow among younger generations. Americans born between 1960 and 1980 have the highest volunteer rate of any generation, and teenagers aged 16-19 have increased their rate of volunteerism steadily over the past six years. So it looks like this revered tradition of neighbors helping each other and caring for their communities will continue to provide the glue that unites and strengthens us.

Our town boards, whose “pay” represents a fraction of the actual time and skill they bring to their civic duties, struggle to balance the needs of the community with the unwritten law that somehow, miraculously, town services can be maintained at the same level of tax levy, despite the rise in cost of living in every other sector—a tough puzzle to solve every November. Volunteers make it possible. Their contributions are irreplaceable and too seldom acknowledged. Churchill famously said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Volunteering is the purest form of democracy in action, citizens answering the call to do their best for their communities. Yes, there are many challenges. To everyone who strives to be a part of the solution, may I say a humble and heartfelt “thank you” this Thanksgiving.

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