Growing Up as a Volunteer: Influence of Charity Work Is Long-Lasting

When Laura E. Lockwood started attending Manatee Community College two years ago, she couldn’t

leave behind her first love: the ManaTeen Club, a program in Bradenton, Fla., she and her sister had founded in 1994 to organize teenage volunteers.

Ms. Lockwood, who started ManaTeen at age 12, remained with the group during college as a member of AmeriCorps — the federal national-service program — and is developing a Junior ManaTeen program that will encourage children ages 8 to 11 to participate in charitable efforts.

“Getting out in the community can really make you feel better,” says Ms. Lockwood, now 20. “It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.”

Ms. Lockwood’s example underscores a key reason why many charities and foundations are seeking to encourage young people to volunteer: Volunteering as a teenager often inspires passion for charitable work as an adult.

Studies on giving and volunteering indicate just how influential an experience like Ms. Lockwood’s can be. People who started volunteering in their youth are twice as likely to volunteer as adults than those who did not volunteer when they were younger, says a recent report by Independent Sector and Youth Service America, both in Washington.

“It’s an experience that hooks people,” says Steven A. Culbertson, president of Youth Service America. “It’s something they don’t drift away from.”

Increased Commitment

For some adults, the commitment to charitable causes they were involved with when they were young increases with age. William T. Gallagher, a 37-year-old physician in Washington, has spent almost 20 years volunteering with an American Red Cross chapter in Pennsylvania. At 16, Mr. Gallagher participated in the charity’s weeklong summer camp to build leadership qualities in teenagers; now he helps to organize the effort.

He says he now spends about 1,500 hours a year on volunteer work. “Sometimes volunteering just sucks you in,” Mr. Gallagher says, noting that his charitable efforts are made possible because he works as a doctor only part of the week and has a flexible schedule.

Involvement with a charity as a youth also affects how adults donate money. Mr. Gallagher says his experience with the Red Cross has motivated him to give more money to charity than if he hadn’t been involved with the group. He and his wife give about $10,000 a year to the Red Cross, food banks, cancer-research and -treatment organizations, and their church’s social-service efforts, he says.

Mr. Gallagher’s experience echoes the report by Independent Sector and Youth Service America showing that adults who worked with charities as youths are more likely to donate to charity, and they typically donate larger amounts of money as well.

For example, the study found that for U.S. households earning between $25,000 and $44,999, those that include adults who volunteered as youths on average give $232 more to charities a year than those households whose adult members did not volunteer as youths.

Professional Choices

People who start their own charity programs at a young age often do more than just donate and volunteer. “They tend to move towards the nonprofit field as a profession,” says Mr. Culbertson. “I don’t know too many investment bankers who say, ‘Yeah, I started this nonprofit and then I decided to go out and make money.’” He estimates that about 80 percent of teenagers who are heavily involved in charitable programs, such as founding a charity, decide to work in the nonprofit field.

With two years of college left, Ms. Lockwood, of the ManaTeen Club, says she may choose a career working with charities. “I’m planning on studying archaeology,” she says, “but I really also want to take classes in nonprofit management.”

Yet an early experience establishing a charity doesn’t automatically equate to a career in the nonprofit arena.

At 13, Charlie Shufeldt started an Atlanta nonprofit group called Free Bytes, which fixes computers and donates them to charities. But after graduating in June from Stanford University with a major in economics and a minor in computer science, he opted to work at Bank of America in San Francisco.

Now 23, Mr. Shufeldt says he wants to be involved with the charity he founded, but the distance between California and Georgia is too great to bridge. “I was frustrated because there was so much more I wanted to do, but I couldn’t really do it 2,000 miles away,” he says.

While Mr. Shufeldt doesn’t currently volunteer with nonprofit groups — he says he is still getting settled in his new job — he again wants to work with charities because his time with Free Bytes was an eye-opening experience.

“It was good for me to get perspective on the world,” he says. “I went to a private high school in Atlanta, and it was a relatively sheltered community. When we’d work with someone like the YWCA, and show the kids how to do something on the computer and see how excited they’d get, it was a pretty gratifying experience.”

Mr. Shufeldt says in the future he may volunteer his computer skills at an organization that provides technological aid to poor countries.

Free Bytes remained active after Mr. Shufeldt’s departure because he was able to persuade a local foundation to grant the charity $30,000 to hire an executive director. Recently, Tech Corps Georgia, a charity dedicated to giving poor Georgians access to computers, acquired Free Bytes and plans to continue the group’s programs.

Charities Shut Down

Unlike Free Bytes, a number of charities started by teenagers close because the founders leave to attend college or move on to other things, says Youth Service America’s Mr. Culbertson. He estimates that about 20 percent of charities started by people under 18 shut down after the founder leaves or for other reasons. Other charities, he says, get taken over by a larger group, like Free Bytes and Tech Corps Georgia, while some manage to grow to the point where they can hire employees and become well-established.

While Mr. Culbertson encourages young people to start their own charities, Trevor Ferrell, who at 11 established Trevor’s Campaign for the Homeless, in Philadelphia, cautions youths “not to take it to the extent that I took it because I lost a good bit of my childhood.”

During the 1980s, Mr. Ferrell’s involvement with the nonprofit organization, which provides temporary housing to homeless people, made him the celebrity poster child for youth philanthropy. He received awards and praise for his efforts from former President Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Mother Teresa. He starred in several documentaries, and CBS and HBO made television movies about him.

“At the age of 11, I was flying around the country and to India, Africa, and the Soviet Union,” he says.

But in 1993, Mr. Ferrell quit the group he founded. “A big motivator in leaving was just to be able to go out and be a regular person, get away from the publicity, not do interviews, not do public speaking,” he says. Trevor’s Campaign for the Homeless remains open and continues to use his name, despite the parting.

Today, Mr. Ferrell, now 30, directs Trevor’s Endeavors, in Philadelphia, which provides donated furniture, lamps, kitchen appliances, and other household items to homeless people who are moving into homes. Although he regrets parts of his childhood, Mr. Ferrell remains dedicated to the charity work that inspired him as a kid.

Says Mr. Ferrell: “When someone comes here and I get to help furnish their house and see how happy they are, that feeling is like a drug.”