Volunteer Here Often?

Single people flock to groups that mix good works and finding a date; for some charities, it’s a perfect match

Forget singles bars and matchmaking services. A growing number of organizations for single people are being created to mix the idea of volunteer service with finding a date.

Those organizations serve a dual purpose: bringing single people together to find their soul mates, and accommodating charities in need of free labor.

Volunteering has often united people with common interests, and groups like the Sierra Club have long offered hiking trips and other social activities for their single members. But these new groups are different because they are designed specifically to help busy singles find an outlet for their volunteer and social impulses while also offering charities quick access to a new pool of helpers.

At least one national network, known simply as Single Volunteers, has sprung up. Started just two years ago, Single Volunteers currently has nine U.S. chapters and 10 start-ups under way, most of them in metropolitan areas. The group also has two international chapters — one in Calgary, Canada, and a fledgling group in Sydney, Australia — and a Web site that makes information available on each chapter (http://www.singlevolunteers.org).

The volunteer groups have surfaced at a time when single people account for a large proportion of the population: 40.3 per cent of the adult population is single, compared with 28.3 per cent in 1970, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Among other things, the increase can be attributed to the fact that Americans marry later in life and tend to divorce more frequently than people did in previous decades.

“It’s just an idea whose time has come,” says Susan Ellis, president of Energize, a Philadelphia company that advises charities on recruiting and managing volunteers.

But some observers caution that the single-volunteers groups have their drawbacks. For one, most chapters are shoestring operations, often started by one person and run as a labor of love. With no paid staff, they must rely largely on the energy and enthusiasm of the leader, who often has a separate full-time job, and the groups may be difficult to sustain if the leader leaves or loses interest.

Other observers worry that the groups may be more concerned with their matchmaking than they are with helping charities.

Chuck Supple, the president of Public Allies, a Washington organization that operates community-leadership programs for young adults, approves of single-volunteers groups but also says the groups have a responsibility to insure that their activities are meaningful and thoughtful — and that they meet real needs. “You can’t play Cupid on the backs of agencies in the community,” he warns.

Many of the single-volunteers organizations trace their roots to an effort begun three years ago in Vermont by Anne Lusk, 51, who was working then as a self-employed environmental consultant. After her 22-year marriage had ended in 1994, and her two children had headed off to college shortly thereafter, Ms. Lusk found the combination of singlehood and an empty nest to be lonely and challenging.

“I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was go the library and read,” she notes. “All the [self-help] books said, ‘Go to church’ or ‘Volunteer.’”

In Ms. Lusk’s experience, however, the pool of people who volunteered was often heavily female, and many of the male volunteers were married. And she discovered that few Vermont houses of worship were large enough to have special programs for single people. At her own church, she says, she often felt as if she were surrounded only by happily married couples.

A natural entrepreneur, Ms. Lusk started Single Volunteers of Vermont in the summer of 1996. The group quickly grew to include 125 volunteers.

It was such an instant hit that Ms. Lusk felt a calling to spread the word nationwide. She sent out press releases describing the group, and generated coverage in publications from Time to Good Housekeeping. She hoped the concept would be picked up by others, who would then form their own autonomous organizations.

Despite the demise of her group, which folded shortly after Ms. Lusk left Vermont to begin a doctoral program in architecture at the University of Michigan, she has continued to help others begin their own organizations.

One of the people Ms. Lusk inspired was Dana Kressierer, a 29-year-old software developer at HT Medical Systems, in Rockville, Md. In 1997, Ms. Kressierer and a female friend co-founded Single Volunteers of D.C., which also serves the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

“I had only been in D.C. two or three months and didn’t know a bunch of people and had been dumped by the guy I thought I was going to marry,” Ms. Kressierer recalls.

Started with just 20 members, the group now counts 5,000 people in its volunteer data base. The group’s Super Bowl party this year — at a trendy downtown restaurant — attracted a crowd of 1,500.

Another indicator of the group’s popularity is how rapidly volunteer events “sell out.” Sign-ups are conducted entirely via the Internet, and participants say the demand is so high that they must often sign up as soon as the event is posted on the group’s Web site, or sent out through an electronic mailing list, to insure a spot.

In addition, in an effort to keep an even male-to-female ratio, the group maintains a 50-50 gender quota. Once the quota is reached for a volunteer event, it is closed to members of that gender.

Single Volunteers of D.C. can already claim credit for at least one pending marriage. This October, Catharine Robertson, the other co-founder of the D.C. chapter, will marry a man she met at the group’s first meeting. Three other couples are shopping for engagement rings, according to Ms. Kressierer.

Single Volunteers of D.C. has also inspired a spinoff: Gay, Lesbian and Other Volunteer Events for Singles, or GLOVES, which was started by Catherine Hess, a Web-site designer from Takoma Park, Md.

While GLOVES works with some charities that are of specific interest to gay and lesbian people, such as the Mautner Project for Lesbians with Cancer, it also offers help to many general-interest groups, such as the Washington Humane Society.

Although most single-volunteers groups focus largely on events where they can be of use to charities, many also offer purely social activities. The Single Volunteers chapter in Bucks County, Pa., for example, in recent months has sponsored a bowling outing, a wine and cheese social, country line dancing, and a ski trip.

Generally, the volunteer groups attract adults of all ages. Many groups have events that are geared toward people in their 20s and 30s, but some also designate events for those age 40 or older.

Ms. Ellis, of Energize, says charities could fill a real niche by reaching out even more to middle-aged singles, particularly to those with children, and recruiting them as volunteers. “There’s a lot more room to do something on this,” she says. “A lot of these organizations ought to go to Parents Without Partners and suggest doing things together.”

Most groups do not charge fees for participation and expect volunteers to pay for their own expenses at social events and, occasionally, to bring supplies to volunteer events.

But some groups, such as Conscience Connections, in Chicago, have opted to charge an annual fee and then pick up some of the incidental costs. Conscience Connections was founded recently by Sandy Bornstein, a widow in her 50s who runs a property-tax-reduction business in Cook County, Ill.

Ms. Bornstein’s group charges members $150 a year. In addition to covering the costs of refreshments and supplies, the fee, as in a traditional dating service, gives members access to a directory of other participants’ biographies.

In the early stages of their operations, many of the volunteer groups had to actively recruit charities to get them to provide volunteer opportunities. The Bucks County group’s organizers initially located interested charities by flipping through the phone book and a directory of non-profit organizations published by the local United Way.

But many groups have found that once they are off the ground, word-of-mouth news about their pool of available volunteers has led charities to seek them out. Charities with short-term projects usually end up benefiting the most.

In the Chicago area, Michael Brady, the vice-president of enterprise and quality development for Glenkirk, a Northbrook, Ill., social-service agency for the developmentally disabled, recently used Conscience Connections volunteers to paint a new group home.

Says Mr. Brady: “We end up getting a home painted, people get exposed to Glenkirk and to people with developmental disabilities, and all we have to do is make sure they have paint and supplies and someone to help them or answer questions.”

The Fort Worth Area Habitat for Humanity, in Texas, recently recruited 50 volunteers from the local Single Volunteers affiliate to help remove oak floors from houses being torn down to make way for the city’s new arts center. (Habitat sells the hardwood flooring and other items in stores it operates to generate income for its home-building projects.)

Dixie Fisher, the volunteer coordinator, says she was impressed by the group’s ability to recruit so many volunteers quickly using the Internet.

But the relationship has not been without occasional problems: The Fort Worth Single Volunteers coordinator cannot always predict how many people will show up on a given day, and the volunteers often work only half a day so that they can go out to lunch together afterward.

“A lot of the [Habitat] project managers want a group that will be there all day long,” Ms. Fisher notes.

While some charities have successfully recruited long-term volunteers through the groups, others have been disappointed.

When Byte Back, a Washington non-profit group that offers computer-training classes to poor people, held an orientation for Single Volunteers of D.C. members, only about two of the 20 people who attended the orientation signed up to teach a computer class. A typical orientation for that many people produces a dozen volunteers, according to the charity.

“Would I expend a lot of energy to recruit singles to orientations?” asks Byte Back director Glenn Stein. “No.” But he still feels it was a worthwhile endeavor. “If they wanted to do it again, we would. They organized it, so it wasn’t too much effort on our part. Even for two or three [new volunteers], it’s worth it.”

Participants in volunteer groups that cater to singles describe them as a more palatable social option than the bar scene, dating services, or personal ads.

Heather McAvey, 30, a project manager at a small technology company in the Washington suburbs, discovered Single Volunteers of D.C. last year shortly after separating from her husband.

“Being married, I had just lost track of people,” she says. But she knew she was not interested in the “meat market” scene.

Searching on the Internet for volunteer opportunities in the Washington area, Ms. McAvey stumbled across Single Volunteers’ Web site. She completed an electronic sign-up form — as well as the charity’s liability agreement releasing the organization from responsibility for the outcome of any relationships initiated through it. Ms. McAvey’s first activity — a clean-up day at the National Zoo — soon led her to sign up for two to three projects a month. Eventually she took on a longer-term project: helping to build the Fairhaven School, a private school started by several Washington-area parents.

“I liked being able to get out and do stuff with my hands, and there was a real sense of accomplishment,” Ms. McAvey recalls.

Ms. McAvey also accomplished a second goal: She met her current boyfriend through Single Volunteers.

And while looking for love, Ms. McAvey found new friendships. “One thing I really liked is all the women I have met,” she observes. “I have made a lot of good friends, which has been really valuable. The dating was almost secondary.”

Joel Richard, 26, a software engineer who worked on the Fairhaven school construction project with Ms. McAvey, says that digging holes, painting, or other grubby work can make for a good dating environment. “It makes for an interesting situation when you are out with someone, and you have already seen them at their worst,” he says.

Ironically, Ms. Kressierer has found that as her organization has grown, her social life has become less active. Although she once attended every volunteer event, she now spends most of her spare time running the group, in addition to logging 50-hour weeks at her full-time job and running a Web-design business on the side.

“I would like to be more of a volunteer, and not just an organizer,” she says. “But I’m not willing to let the group die out because I want to meet someone or because I am working so hard.”