Volunteering leads to happiness

By Charles Oberweiser

You might say happiness is my profession. I work in the community service office of a medium-sized liberal arts college where it's my job to convince college students that some of the best ways to experience happiness come through the community service projects I organize. I've found the potential of being happy is such a powerful incentive that it makes 19-year-olds do things that defy rational explanation. I've woken them up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning, taken them away from studies the day before a final exam, and made them so busy they give up other satisfying activities. Surprisingly, not only do students accept these inconveniences, they bring their roommates, their teammates, even their love interests, buoyed by the idea that planting garlic at the community garden or sharing the work of Dr. Seuss with a first grader will somehow make it all worthwhile. More surprisingly still, it almost always does.

While work for the public good has long been a part of the American landscape, it's hard to escape how quickly the nonprofit sector has grown in the last 20 years. There are twice as many nonprofit agencies now as in 1998,  with the IRS reporting that some 200 new agencies are recognized daily.  And volunteering for these agencies has become the most accepted method of demonstrating that we are responsible citizens, overpowering old standards like voting, civic knowledge, and military service. Something like 75 percent of high school students now complete community work, often because it’s required in order to graduate.  This participation remains well into the undergraduate years, with upwards of 30 percent of students participating annually in community service.

The predominant reason for this growth in community service is the multiplicity of levels on which service can lead to happiness. It's easiest to appreciate this argument by considering the categories developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his hierarchy of needs. From very basic safety needs to the highest-level experiences of development and actualization, you can have an experience in any of these areas on any given day by doing community service.

Let's say the very basic levels of happiness stem from feelings of security and friendship. A typical community service experience offers a number of ways to provide this kind of happiness. Volunteering allows us to meet new people and make new friendships. The possibilities for friendships are magnified by the fact that most nonprofits are human-service providers, so there is constant interaction with people. Volunteering with these types of human-service agencies also provides the opportunity for a volunteer to improve his or her own feelings of safety and security by making downward comparisons with the agency’s clients. If a volunteer comes to work at the soup kitchen worried about potentially losing her job, it’s easy to be reassured by the idea that people she meets while volunteering are doing far worse than she is. This distinction between service providers and service recipients is something we work hard to try to prevent, especially at the college level. Yet, we know volunteers continue to make these distinctions and they do so because making them sometimes feels good.

On a more advanced level, doing community service contributes to our sense of self-efficacy, the happiness that comes from believing we can accomplish tasks. Community work is about, to use the motto of the national AmeriCorps service program, “getting things done.” Far more than our work at our jobs or in our relationships, volunteer work brings tangible results. This happens because the tasks assigned to volunteers are not simply a cross-section of what needs to be done at a given organization; rather, they are specially selected activities likely to bring immediate, demonstrable success. Agencies do this because success leads to feelings of happiness and happy volunteers are more likely to return to do more work for the organization. Meanwhile, the agency's paid staff takes on the mundane and abstract work that keeps the agency operating. While volunteers spend the day reading to children or playing with puppies, staffers spend the day completing grant reports or haggling with the computer system.

These feelings of efficacy flow easily into feelings of esteem, the sort of happiness that comes from feeling respected and valued by others. The reason volunteers are thanked so often during their work goes beyond the goodness of what they do. Earning the respect of others and feeling valuable to them makes a volunteer feel happy, and again, happy volunteers are more likely to return. Nonprofit agencies, especially larger ones, often use a fairly ritualized process to convey their thanks to volunteers. A letter of thanks for the service work, annual volunteer banquets, comfortable volunteer lounges, free food during work, cards, candy, newsletters, and prizes can all be part of the strategy an agency uses to keep volunteers coming back. In the trade lingo we call thanking people “volunteer recognition” and there's a cottage industry of conference speakers who train us to “recognize volunteers the way they want to be recognized,” “thank volunteers on their terms,” and “make a place for volunteers in your agency” (all titles of workshops I've attended). In addition to this praise from agency staff members, the more important feelings of happiness for volunteers often come when they earn admiration from their families, friends, and coworkers.

Community work can also make a volunteer feel happy on the very highest levels Maslow identified. First, there is a sort of moral happiness that comes from knowing we did something we were supposed to do. Most religious or humanist belief systems tell us that we ought to help others, and community work almost always fulfills this goal. Second, there is a sort of happiness that comes from growing to see things as they actually are, of developing a real understanding of the world. Community work often puts us in touch with new situations and people from a diversity of economic levels, races, backgrounds, and orientations. Finally, there is a type of happiness that comes from being called upon to create something new. Many long-term volunteers, such as the students and full-time volunteers I’ve overseen, are asked to use their knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm to create new approaches and new programs for the agency.

Despite these opportunities to experience happiness on so many levels, perhaps the most potent reason people believe community work will make them happy comes from a quirk in our memories: We humans are terrible at making accurate recollections of our feelings, so we substitute how we think we should have felt for how we actually did feel. While there has been much interesting psychology done about our inability to recall feelings accurately, the quintessential study in my opinion remains one done during the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida (Wilson, Meyers, & Gilbert, 2001). Scientists asked Bush and Gore supporters to predict how much an eventual Bush victory would affect their happiness, asked them as Bush was declared the winner how happy they were, and then asked months later how happy they remembered being as the race was decided. Respondents predicted the outcome would have a large impact on their happiness, but experienced a much smaller change in happiness as the race was decided. Yet, interestingly, their later recollection was that the decision had made a large impact on their happiness, just as they had originally forecast it would. My experience with volunteers suggests a similar pattern might come into play when volunteers remember their community work. I've talked with students who say they thought they'd enjoy a volunteer experience quite a lot, but that it hadn't lived up to their expectations. However, by the end of the semester the students remember it being enjoyable and are surprised to see notes from earlier conversations where they claimed it wasn't a happy experience. In light of these experiences, it's worth wondering just how much of our happiness from community work might come from the fact we think it should be a happy experience and therefore remember it that way.

Then again, I leave it to psychologists to decide why you feel happy doing community service or what sort of happiness you feel. I'm delighted that the experience has been a predominantly happy one for most of the volunteers I work with. Yet, with the soup kitchen short of volunteers over the winter and our transitional housing agency in desperate need of help for their after-school program, I selfishly hope that a happy volunteer experience means a volunteer experience you're likely to repeat again next week.

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Charles Oberweiser works in the community service office at Allegheny College with college students and full-time volunteers in an AmeriCorps*VISTA program.