“What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.”
― Aristotle
With Labor Day just passed, I’ve been mulling over the outrageous value of the thousands of hours of volunteering and other unpaid work and service that keep our society functioning.
The presence — and necessity — of volunteer labor is perhaps more apparent during our community events and festivals like Range Call, the Mustang Makeover and the Meeker Classic, but our volunteers are hard at work all year round, often behind the scenes.
In 2022 the estimated hourly value of a volunteer was nearly $30 an hour. That’s people helping at events, making and serving food for fundraisers and soup kitchens, responding to fires and accidents, manning gates and booths, taking out the trash, serving on unpaid boards to keep special districts and nonprofits operational, cleaning churches, mowing grass, leading support groups, reading to children, and all the other tasks official volunteers take on.
On a visit to the United States in 1831, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the volunteer spirit he saw in America, identifying it as a critical feature of American life. He later wrote: “In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made—among democratic nations—all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another.”
Keep an eye out for volunteers. Find someone doing something you think you could help with, and offer your services. An hour here or an afternoon there makes a huge difference, individually and collectively.
And while I’m thinking about volunteers, a huge thank you to my neighbor, who noticed my garage door has been stuck open all summer and volunteered to fix it. My faith in humanity has been somewhat restored.