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AmeriCorps.gov

Key Findings from the 2019 Current 

Population Survey: 

Civic Engagement and 

Volunteering Supplement

AmeriCorps Research and Evaluation

December 2021
AmeriCorps.gov

This is an internally produced report from AmeriCorps Research and Evaluation, 

authored by Laura Hanson Schlachter, Ph.D. Please reach out to 

evaluation@cns.gov with any questions.

Suggested citation: 

AmeriCorps, Office of Research and Evaluation. (2021). Key Findings from 

the 2019 Current Population Survey: Civic Engagement and Volunteering 

Supplement. (by Laura Hanson Schlachter, Ph.D.). Washington, DC: Author.
AmeriCorps.gov 1 

Executive Summary

Volunteering and national service are cornerstones of democratic participation and 

civility in American society. Unpacking trends in civic behavior is a first step toward 

developing a comprehensive plan to unify the country in this moment of national 

reckoning. 

As the most robust longitudinal survey on the topic, the Current Population Survey (CPS) 

Civic Engagement and Volunteering (CEV) Supplement provides valuable insight into 

America’s civic health over time. This report summarizes top-level findings from the 2019 

data and identifies opportunities for future research.

The national organization-based volunteering rate has remained stable over the past 

two decades. In 2019, an estimated 30 percent of Americans or 77.9 million people 

reported they volunteered for an organization or association.

Consistent with previous research, 2019 volunteering rates vary by demographic, 

socioeconomic, and family characteristics. Unpacking these patterns requires an 

intersectional approach that understands social inequalities like race, class, and gender 

as deeply intertwined.

Volunteering represents only one dimension of a much larger array of civic activity in 

the U.S. Although volunteering has received the lion’s share of attention in policy 

debates about national service, the 2019 CPS CEV echoes a growing body of 

AmeriCorps-funded research about how different groups engage in and are impacted 

by civic activity across communities, demographic characteristics, and geography.

Several questions raised by the 2019 CPS CEV warrant further investigation. For example, 

future research should examine variation in volunteering intensity, pathways and 

barriers to various types of civic engagement for different groups, and implications for 

national service programs.

The most recent wave of CPS CEV data collected in September 2021 offers unique 

opportunities to examine the impacts of COVID-19 and policy interventions on 

America’s civic health. New questions will also shed light on the relationship between 

work and civic life. 

Data from the CPS CEV is a necessary but insufficient piece of a larger puzzle: how can 

we best address the urgent challenges facing our nation in a way that reinvigorates our 

civic health? Situating findings from this report in broader scholarship and policy 

conversations will help the nation begin charting a new path forward.
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Why Measure Civic Engagement and Volunteering?

An extensive body of research documents links between well-being and civic life. 

Since Alexis de Tocqueville (1839) first proposed that civic participation is foundational 

to democracy in America, scholars have found that the vitality of the civic sphere is 

closely associated with indicators of social, economic, physical, and mental health. For 

example, studies have found links between educational outcomes and social capital 

(Turley et al. 2017), social relationships and mortality risk (Holt-Lunstad et al. 2010), and 

neighborhood-level collective efficacy and crime rates (Sampson et al. 1997). Civic ties 

are also crucial for community resilience in the face of natural disasters and other tests 

of collective strength (see e.g. Erikson 1976, Klinenberg 2015). Taken together, the 

evidence suggests that addressing intersecting crises like climate change, racial 

inequality, and political polarization requires understanding and investing in America’s 

civic infrastructure.i National service programs that systematically build volunteer 

capacity in communities are one crucial piece of the puzzle. Federal statistics are 

another. 

Since 2002, the nation’s most robust longitudinal data on Americans’ civic engagement 

and volunteering behavior has come from AmeriCorps-sponsored supplements 

attached to the Current Population Survey (CPS).ii The CPS has a unique research 

design that not only provides vital monthly labor force statistics but also permits reliable 

estimates at the state level and panel analysis at one-year intervals.iii 

In 2010, the AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation sponsored the convening of 

a group of experts to assess existing data collection efforts related to social capital, 

civic engagement, and social cohesion and make recommendations about how best 

to measure these constructs in the CPS. The resulting report (National Research Council 

2014) informed the launch of a new supplement on Civic Engagement and 

Volunteering (CEV)iv to be administered biennially starting in 2017. The findings 

discussed below are based on the second wave of CPS CEV responses collected from 

139,217 households in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in September 2019.

The National Research Council (2014) also recommended complementing the CPS with 

more research at the subnational or local levels by using diverse research approaches 

to tap into the complexity of volunteering and civic engagement. In response, the 

AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation developed a research grant program 

for institutions of higher education and awarded 34 cooperative agreement grants 

from 2015 to 2018.v These studies are demonstrating the wide variety of ways that 

different groups civically engage across communities, demographic characteristics, 

and geography (see e.g. Crittenden et al. 2020, Nesbit et al. 2018), including the 

prevalence of informal forms of volunteering among youth of color (Wray-Lake and 

Abrams 2020). They also show how volunteering and national service impacts members, 

organizations, and communities – especially in terms of employment outcomes 

(Benenson et al. 2016, CIRCLE 2021, Konrath et al. 2020, Whitsett et al. 2018)vi and 

subjective well-being (Velasco et al. 2018). Taken together, these results show that 

triangulating robust national survey data with administrative records, in-depth 
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interviews, ethnographies, and other types of qualitative and community-based data 

provides an even richer picture of civic engagement and volunteering across the 

United States. 

Organizational Volunteering in America

The 2019 CPS CEV finds that an estimated 30 percent of Americans or 77,949,981 

people reported they volunteered for an organization or association in the previous 

year.vii This volunteering rate is comparable to 2017 and has remained largely stable 

over the past two decades. In total, these volunteers served an estimated 5.8 billion 

hoursviii with an economic value of $147 billion.ix

Although the average volunteer contributed 74 hours of their time in the previous year, 

the mean obscures substantial underlying variation. Total time volunteered from 

September 2018 to 2019 ranged from 1 to 500 hours with a quarter of volunteers serving 

10 hours or less, another quarter serving 90 hours or more, and five percent serving 360 

hours or more.x

Consistent with a large body of research, the 2019 CPS CEV suggests that volunteers for 

U.S. organizations and associations are disproportionately female, white, non-Hispanic, 

and middle-aged (Musick and Wilson 2008, National Research Council 2014). A third of 

women volunteered compared to a quarter of men, while 32 percent of whites 

volunteered compared to 25 percent of those of another race and 23 percent of 

Blacks. Only 19 percent of Hispanics (who may be of any race) volunteered compared 

to almost a third of non-Hispanics. The median volunteer is 47 years old and the 

volunteering rate is highest among members of Generation X born between 1965 and 

1980 (35 percent).xi

Also consistent with previous studies, socioeconomic and family characteristics are 

associated with substantial variation in rates of organization-based volunteering (Musick 

and Wilson 2008, Wiertz and Lim 2019). For example, rates increase dramatically with 

educational attainment (12 percent among those with less than a high school diploma 

compared to 44 percent among those with a college degree or higher) and annual 

household income (approximately 20 percent among those in households making less 

than $40,000 compared to 45 percent making $150,000 or more). Rates of 

organizational volunteering are also relatively higher among part-time workers (37 

percent) and parents of school-aged children (43 percent compared to 29 percent of 

parents of young children), who tend to have more discretionary time, network ties, 

and other personal circumstances that support civic engagement (Brady et al. 1995, 

Goldstone and McAdam 2001, Roth 2016).xii

These findings underscore calls for a more intersectional approach to investigating civic 

life in America that understands social inequalities like race, ethnicity, class, and gender 

as deeply intertwined rather than additive (Collins 2019). For instance, differences in 

organizational volunteering rates within racial subgroups vary widely by educational 

attainment in the 2019 CPS CEV. As Figure 1 indicates, the percentage-point difference 
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in volunteering rates between those with and without a college degree is highest 

among whites (23 percent), then declines to 19 percent among Blacks and 15 percent 

among those of another race. 

Figure 2 suggests a similar pattern except the percentage-point difference in 

organizational volunteering rates between those with and without a college degree is 

about the same for people who are and are not of Hispanic origin. 

These types of patterns raise broader questions about the complex drivers of variation in 

organization-based volunteering rates and the distinction between volunteering and 

professional development.

Figure 1. Volunteering Rate by Race and Education

Among those 25 years and older

Figure 2. Volunteering Rate by Hispanic Origin and Education

Among those 25 years and older
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The Multidimensional Nature of Civic Engagement

Historically, organizational volunteering has received the lion’s share of attention in 

policy debates about national service. Yet the 2019 CPS CEV echoes a growing body 

of AmeriCorps-funded research that it represents only one dimension of a much larger 

array of civic activity in the U.S. 

Some types of civic engagement are more institutionally oriented. For example, 53 

percent of eligible voters participated in local elections and half of Americans donated 

to a non-political group between September 2018 and 2019. As Figure 3 indicates, 

others are more informal. In the 2019 CPS CEV, 70 percent of Americans had 

conversations with their neighbors and 29 percent discussed political, societal, or social 

issues with neighbors at least once in the past year. About half exchanged favors with 

their neighbors and 21 percent participated in a local effort to do something positive 

for their community. 

Civic engagement scholars have historically conceptualized informal helping and 

formal volunteering as distinct (Crittenden et al. 2020, Tang et al. 2010), yet the 2019 

CPS CEV data suggests a positive – albeit weak – relationship between these constructs 

that persists across racial, ethnic, and educational attainment subgroups.xiii Our 

exploratory analysis of how various measures in the CPS CEV cluster together finds that 

measures as diverse as informal helping, organization-based volunteering, public 

meeting attendance, and consumer activism share a common underlying construct.xiv

In short, deeper analysis of the multidimensional nature of civic engagement is clearly 

needed. 

Figure 3. Rates of Informal Civic Engagement Behaviors
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Opportunities for Future Research

These top-level findings from the 2019 CPS CEV shed light on several questions of interest 

to researchers, policymakers, and the public. They also point toward several issues that 

warrant further investigation. For example:

• Who are the “supervolunteers” who contribute such significant amounts of time 

to organizations and associations? Prior research has largely treated volunteering 

as a binary variable, but considerable variation in total hours volunteered 

suggests a more complex approach is warranted. 

• How do pathways and barriers to various types of civic engagement vary by 

education, race, income, age, and geography?

• What are the implications of these questions for recruitment into national service 

programs and goal-setting?

The most recent wave of data collected in September 2021 also offers unique 

opportunities to examine the impacts of COVID-19 and policy interventions on 

America’s civic health. For example: How have social distancing and quarantine 

guidelines affected organization-based volunteering? Are significant investments in 

AmeriCorps through the American Rescue Plan evident in localized civic engagement 

behavior? To what extent does volunteering provide pathways to employment (Spera 

et al. 2013) for communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic-induced 

recession? Two new questions designed to facilitate the transition between the core 

CPS labor force module and the CEV will also shed light on methodological issues 

related to response and drop-off rates and the relationship between work and civic 

life.xv 

The AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation anticipates the possibility of revising 

the survey instrument again in 2023 based on lessons learned from the 2021 

administration. For example, we are thinking about key questions like the following:

• Are we learning anything from research at the subnational and local levels that 

warrant inclusion in this national survey?

• Do Americans conceptualize national service as a form of volunteering – or 

professional development? 

• How do the spheres of work, civic engagement, and family intersect and inform 

each other over the life course?

As the National Research Council (2014:15) writes, civic engagement and social 

cohesion “can be powerful drivers affecting the quality of life among a community’s, a 

city’s, or a nation’s inhabitants and their ability to achieve both individual and societal 

goals.” With the unprecedented challenges facing America at this moment, studying 

and strengthening our civic infrastructure is more urgent than ever. 
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References

Benenson, Jodi, Felicia M. Sullivan, and Noorya Hayat. 2016. “Does AmeriCorps Impact 

Nonprofit Sector Employment Prospects for Young People? A Field Experiment.” 

Paper presented at the November 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association for 

Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action in Washington, DC.

Brady, Henry, Sidney Verba and Kay Lehman Schlozman. 1995. “Beyond SES: A 

Resource Model of Political Participation.” The American Political Science Review

89(2):271-294. 

CIRCLE, Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. 2021. 

“Study: Does National Service Experience Improve a Young Person’s Job 

Prospects?” Research brief 16 March. Tisch College, Tufts University. Available at 

https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/study-does-national-service-experienceimprove-young-persons-job-prospects. 

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham: Duke 

University Press.

Crittenden, Jennifer, Sandy Butler, Nicholas Silver, Abbie Hartford, and Rachel Coleman. 

2020. “Juggling Multiple Roles: An Examination of Role Conflict and Its 

Relationship to Older Adult Volunteer Satisfaction and Retention.” Maine Center 

on Aging Research and Evaluation. Brief Report 43.

Erikson, Kai. 1976. Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek 

Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Goldstone, Jack and Doug McAdam. 2001. “Contention and Demographic and LifeCourse Context.” Pp. 195-221 in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious 

Politics edited by Aminzade et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holt-Lunstad, Julianne, Timothy Smith, and J. Bradley Layton. 2010. “Social Relationships 

and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review.” PLOS Medicine 7(7):e1000316. 

Klinenberg, Eric. 2015. Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, 2nd edition. 

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Konrath, Sara, Xiao Han, Xiaonan Kou, and Una Osili. 2020. “Predictors of Youth

Volunteering and Charitable Giving: An Ecological Systems Approach.” Draft 

manuscript (under review).

Lang, R.E. and Hornburg, S.P. 1998. “What is social capital and why is it important to 

public policy? Housing Policy Debate 9(1):1-16.

Musick, Marc and John Wilson. 2008. Volunteers: A Social Profile. Bloomington and 

Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
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National Research Council. 2014. Civic Engagement and Social Cohesion: Measuring 

Dimensions of Social Capital to Inform Policy. Washington, DC: The National 

Academies Press.

Nesbit, Rebecca, Laurie Paarlberg, Ryan Moss, and Su Young Choi. “The Moderating 

Effect of Rurality on the Incidence and Intensity of Volunteering.” Paper 

presented at the 2018 ARNOVA Research Conference in Austin.

Roth, Silke. 2016. “Professionalization and Precariousness: Perspectives on the 

Sustainability of Activism in Everyday Life.” Interface 8(2):29-58. 

Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. 1997. “Neighborhoods 

and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.” Science

277(5328):918-924. 

Spera, Christopher, Robin Ghertner, Anthony Nerino, and Adrienne DiTommaso. 2013. 

“Volunteering as a Pathway to Employment: Does Volunteering Increase Odds of 

Finding a Job for the Out of Work?” Report by the Office of Research and 

Evaluation, Corporation for National and Community Service: Washington, DC.

Tang, Fengyan, Nancy Morrow-Howell, and Eunhee Choi. 2010. “Why Do Older Adult 

Volunteers Stop Volunteering?” Aging and Society 30(5):859-878. 

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1839. Democracy in America. New York: George Adlard.

Turley, Ruth N. López, Adam Gamoran, Alyn Turner McCarty, and Rachel Fish. 2017. 

“Reducing Children’s Behavior Problems through Social Capital: A Causal 

Assessment.” Social Science Research 61:206-217. 

Velasco, Kristopher, Pamela Paxton, Robert Ressler, Inbar Weiss, and Lilla Pivnick. 2018. 

“Do National Service Programs Improve Subjective Well-Being in Communities?” 

The American Review of Public Administration 49(3):275-291. 

Whitsett, Andrea, David Schlinkert, and Sofia Mastikhina. 2018. “The AmeriCorps 

Experience: Transformation through Service.” Arizona State University Morrison 

Institute for Public Policy. Report to the Corporation for National and Community 

Service. Available at https://morrisoninstitute.asu.edu/content/americorpsexperience-transformation-through-service. 

Wiertz, Dingeman and Chaeyoon Lim. 2019. “The Civic Footprints of Labor Market 

Participation: Longitudinal Evidence from the United States, 2002-2015.” Social 

Forces 97(4):1757-1784. 

Wray-Lake, Laura and Laura Abrams. 2020. “Pathways to Civic Engagement Among 

Urban Youth of Color.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child 

Development 85(2):7-154. 
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i “Civic infrastructure” is defined as the “invisible structures and processes through which the 

social contract is written and rewritten in communities,” “the formal and informal processes and 

networks through which communities make decisions and solve problems”, or “the network that 

exists among local groups such as community development corporations (CDCs), foundations, 

other nonprofits, local governments, public housing authorities, businesses, and voluntary 

associations.” (Lang and Hornburg 1998). ii The CPS Volunteer Supplement was administered annually in September from 2002-15. The CPS 

Civic Engagement Supplement was administered in November 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2013. The 

CPS Civic Engagement and Volunteering Supplement (CPS CEV), which merged and 

consolidated these two questionnaires, was administered in September 2017, 2019, and 2021. 

The CPS CEV has also been known as the CPS Volunteering and Civic Life Supplement.

iii The CPS also provides fairly reliable estimates for the twelve largest Metropolitan Statistical 

Areas (MSAs). For details, see https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/about.html. iv The Civic Engagement and Volunteering (CEV) supplement has also been referred to as the 

supplement on Volunteering and Civic Life in America (VCLA).

v See https://americorps.gov/partner/how-it-works/research-evaluation. vi These research grantees build on numerous social science and policy studies that use CPS 

data to investigate the relationship between volunteering and employment. See, for example, a 

CNCS report titled “Volunteering as a Pathway to Employment” (Spera et al. 2013) and Wiertz 

and Lim (2019). 

vii All figures reported here are weighted to account for the random selection of eligible 

respondents and missing data due to nonresponse. viii Total hours served nationally calculated by multiplying weighted average of hours served per 

volunteer (74.32) by total estimated number of volunteers nationally (77,949,982) = 5,793,524,025 

hours. 

ix Based on Independent Sector's estimate that the average value of a volunteer hour was 

$25.43 in 2019 (see https://independentsector.org/news-post/new-value-volunteer-time-2019/). x Those who served 500 hours in the previous year represent 3.5 percent of all volunteers. This 

group is more likely to be older and outside the labor force relative to volunteers overall.

xi By comparison, 30 percent of Baby Boomers, 28 percent of Generation Z and Millennials, and 

25 percent of Silent Generation or older volunteered. Generational cohorts are defined based 

on thresholds from the Pew Research Center (see https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/onthe-cusp-of-adulthood-and-facing-an-uncertain-future-what-we-know-about-gen-z-so-far/). In 

2019, members of Generation Z (born after 1996) were 22 years old or younger, Millennials (born 

1981 to 1996) were aged 23 to 38, members of Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) were aged 39 

to 54, and Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) were aged 55 to 73. Since topcoding made it 

impossible to differentiate between members of the Silent (born 1928 to 1945) and Greatest 

Generations (born 1901 to 1927), all respondents aged 74 or older in 2019 were coded as “Silent 

Generation or older.”

xii Overall, parents of children under 18 years also volunteer at a higher rate (39 percent) than 

those who are not a parent of children under 18 (27 percent). Those who are employed full-time 

volunteer at a relatively higher rate (31 percent) than those who are not in the labor force (27 

percent) or unemployed (24 percent).

xiii The Pearson correlation coefficient, a common measure of the strength of a statistical 

relationship between variables, is 0.2541 for organizational volunteering and exchanging favors 

with neighbors at least once in the past year and significant at the 5 percent level. Typically, a 

Pearson correlation coefficient between 0 and 0.3 implies a positive but weak relationship. The 

correlation remains positive, weak, and statistically significant when we restrict the analysis to 

racial and subgroups and respondents with versus without a college degree.
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xiv Exploratory factor analysis is a statistical technique that examines the structure of observed 

data and identifies clusters of variables that are interrelated through shared underlying 

constructs or “factors.” We used a specific type of exploratory factor analysis called principal 

components analysis (PCA) that is well suited for simplifying complex datasets. Our PCA of four 

CEV variables – exchanging favors with neighbors, volunteering, public meeting attendance, 

and consumer activism – identified one factor with an eigenvalue of 1.64. According to a 

mathematical rule of thumb called the Kaiser criterion, which uses the number of factors and 

absolute value of the eigenvalue to assess the strength of relationships in a covariance matrix, 

these findings suggest that these four behaviors share an unmeasured underlying construct. xv The new questions were developed by ORE grantees who adapted constructs from 

AmeriCorps-supported research and the General Social Survey:

• Now I’m going to read you a list of statements that might or might not describe your 

main job. Please tell me whether you [strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly 

disagree] with each of these statements:

o I am proud to be working for my employer

o My workplace contributes to the community

o My main satisfaction in life comes from work

o I contribute to the community through my work

• In the past 12 months, has your workplace or employer asked or encouraged employees 

to volunteer or contribute to a specific cause? Examples include participating in an 

employer-sponsored volunteering day, providing pro bono services, or donating to a 

charity. [yes, no]