The power of volunteering

Time and monetary donations are the visible parts that show up in annual reports, grant applications and executive summaries of outputs and outcomes — meals served, hours logged, number of people helped, animals saved. These numbers help organizations keep the lights on and justify continued investment, and if you look strictly at the economics, volunteerism is already doing heavy lifting. If we value a volunteer hour conservatively at around thirty dollars, the economic impact of San Mateo County’s volunteers translates into hundreds of millions of dollars in labor that local governments and nonprofits would otherwise have to fund or cut services without. Volunteer labor stabilizes budgets, stretches tax dollars and allows communities to deliver services at a scale that would be politically or financially impossible otherwise.

The numbers are material and the need has grown, steadied, and grown again in the past five years since the COVID pandemic. We tend to talk about it as generosity, goodwill or something nice people do on the margins of “real” economic activity, but we really need to treat this level of human capital and economic impact as a core part of how our communities function.

Still, even this framing significantly undersells what is actually happening as the deeper value of volunteerism is in the connection that happens when someone shares their knowledge, experience or time with someone else. It’s the moment when someone feels, often quietly and without fanfare, that they have a chance to shape the world they live in instead of just enduring it. It’s the shift from being a recipient of services to being a participant in a shared project. I’ve seen it volunteering with the Humane Society, with our local Education Foundation, with our local Chamber of Commerce, at St. Anthony’s, and more over the years. 

Volunteer spaces also create something modern life has materially eroded: cross-generational connection. In many communities, age groups now live in parallel lanes where children are with children, working adults are busy and isolated, and older adults are often relegated to their own spaces. Volunteer environments provide an opportunity to bring those lanes back together where you’ll often see a teenager working alongside a retiree or a parent collaborating with someone whose kids are long grown. 

These connections matter more than any of us think. Loneliness is no longer a soft social issue and increasingly recognized as a public health problem with real economic consequences — San Mateo County has officially recognized loneliness as an epidemic and in November 2025 voted on a resolution to encourage private employers to recognize loneliness and social isolation as a public health concern. Meaningful social engagement, especially across generations, is associated with longer independence and a delayed onset of dementia, and volunteerism is an incredible way to nurture these connections organically without labeling them as interventions or treatments. People simply move from being strangers, to useful, to one another, and the benefits follow.

This is why volunteerism should be treated as the civic infrastructure it is. It produces resilience that shows up later when communities are tested by economic downturns, natural disasters or demographic shifts. Places with dense volunteer networks recover faster because trust and coordination already exist, because people know each other and how to help. 

A quick note on private employers. It is important to say that volunteer systems require coordination, support and signals from those in power that this work is valued. Employers implementing a program to allow for one’s employees to volunteer without funding the staff or systems to actually do so is celebrating volunteerism rhetorically while making it harder to participate. One employer I worked for years ago had a policy but always rejected time off requests to volunteer — it was merely a performative policy like unlimited PTO when implemented similarly.

Employers have a real opportunity here to set policy that supports real outcomes — start with 16 hours a calendar year that don’t get denied. That is less than 1% of their professional exempt hours while giving someone the ability to materially invest in their community. 

If you haven’t yet found your organization to give a few hours a month to yet, start with the causes that impact your life and the lives of those you love. Make it personal — habits always build faster and stronger that way.