2015 Volunteering and Civic Life in America

Posted by Corporation for National & Community Service on December 19, 2016

Latest Volunteering and Civic Life in America released; with it CNCS Open Data

On November 15th CNCS released to the public the 2015 Volunteering and Civic Life in America (VCLA) data. This year’s report found that 62.6 million adults (24.9 percent) volunteered through an organization last year. Altogether, Americans volunteered nearly 7.8 billion hours in 2015, worth an estimated $184 billion, based on the Independent Sector’s estimate of the average value of a volunteer hour. The volunteer rate consistently remains stable and strong. Over the past 14 years, Americans have volunteered 113 billion hours, service worth an estimated $2.3 trillion.

https://www.nationalservice.gov/vcla

In addition, more than 138 million Americans (62.5 percent) also engaged in informal volunteering in their communities, helping neighbors with such tasks as watching each other’s children, helping with shopping, or house sitting. In the map above, the darker the color, the higher overall rate of volunteer and civic engagement.

With the release of the VCLA, CNCS also launched its new public data-sharing platform – CNCS Open Data. Users will not only be able to download data in useable formats like Excel, JSON and XML, but will also be able to use mapping and visualization tools right in the platform! Stay tuned as we add more and more datasets in 2017.

https://data.nationalservice.gov/