Why Volunteerism Matters More Than We Think for Youth Civic Engagement
By Lyric Amodia
When we talk about youth civic engagement, we often begin with voting. We encourage young people to register, learn about candidates, contact elected officials, and make their voices heard. Those things matter. However, by centering our understanding of civic engagement around politics and elections, we overlook one of the most accessible ways young people first learn to participate in civic life: volunteerism.
There is no shortage of young people who care about what is happening around them. They care about food insecurity, education, environmental justice, mental health, racial equity, homelessness, and the well-being of their neighborhoods. Yet, caring about an issue and having an accessible way to act on it are two very different things. Research on youth volunteerism points to a persistent participation gap: young people demonstrate historically high levels of interest in doing good, yet that interest does not consistently translate into volunteering.
I do not think that gap exists because young people are apathetic. I think we have to examine the infrastructure we have built around service.
Growing up in Flint, Michigan, during the water crisis fundamentally shaped the way I understand civic engagement. Long before I understood the policy and/or government failure behind what was happening, I understood what it looked like when a community showed up for itself. I saw people distributing bottled water, organizing resources, checking on neighbors, and responding to immediate needs while families waited for larger systems to respond.
Nobody had to explain to me that what I was witnessing was civic participation. It was everyday democracy.
That understanding eventually influenced me to found The Movement Street, a nonprofit focused on making volunteerism more accessible, engaging, and sustainable. Through this work, I have had the opportunity to engage thousands of volunteers across multiple communities. One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that getting people to care is often not the hardest part. The harder questions are: Can they access the opportunity? Do they feel like they belong when they arrive? And have we given them a reason to come back?
The Problem Is Not Just Recruitment
The traditional model of volunteering asks a lot of young people.
Find an organization. Discover an opportunity. Complete an application. Have transportation. Be available during a predetermined window. Sometimes attend an orientation or background check. Serve for several hours. Then, after completing the opportunity, begin the process again.
For a student balancing classes and extracurricular activities, a young adult working multiple jobs, or someone without reliable transportation, even wanting to serve may not be enough. This is why accessibility has to mean more than making volunteer opportunities available. We have to create multiple entry points into service.
At The Movement Street, we have explored in-person, remote, and passive service opportunities, because participation does not have to look the same for everyone. Someone may have four hours to spend at a community garden on Saturday. Someone else may only have enough time to write letters from home, donate supplies, share a resource, or participate in a short community activation. Those actions can all become entry points into deeper civic participation. If our goal is lifelong engagement, the first experience should not have to be the biggest commitment. It simply needs to open the door.
From Volunteer Recruitment to Volunteer Retention
Accessibility gets someone through the door. It does not necessarily make them stay. This is where I believe the civic engagement field can learn from volunteer retention. Too often, organizations measure success by the number of people who attended an event or the number of service hours completed. Those numbers tell us something, but they do not tell us whether someone developed a relationship with their community. A young person can complete 20 required service hours and never volunteer again. That should challenge our definition of success.
I have seen how much belonging matters. People return when they build friendships, when someone remembers their name, when service feels connected to their interests, and when they understand the outcomes of what happens because they show up. They are even more likely to remain engaged when organizations trust them with responsibility.
A young person who begins by checking people into an event can eventually coordinate volunteers. A college student who attends a service project can later lead a chapter. A volunteer can become a mentor, project leader, fundraiser, organizer, or board member. When organizations intentionally create these pathways, young people stop seeing themselves simply as people helping an organization accomplish its mission. They begin seeing themselves as people capable of leading change.
That shift in identity is important to civic engagement.
Volunteerism Is Civic Education
Service can also introduce young people to public issues before they ever encounter those issues through politics. A teenager may first understand food insecurity while packing groceries for families. A college student may learn about period poverty while organizing a menstrual-product drive. Someone volunteering with children may begin asking questions about educational inequities. The volunteer experience gives an issue a face, a place, and a story.
From there come deeper questions: Why does this problem exist? Who has the power to change it? Where does funding come from? What policies affect it? What can my community do? That is where volunteerism can become a bridge to other forms of civic and political engagement.
We sometimes expect young people to become informed voters, advocates, organizers, and community leaders without giving them enough opportunities to first develop a personal relationship with their communities. Volunteerism can provide that foundation. It teaches civic engagement through practice.
Let Young People Lead
If we want young people to develop a lifelong commitment to civic participation, we also have to stop designing every civic experience for them and begin designing more experiences with them. Young people understand their communities in ways institutions may not. They know how their peers communicate. They see needs within their schools and neighborhoods. They know which issues feel urgent and which approaches feel outdated or disconnected.
Organizations should give young people opportunities not only to volunteer, but to identify community needs, develop projects, manage budgets, recruit participants, build partnerships, and evaluate their impact.
Schools can connect service experiences to classroom learning rather than treating volunteer hours solely as a graduation requirement. Nonprofits can build pathways that move participants from first-time volunteers to recurring volunteers and, eventually, into leadership. Civic organizations can recognize volunteerism as part of the civic engagement pipeline rather than treating community service and political participation as unrelated activities.
Across all of these institutions, we should be asking different questions:
- How many young people volunteered?
- How many came back?
- How many felt like they belonged?
- How many became leaders?
- How many left believing they could change something?
Building Lifelong Civic Participants
The future of youth civic engagement will require more than convincing young people to vote every few years. Elections matter, but democracy also happens between elections. It happens when neighbors organize around a community problem, when students develop service projects, and when someone discovers an issue they care about through volunteering.
For me, that understanding started in Flint. During one of the most difficult periods in my hometown's history, I watched ordinary people show up for one another. Years later, my work with The Movement Street has reinforced the same lesson: wanting to serve and having a meaningful pathway to serve are not the same thing.
If we want more young people engaged in civic life, we must build systems that make participation accessible and experiences that make them want to return. That means removing barriers, prioritizing relationships over transactions, and trusting young people with real ownership of their communities.
Volunteerism is not simply a résumé builder, graduation requirement, or collection of service hours. At its best, it teaches a young person three things that are foundational to democracy:
I belong to this community.
I have something valuable to contribute.
I have the power to help change it.
