Carnegie President Urges More Citizens to Volunteer

Warning against the loss of the sense of community in modern American life, Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation of New York this past week has issued a call for citizens to work more closely together for broad societal benefits.

Gregorian, co-chair of last week's ServiceNation Summit, is urging Americans to "join their personal aspirations for the future with their hopes for the collective progress of the nation." In an essay soon to be published in Time magazine, Gregorian argues that Americans have carried "individualism" to a new level of idolatry.

"While instantaneous communication and online technologies seem to connect us," he writes, "they also allow us to report on the minutiae of our daily lives and contribute to a cult of the individual. But in elevating the individual to center stage, we are quickly losing the sense of the larger community that draws us out of ourselves and our isolated circles and into the wider society."

Recognizing the strength and number of our voluntary associations as the expression of the collective American nature goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville. Today, Gregorian calls for ways to provide new and more varied opportunities and incentives for people to volunteer their time. He also identifies a need to decrease duplication through cooperative efforts and collaborative projects that allow for more effective targeting of available resources while freeing up financial and human resources for equally critical needs.

Calling commitment to volunteer effort "one of the greatest antidotes we have to pessimism about our collective future," Gregorian writes that "there is nothing cynical or shallow about offering to lend a hand...[i]ndeed, doing so is the opposite of so many of the ills that too often these days characterize our society."