volunteering

Like a lot of people who work somewhere in the general orbit of politics, I often find myself playing the role of low-budget pundit with friends and acquaintances.

"How's the election looking?" they ask. "Who's going to be the running mate?" "What big October surprises do we have in store?"

Honestly I kind of suck at punditry. Answering damn near every question with "who the hell knows" probably won't get you invited back as a talking head on CNN, and a careful analysis of the possibilities doesn't really seem to thrill a party crowd gathered around the punch bowl.

I'm ok with that. Anyone who claims to have all the answers is probably as full of it as the TV pundits anyway.

But there is one question that I get asked that really ticks me off -- not because it's a bad question, but because I don't have a good answer.

That question: "What else can I do?"

I know tons of people, of all ages, who really care about the outcome of this election, and who want to "help." But they don't really know how.

For young people who can afford to do it, there are definitely some jump-in-with-both-feet options, like volunteering or working full time for a campaign, or hooking up with the League of Young Voters (where I work), or taking a trip with Swing Semester, or getting involved with one of the great "young progressive" organizations on the right column of this website.

But when it comes to young people who need to work full time, or people in my parents and grandparents generation, or even my peers in their 30's or 40's, the options thin out a little bit.

Everyone knows they can donate money. That's a good thing to do, and it's important. But it's only sorta satisfying, and reduces a person's potential talent and energy to all the creativity and skill of having a credit card.

Sure, I could tell people to volunteer at a local campaign office. That's definitely important. Sometimes that can even be fun or satisfying. And sometimes it stinks.

I could tell them to get out there and make phone calls or knock on doors. That can be enjoyable sometimes, when you're not feeling apologetic being the guy on the other end of those phone calls and front porch visits we all "love" so much. After trying it once, plenty of people have no interest in a return engagement.

Donating, stuffing envelopes, phone banking, or knocking doors. Are those really the best ways we can offer people to engage?

The truth is, the way most election work is done these days is shockingly inefficient. The amount of time and money that campaigns end up spending in ineffective ways is staggering. We have to play the game because it's the best option we've got right now. But if you step back and summon a little perspective about the way voters are identified and turned out, you quickly figure out that we're still just emerging from the prehistoric age here.

There has to be a better way. I've been thinking about it and I've got some ideas about how we might be able to step back a bit, think outside the box, and figure out how to use the massive well of talent and energy that's out there from people of all ages.

I hope other people are hard at work at the same task. There's a lot of powerful passion, energy, and skill out there to be tapped, and we're only just at the beginning of learning how to do it. Holler if you're down to help, and let's get to it.

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Sam Dorman is the Managing Director of the League of Young Voters

The National Conference on Citizenship has released their 2007 Civic Health Index. The main finding, reported here by Peter Levine, one of the co-authors, and covered on Yahoo News by Ron Fournier, is that there is a "civic core" of 36 million Americans who do the majority of volunteering and participating in civic activities (in addition to voting). The report also finds that volunteering and civic engagement have dropped recently, finally returning to their pre-9/11 levels.

When it comes to Millennials, the report is encouraging. It notes that participation at the ballot box by Millennials continues to rise, and suggests that Millennials are mimicking the civic-mindedness of the Greatest Generation (the report actually tags Gen X and the Boomers with responsibility for the overall decline in civic participation in the last 30 years). When it comes to overall trust, the report finds that Millennials are less trusting of individual actors, but more trusting of government and institutions, and three quarters of Millennials express distrust of the mainstream media as a reliable reporter of information.

What I found very interesting was that of all age groups, Millennials are the most likely to feel that they have little power and few avenues for civic engagement that could result in positive change. More than any other groups, they are looking for those opportunities to further increase their level of participation. Yet at the same time, they are one of the least likely of groups to use the internet to express opinions about politics and take civic actions. This is due primarily to the fact that older generations use email as a political tool at a FAR higher rate than Millennials.

I'm not sure exactly what questions the researchers asked to come to these conclusions and produce the two charts below. It may in fact be that pairing these next two charts is like comparing apples and oranges, but I wonder what this means about Millennial participation in something like MoveOn, the most obvious organization to allow its members to participate and express themselves politically using email. At the very least it is indicative of a disconnect between what Millennials are doing online (IMing, blogging, social networking) and what they regard as effective political action for their community. It seems we still have a long way to go in making those into effective vehicles for political participation.