NCoC: Americans are Helping with Food and Shelter

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Americans are Helping with Food and Shelter

The Economic Downturn is Reshaping Civic Engagement

August 27, 2009

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The 2009 America’s Civic Health Index finds much evidence that we are directly helping people very close to ourselves by giving food and shelter to relatives and non-relatives in need. Almost half of all respondents had given food or shelter to someone other than a relative in the last year. We do not know whether these forms of assistance have grown during the recession; certainly, the need for them has.

These forms of civic engagement need to be further explored as they are every bit as critical, often more critical, than activities such as charity walks and volunteering that are typically more common among affluent Americans. In focus groups that CIRCLE (The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) conducted before the 2008 election, giving people shelter emerged as a demanding form of “service” offered by some people who were not otherwise involved in civil society. For example, one young woman in Baltimore began the focus group by saying that she was uninvolved in her community, but she later described feeding a friend, counseling her, and letting her stay in her one-room apartment (with her own small child) because this friend was hiding from drug dealers. This is significant “service” of a type that usually eludes survey research.

Americans are Turning Inward and Cutting Back Civic Engagement in Tough Economic Times • Older Americans May be Shifting from Volunteering and Community Work to Private Helping

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