Hundreds of people lined up outside in the freezing cold on a recent December morning to get free fruits and vegetables from an outdoor mobile food pantry in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. So many, that the line stretched down one block, around the corner and down another block, and never seemed to get shorter.
“Despite our 9-9:30am opening, many of them were here at 4 o’clock this morning,” said Thomas Chen, a regular volunteer with City Harvest, the nonprofit that runs this mobile food market.
Twice a month, he and roughly two dozen other volunteers spend the morning here passing out fresh produce — bright red net bags packed with oranges, pineapples, carrots and mangoes.
“This is so energizing,” Chen said. “Whenever I feel down, sick, wanting to give up on the world, this is the place that inspires me.”
Chen retired in early 2020 and now spends a few hours a day, five days a week volunteering — gardening, landscaping and collecting trash in Central Park, and distributing food at mobile food pantries around the city.
Nearly 76 million Americans volunteered at some point in 2023, up from just over 60 million in 2021, according to a recent survey from AmeriCorps and the Census Bureau. The increase came after a 7 percentage-point drop during the height of the pandemic — the largest decrease in volunteering in more than two decades.
“So many people volunteer through their schools or community organizations where they just couldn’t go anymore,” said Michael D. Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps.
Lots of nonprofits also temporarily stopped inviting volunteers to help in person in 2020 and 2021, and lots of parents — who make up a big percentage of volunteers — suddenly lost child care.
“So the hope was this was a blip,” Smith said. “And once Americans returned to work and public life, that we would see a rebound.”
That’s exactly what’s happened.
Many nonprofits, including City Harvest in New York City, rely heavily on volunteers.
“We could not handle the amount of distribution that we do, we could not repack all of the amazing produce into family-size portions without our volunteers,” said Olivia McMahon, associate director of volunteer programs at City Harvest. “They’re really, really essential to the work that we do.”
About 200 people work on staff at the nonprofit; this year, more than 14,000 have volunteered.
“Unfortunately, the need for food assistance in New York City is the highest on record,” McMahon said. “So our need for volunteers is really as high as ever.”
That’s true for many nonprofits doing all kinds of work around the country, “especially coming out of the pandemic,” Smith said. “There’s an increase in demand for their services.”
Brynna Ververs, welcome services coordinator at the Brooklyn Public Library, said the 62-branch system has had more than 1,000 active volunteers this year, more than before the pandemic.
“We have volunteers staffing the welcome desk here at Central Library,” she said. “We have volunteers stationed in branches serving as computer coaches and personalized tech help.”
The library also has volunteers facilitating English conversation groups both in person and online — something that’s new since the pandemic.
Every month when Ververs runs orientation sessions for new library volunteers, “I’m kind of surprised at how many more people there were than the last time we did one,” she said.
City Harvest has also seen a steady increase in new volunteers over the last couple of years. Danielle Allen, 28, signed up the day after the presidential election and worked her first shift this month at the mobile market in Sunset Park in Brooklyn.
“I think I was feeling a real drive to connect with my community and to help out in a tangible way,” she said.
She had already been volunteering with an informal group, picking up trash once a month in her neighborhood, but wanted to do more.
“Partly because my family went to food pantries as a beneficiary of them as I was growing up,” she said, “so I have felt a real drive to give back now that I’m older and in a position to help.”
Walking up to the mobile market for her first volunteer shift, Allen was shocked to see the line wrapped around the building.
“Even on this cold day,” she said. “So, seems like there’s a great need in the community — but there’s also a great willingness to help.”
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