Since the passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in 2009, there has been an even greater drive nationwide to increase volunteer turnout. Here at the University, service has always been a big part of student life.
Roughly 3,300 students volunteer through Madison House, which has served as the University's Office of Community Service since 1969, in a variety of activities every week. In addition, there are numerous autonomous service groups on Grounds, including organizations such as The Men's Leadership Project and Alternative Spring Break.
But despite the success of these groups, a number of them face a similar problem in recruitment - a problem that becomes apparent to anyone who walks into one of these group's interest meetings and finds himself engulfed in a sea of ponytails with only a few male faces here and there. For some reason, young men are simply not turning out in the same numbers as their female counterparts.
ASB President Taylor Deutsch said of the group's most recent rounds of applications, males composed only 20 percent of the applicants for winter service trips and 25 percent of the applicants for spring. As low as this figure is, Deutsch said, it is not unusual, and the average number of male applicants for all trips during the last few years has fallen by between 20 and 25 percent.
This gender imbalance is a problem that ASB has tried to solve through targeted flyers. Group leaders hope that if they play up aspects of trips that would appeal more to young men, they might be able to increase their numbers. In addition, Deutsch said, if more men would sign up for trips to begin with, there might be good reason to believe that a larger number of them would return.
"We have a higher average of guys as site leaders and on [the executive board] because they go on the trips and see that they do like it," Deutsch said.
Gender imbalance is an issue for an organization such as ASB, which aims to bring together diverse groups of students. For other organizations, the lack of gender diversity may not be as much of an issue.
"In general, we have more female volunteers than male volunteers, but that doesn't really affect us unless it's a program like Big Sibling," Madison House Student Co-Chair Kelsey Host said. Currently, 28 percent of Madison House's volunteers are male.
In most cases, the gender of the volunteer is irrelevant, and all that matters is that they contribute their time and energy to the program. Programs such as Big Sibling, however, contain gender-specific matching. As a result, boys who sign up for such programs have a smaller chance of getting a mentor than their female friends. In fact, Host said, Madison House has recently had to turn away several boys looking for male mentors because there simply weren't enough volunteers to fill the slots.
Another mentor pairing program, the Men's Leadership Project, also faces problems finding enough big brothers to meet the community demand. Claire Kaplan, director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services at the Women's Center, oversees both MLP and its counterpart, the Young Women Leaders Program and said there is huge discrepancy between the numbers of volunteers for each group.
"There are about 200 volunteers involved with the women's project," said Kaplan, adding that this was a staggering number compared to the 10 young men who are currently big siblings with MLP.
The exact reason for this gender discrepancy is unclear. MLP's Academic Co-Director Ruel Tyer said he believes that "female students tend to do more volunteering than guys, just in all aspects."
He added that MLP members are trying to raise awareness about their organization and are working this year to inform more male students about their existence.
Nevertheless, it seems improbable that male students are completely unaware of these volunteer opportunities, given that their female counterparts flock to them. Rather, it might be that male students see less of an incentive to join service organizations, for a variety of reasons. Even the students themselves, though, seem unsure about the exact reasons for the difference in volunteer numbers.
Some, such as fourth-year College student Adam Smith and third-year College student Kevin Nguyen, said young men may be reluctant to join service groups because of the volunteer opportunities they already have through their social organizations.
"I used to be in a fraternity, and we did community service and philanthropies," Smith said.
Nguyen, who is a member of the Organization of Young Filipino Americans, said he would be more inclined to volunteer with an organization he has already joined.
"The thing that makes people actually want to do it is if you make it fun and not just work," he said.
Nguyen has done other purely volunteer activities before but he said OYFA appeals to him because there are social activities as well as service ones. As a result, he knows the other people he is working with very well and can enjoy both types of activities more, he said.
But even within groups such as the coeducational service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, which combines volunteering with social activities, there is typically a higher number of female members.
"We normally have a pledge class of 22-24 people, and generally I'd say it's about 16 girls and 6 guys," Chapter President Matt Baltz said.
To combat this trend, Baltz said that the organization has tried to recruit more males by making YouTube videos that joke about the high ratio of girls and thus the higher potential to meet women by joining the group.
It is difficult to say whether the recruitment efforts of all of these organizations have helped - Baltz, and the rest of these organization's leaders, can only hope that things will start looking up.
"Recently we've seen that reversed with a class of about 10 guys," he said. "But it's still really rare that we get 50-50"
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