CHAPTER SEVEN

Volunteer

When you’re an event planner, people expect you to throw yourself a rock-star birthday party every year. In 2010, Robyn Bomar wasn’t sure she wanted to. “There’s nothing special about turning thirty-eight, but it felt like a lot of people were, like, ‘What are you going to do?’” Finally she said, “Let’s do something for someone else.”

No party. No guests. Robyn decided she would spend the day doing thirty-eight random acts of kindness, one for each year she’d been alive.

She and her family began right after breakfast on her birthday. They loaded bags of groceries into shoppers’ cars at the supermarket. They fed parking meters around Destin, Florida, where they lived. They hid gift cards between the books at Barnes & Noble, passed out Tootsie Pops on a playground, and paid for the cars behind them at a toll bridge. They delivered balloons to hospital patients and dragged a neighbor’s garbage can up the driveway for her.

Strangers were sometimes hesitant. “Why are you doing this?” they’d ask. “What organization are you with?” Robyn’s three daughters were under strict instructions not to tell anyone it was their mother’s birthday, so they’d simply say it was a little something to brighten their day.

July 17, the day we moved to Blacksburg, also happened to be the day I turned thirty-six. Festive birthday highlights included a seven-hour drive through Kentucky and West Virginia, topped by a celebratory signing of contracts at the electric company. I made Quinn vow that, to make up for it, he’d turn my next birthday into a bacchanal of indulgence, or at the very least bake a homemade cake and do the dishes afterward.

I would have held him to it, too, if he hadn’t registered for an out-of-state conference that week. Good-bye, homemade cake. Hello, dishes. I braced myself to spend birthday #37 wallowing in self-pity.

To cheer myself up, I contemplated taking Robyn Bomar’s approach, which she had turned into a national movement called the Birthday Project, and which I had written about for a women’s magazine. Building some good place-karma here in Blacksburg might be more rewarding, I thought, than passing my special day in a Facebook coma. Inspired, I settled on completing seventeen acts of kindness, a number that seemed propitious for a July seventeenth birthday.

Robyn Bomar, ever the event planner, had plotted and prepped her thirty-eight good deeds beforehand. I, too, brainstormed a list of possibilities, starting with a few basic questions: Who in Blacksburg would be cheered by a surprise hit of affection? What good deeds might make my birthday feel like a party? Once I’d decided what to do, I spent a few days gathering supplies (gift cards, quarters) and mapping the most efficient routes around town.

The July humidity sets in early in southwest Virginia, so not long after eight a.m. on my birthday, Ella and Ruby and I were heaving a cooler full of water bottles toward the Huckleberry Trail, the paved path where I’d posted the Walk Blacksburg sign. Our first act of kindness was modeled on one of Robyn’s. Destin, she’d said, was full of walkers and joggers, so she and her family handed out water bottles. I figured we could mount a low-effort version on the Huckleberry. We left the cooler next to the trail with a construction paper sign that said, “Good for you for getting outside! Enjoy some cold water on us.” Then we ran back to the car. The ding-dong-ditch aspect electrified us. By the time we were buckled in we were practically hysterical.

After that, each little random act of kindness tumbled efficiently into the next, like we were working our way through the best list of errands ever. Deliver Carol Lee donuts to the library and the fire department. Stuff vases with flowers and get the nurses at Lewis-Gale Medical Center to deliver them to patients. Tape $1.50 in quarters to a hospital soda machine. Leave a buck on the claw machine in the supermarket, with a note advising the finder to play a game. Check, check, check, and check.

Robyn had said that as her birthday wore on, she paid more attention to who was around them and what they really needed. That, she said, “was the biggest learning experience of all—to not be so random about kindness and be more intentional.” Like her, I tried to keep my eyes open to genuine distress. We saw a homeless man with a “Need Food” sign on a bench downtown. When I handed him a bag of donuts and a paper carton of milk, he nodded wordlessly, as if he’d been expecting us.

The librarian, on the other hand, squealed like a teenager: “Donuts? For us?” More than I’d expected, people in Blacksburg were willing to roll with the oddness of the moment when a stranger assaults them with goodwill. That morning, I’d spotted a Volunteer Rescue Squad truck parked on the side of the road, and I’d run up and thrust a box of donuts through the window (donuts being the ultimate happiness maker). “This is a random act of kindness!” I exclaimed. “Thanks for your service! Share them with the rest of the rescue squad!”

The driver, a middle-aged man with a mustache, blinked at me, then laughed. “Are you serious? Wow.”

I’d like to think that at dinner tables around Blacksburg that night, people told crazy stories. Can you believe that lady with the donuts? they’d say. Or, Hey, I finally got to play the claw machine! I imagined them saying how it made their day.

It more than made my day. About half of our random acts of kindness were designed for anonymity. These were the sneaky ones that Ella and Ruby loved best, like hiding dollar bills among the play equipment at Nellie’s Cave Park or tucking an Olive Garden gift card into the door of a young couple we knew from church. We always left before we could see their reaction. Sometimes the reaction found us anyway. In the afternoon, when we circled back to the Huckleberry Trail to pick up the cooler, I found a couple bucks and a thank-you note inside.

Even in anonymity, the seventeen random acts of kindness we did made me feel more seen in Blacksburg. We had made something good happen. We had thrown a pebble into the pond and watched the ripples fan out.

Find a Reason to Give

I probably don’t have to convince you that doing nice things for others makes us feel better in all sorts of ways.

Physically, community service is as satisfying as gorging on burgers and as calming as a session of yoga, but without the nasty side effects of Zoloft. In one 2013 survey, more than a third of American volunteers said that volunteering lowered their stress levels and made them feel better. Volunteers have higher self-esteem, more optimism, and better social skills. They’re less anxious and depressed. They wow doctors with their lower blood pressure and healthier hearts. In studies, they’re less likely to die at any given moment than nonvolunteers.

“When we do good deeds,” explains bioethicist Stephen G. Post, coauthor of Why Good Things Happen to Good People, “we’re rewarded by a dopamine pulse. Giving a donation or volunteering in a food bank tweaks the same source of pleasure that lights up when we eat or have sex. It’s clear that helping others, even at low thresholds of several hours of volunteerism a week, creates mood elevation.”

Volunteering in your hometown, you reap a double-whammy benefit: Helping out makes you feel better while simultaneously making your city a better place to live. Think about it. Every time you pick up litter, you make your city more aesthetically pleasing—one of the three most important factors in place attachment, as the Soul of the Community study taught us. Every time you volunteer to pass out T-shirts at a town festival, you help your city increase its social offerings—more place attachment. When you hammer nails into a Habitat for Humanity house in your town, your city becomes welcoming for all kinds of people. Still more place attachment. What’s good for your community is also good for you.

In 2005, researchers from the National Conference on Citizenship started measuring the number of nonprofits in 942 metro areas and 3,100 counties across the country. A few years later, the recession hit. That allowed them to uncover this startling piece of information: People who lived in towns with a higher number of nonprofit organizations—a symbol of how service minded the town was—were less likely to become unemployed during the recession than residents of towns with fewer nonprofits. Just one extra nonprofit per one thousand people added up to a half percentage point fewer out-of-work residents. A similar effect was seen among cities that had a greater number of citizen volunteers.

Why did community service help cities do better economically? One reason suggested by researchers is that volunteering increases place attachment, and place attachment to one’s town can “increase the odds that one will invest, spend, and hire there.”

As taxpayer dollars peter out, the list of what unpaid volunteers do for cities has grown long and kind of appalling. Volunteers don uniforms and patrol neighborhoods with the city police force in Pasadena, California. They man the front desk of the Naperville, Illinois, city hall. They direct lost passengers around the airport in Philadelphia and write parking tickets in Deer Park, Texas. In an ideal world, municipalities would never have to recruit volunteers to handle the filing, maintenance, gardening, cleaning, and caring that should probably be the domain of full-time city employees. On the other hand, volunteers free up cash-strapped governments to maintain basic or extra services. If American volunteers were paid for all the service they gave in 2013, it would cost an estimated $173 billion.

So substantial is the good that cities can eke out of local volunteers that in 2009, then mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and the Rockefeller Foundation funded an organization called Cities of Service, to teach cities how to galvanize volunteers and use them more effectively. More than two hundred mayors across the United States and the United Kingdom joined the Cities of Service coalition, pledging to, in the words of Mayor Bloomberg, “harness the power of the civically minded to help solve our most pressing local challenges.” Two dozen cities, including Baltimore, Houston, and Richmond, were given grants to hire a chief service officer, a senior official who would develop a citywide volunteer plan and champion it through the highest levels of city hall.

Two days before Laurel Creech was set to start work as Nashville’s first chief service officer, in May 2010, the city was hit with a thousand-year flood that killed eleven people and caused $6 billion in damage—a baptism by fire if ever there was one. Before the flood, Creech says, Nashville “already had a pretty good culture of service in our community. Postflood, that has increased dramatically.”

As chief service officer, Creech launched the Mayor’s Workplace Challenge to encourage businesses to prioritize employee volunteerism, and she helped create an accreditation program for nonprofits that train and treat volunteers well. In a city that’s expected to triple in size over the next twenty-five years, volunteers now do more of the heavy lifting with city-run initiatives like the Home Energy Savings Program, which retrofits low-income houses to make them more energy efficient. By signing up for Cities of Service opportunities, residents are essentially saying, “If the city thinks it’s important, so do I.” That, says Creech, “enhances the pride and value of being in Nashville.”

One of the by-products of volunteering in and for your city can be a sense of “place identity.” The idea is that, in the same way you might self-identify as a parent or a lawyer or a dog lover, volunteering helps you see yourself as a valuable part of your town. You join the collective “we” of your place, a sentiment that’s summed up tidily in this statement from the place attachment scale: “Where I live tells you a lot about who I am as a person.”

One woman, a self-described “chronic volunteer” who spends six hours a day running the free community toolshed in Flint, Michigan (a Cities of Service program), explained why she didn’t just hand the job over to city government: “We are the city of Flint. This is our responsibility. We have to take care of our home.” For the place attached, volunteering for your town feels as natural and obligatory as Saturday chores around your house. The more you give, the more firmly you feel that way.

The cycle goes something like this: You volunteer, so your town becomes better, which makes it easier to love, which makes you more attached to your town. As Abraham Lincoln purportedly said, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live in it so that his place will be proud of him.”

That your city wants you to volunteer in some capacity is a no-brainer. Of course it does. Nashville, which rates a middle-of-the-road twenty-second place for volunteering among the fifty-one largest cities in the country, is desperate for it. So why don’t Americans do it more often? In 2014, only about a quarter of Americans volunteered. Those who did gave a median fifty hours of service—impressive, but that still leaves three out of four Americans who never volunteered during the year. Not even once.

How geographically mobile we are may explain some of our reluctance. In one survey of why metro-area Atlantans gave to charity, 83 percent said they did so “out of a sense of community.” Implied is that if you don’t have a sense of community, you may not be motivated to give. Other studies show that Movers are less philanthropic than Stayers, and that towns with more Stayers tend to have more volunteers.

When we move, our volunteer habits from wherever we lived last often carry over to our new town, says Becky Nesbit, an assistant professor of nonprofit management at the University of Georgia, who studies volunteerism. So if you volunteered for the animal shelter in your old city, chances are good you’ll sign up with another animal shelter after you move.

Some Movers, however, wait for an invitation to volunteer, which means they have to develop a social network first. Others have a tough time finding the right fit. They track down the soup kitchen, “but it might be kind of cliquey and they feel left out, so they stop because it’s not the same positive experience it was before,” says Nesbit. Or they want to volunteer for the local arts organization but find it poorly managed. Sometimes they inquire about volunteer opportunities and never hear back. “There are a lot of barriers to people successfully reconnecting to volunteering [after a move].”

Nesbit herself, who’s lived in Indiana, North Carolina, Kansas, and Georgia in the last ten years, says that the painful process of getting your feet under you in a new place can be enough to kill the time or desire to volunteer. “My last few moves, I haven’t been there very many years. I haven’t made as much of an investment in place. I thought for a long time I’d like to be a CASA volunteer, but I just haven’t done that. I don’t know all the reasons why.” She hasn’t found her forever place, and “there’s this reluctance to make a deep [volunteer] commitment unless I know I’m going to be there for a while.”

By those lights, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, is something of an outlier. It’s one of the fastest-growing metros in the United States, with more new move-ins than move-outs. Yet the Twin Cities also have one of the highest volunteer rates in the country. Nationally, about a quarter of Americans volunteer. In the Twin Cities in 2013, 35.8 percent did.

How does a city filled with Movers get people to volunteer? My hypothesis was that it might have something to do with how much people liked living there. In 2014 the Twin Cities scored fourth place in Gallup-Healthways’ well-being poll. Wages are high, 23 percent above the national average, and it’s relatively inexpensive to live there. Other studies back up just how happy and healthy locals seem to be—more physically active than most of the nation, more well-read, more likely to feel safe.

Did people in the Twin Cities volunteer because they were so bowled over by their hometown’s splendor that they just had to give back? Or were Minneapolis and St. Paul amazing because they were packed with the kinds of people who volunteer no matter what?

Take Care of Your Own

In the 360 acres that constitute the Minnesota State Fair (tellingly referred to as the “Great Minnesota Get-Together”), you can admire abnormally large zucchinis and eat vast amounts of cheese curds. You can watch white-clad 4H-ers lead their heifers around the cattle barn while judges make lurid-sounding pronouncements about the second-place cow’s “awful good udder.” And still I feel confident saying that one of the more unusual displays of state pride is found in a barn across from the Red Hot Chicago Dog booth. “Hey there, welcome!” a man cried into a microphone as I wandered inside. “We’re doing a little volunteering today! Come join us!”

I had found the KARE barn, where each Saturday and Sunday of the Great Minnesota Get-Together, fairgoers can complete a small volunteer project for a Twin Cities nonprofit. One day they were making blankets for people in hospice care, the next assembling journal kits for the children’s hospital. Today’s goal: decorating holiday boxes, which in December would be filled with food and delivered to clients of the Aliveness Project, a charity that serves Twin Cities residents who have HIV/AIDS. “In just ten minutes,” said the guy with the mic, an Aliveness Project staffer named Tim Marburger, “you can help us make someone’s holiday a little brighter this year. Last year, we helped seven hundred families.”

Outside, there were alligators to be admired and corn dogs to be devoured. A community service break seemed like a lot to ask. Yet a couple dozen people were splayed across benches, drawing out-of-season snowmen and sleighs on white boxes. Volunteers ferried around plastic cups of crayons and markers. Everyone seemed happy to be there.

Why did Minnesotans at the fair take the time to volunteer? When I asked Patricia Garcia, a staffer with local volunteer network HandsOn Twin Cities, cosponsor of the speed volunteering event, she said, “It’s the whole concept of ‘Minnesota nice.’ It’s important to us to have a close-knit community.”

“There’s a culture of giving back,” added Meghan Morse, the center’s special projects director.

I had of course heard about “Minnesota nice,” the famed midwestern brand of bland, nonconfrontational pleasantness so well-known that it merits its own Wikipedia entry. Was the reason Minnesota ranked second in the nation for number of volunteer hours per resident because Minnesotans were just plain nicer than everyone else?

When I ran this theory by Kristin Schurrer, executive director of HandsOn Twin Cities, she was incredulous. “No!” she blurted. “Have you driven on our roads?” Minnesota nice—really an excruciatingly reserved social politeness—wasn’t the same thing at all as being fundamentally kinder than the rest of America.

Schurrer’s theory was that the prevailing ethos of community service was ingrained in local culture by the area’s Scandinavian immigrants. They valued mutual aid, trust, and social connectedness—antecedents for volunteerism that were cemented by Minnesota’s harsh weather. Pioneers literally had to help each other survive.

The same prosocial characteristics can be seen in other bitter-cold states. North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Vermont excel on measures of social capital where Sun Belt states like Nevada, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama do poorly, prompting social scientist Robert Putnam to point out that “the best single predictor of the level of social capital in American states is distance to the Canadian border.”

If anyone embodies the genuinely good side of Minnesota nice, it’s a woman named Jenny Friedman—which is odd, since Jenny’s originally from St. Louis. She moved to Minnesota for college as an eighteen-year-old and immediately fell in love with the state. “It was a feeling I got when I got here, that it just seemed to fit me,” she says. After a stint in graduate school in Chicago, she and her husband settled in a homey neighborhood of Minneapolis three blocks from Minnehaha Creek.

Not long afterward, Jenny volunteered to deliver for Meals on Wheels. She and a friend piled into Jenny’s tiny car, a stack of hot tin-foiled dinners between them and their kids buckled into the back. At each stop, one of the women would escort a child to the front door to present a meal to a grandmotherly senior. The experience became a mission; Jenny went on to found the family volunteering nonprofit Doing Good Together. But she remembers that first foray into volunteering as a direct response to her joy at living in Minneapolis. “I felt like I was incredibly blessed, like life had handed me this great place,” she recalls. “Here I was in Minneapolis! I loved it. I was just happy. So I wanted to do something.”

Though the Twin Cities have a lot going for them, they are not Shangri-La. Like any major metro area, they deal with their fair share of crime, drugs, gangs, violence, poverty, racial inequality, and all-purpose hard times. For residents, volunteering is a concrete, positive way to deal with their city’s problems so they don’t overwhelm them.

Through Doing Good Together, Jenny organizes an annual Family Service Fair, with booths where grade schoolers can assemble sandwiches for a homeless shelter or design a card for a hospitalized child. So many people cram into the Midtown Global Market for this little carnival of idealism that “it’s like all these people shining lights into the darkness,” she tells me. “It makes you feel good about people in general, and about your city and the place you live.”

One man I met in Minneapolis moved to the city’s north side precisely because it was one of the most economically disadvantaged and troubled parts of town. Brian Mogren is a lanky, forty-eight-year-old white guy who looks not unlike the dad from Family Ties. In 2008, he quit his job as an art director for Target to turn his Craftsman-style home in the Near North neighborhood into a “house of hospitality.” The idea was to provide a safe, light-filled gathering place in a part of town where crime is not uncommon.

In practice, that means a literal open-door policy at his home, called St. Jane House. The book- and candle-bedecked living room hosts a local meditation group, monthly ukulele sing-alongs, and a support group for women who have lost children to violence or prison. People pray there. They hold hands and hug. The day I was there, a couple of schoolkids, Devon and Lazell, did homework in Brian’s kitchen after school, raiding the fridge at will and complaining about the snacks. (Lazell: “Aw, man, these Oreos are stale!” Brian: “No, they’re not. I just bought them.” Lazell: “They’re stale, Brian.”) Brian, who has no kids of his own, relishes the part of godfather, buying the brothers school shoes and cajoling them about their grades.

To manage St. Jane House full-time has required sacrifice. No more 401(k), health benefits, financial security, or Target employee discount. The differences between Mogren and his neighbors are sharp enough to cut yourself on. He’s conscious of the fact that some people probably see him as another white do-gooder. But he firmly believes that “this is what it’s all about—connecting across differences and discovering our common humanity. It’s hard to build community from the outside.”

I can hardly think of a more demanding way to invest in where you live. Yet Brian radiates joy. He insists he’s never been happier. He was frenetic about introducing me to his friends and mentors, including the Visitation Sisters of Minneapolis, a group of white-haired “nuns in the hood” with their own open-door policy a few blocks away. “My life is so great because I’m surrounded by great people,” Brian told me about ten times.

One of the friends Brian wanted me to meet was Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis city council member who was recently elected to the city’s school board. Sitting at Brian’s kitchen table, Don told me that after immigrating from Jamaica as a twenty-year-old, “I made the commitment that I would always live in the inner city.” His first house, in Providence, Rhode Island, was in a neighborhood so bad that no one else would live there. Even as Don’s career as a toy designer took off, he settled his family in poor, mostly African American neighborhoods every time he moved, in Boston, Southern California, New York, and elsewhere.

Living in rough neighborhoods meant his four kids had few playmates. On the sidewalks there were guys with guns instead of children on bikes. In Minneapolis, the real estate agent refused to show them houses in the high-crime, low-income Jordan neighborhood that Don and his wife, Sondra, targeted. “You don’t want to live there,” he said. They bought a place in Jordan anyway.

Don and Brian had turned their entire lives into placemaking tools, and their commitment astounded me. When I pointed out that they might be the only people in America who took this half-crazy approach to house hunting, Don laughed. “I’m not trying to find the toughest neighborhood to beat up on myself,” he said. He believes that the number one reason inner-city neighborhoods are struggling is that the middle class, and specifically the black middle class, won’t live there. To survive, the bad parts of town need to become more stable and economically diverse. How could Don make that happen? Live there himself and hope others followed. That’s what it has taken to put his ideals into the kind of lived, daily action that helps him sleep well at night.

For Don, changing underserved communities by choosing to live there is the ultimate expression of loving where you live. “Lots of people would like to see neighborhoods change,” he says, “but they don’t want to have to change their own life to modify them.”

Occasionally some of Don and Sondra’s well-off friends are beguiled by their philosophy. “You know, the kids are leaving,” one woman said. “We might do this!” She pointed at a rehabbed house on a tough street and said, “I like that house. Can I see it?”

“I’ll give them the property and Realtor information and they seem genuinely inspired to make the move,” says Don mildly, “but nothing comes of it. It often comes so close, but it’s a hard decision to make. The barrier between us and the future we want to see is as thin as a membrane.”

Just Give Cash (the Right Way)

Stories about selfless Good Samaritans like Don, Brian, and Jenny are inspiring and depressing in equal measure. The idealistic jolt they give me quickly dissolves into lassitude. I can never be like that, I think. I can barely be nice to my own kids some days. The thought of trying to solve someone else’s problems while I’m being pulverized by my own seems a laughable act of hubris. Despite seeing how good volunteering is for us and our communities, sometimes I can’t resist the guilty satisfaction of locking myself in my house and muttering, “Maybe next time.”

Volunteering is, by definition, the thing we don’t have to do, unlike working, eating, parenting, sleeping (maybe), and trying to maintain some semblance of a life. As our day-to-day schedule becomes chaotic, volunteering is naturally the first commitment we jettison—or else it becomes the commitment we agonize over and learn to resent. In Blacksburg, I volunteered to organize a readathon fund-raiser that made $10,000 for Ruby’s elementary school. Still, whenever Quinn saw me staying up late to work on it, he would say, “You’ve got to quit the readathon. It’s too much. Tell them you can’t do it. Someone else can take it on.”

Except there was no one else. Even in the Twin Cities, only slightly more than a third of residents volunteer—and that’s a staggering amount for the United States. If you are among the two-thirds of nonvolunteers, no judgment. I get it, I really do. When you’re overworked or stressed or don’t know how to help, sometimes it’s easier to not do anything.

Here’s a thought. Just give money.

Each of my Love Where You Live experiments had taught me that the more I gave to my city, the more I got back from it. When I invested time, curiosity, and enthusiasm, I felt more invested. The act of giving increased my commitment and my place identity—the sense that there’s a holistic relationship between who I am and where I live. That we’re in it together.

Why not write a check, then? The local nonprofit isn’t asking for blood. They want cash. Just as investing in American Airlines stock makes us pay a lot more attention to how American Airlines is operating, and probably makes us more likely to fly American ourselves, I figured that investing my hard-earned money in Blacksburg could increase my ratings on place attachment measures like “If something exciting were happening in this community, I’d want to be involved”; “I’m really interested in knowing what’s going on here”; and “I care about the future success of this town.”

I thought I’d test my theory out. In 2013 the Lyric, the restored Art Deco movie theater in downtown Blacksburg, needed to upgrade to a digital projection system. The change would cost $120,000—wildly expensive for an operation that relies on volunteers to sell the peanut M&M’s. Still, they’d managed to raise all but the last $50,000, and for that the board of directors launched a civic crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The Lyric is one of Blacksburg’s hubs, where standing in line for cheap buckets of popcorn is akin to community social hour. Back when Quinn and I didn’t know anyone in town ourselves, we felt wistful about all the people calling out greetings around us. Now that we’d made more of an effort to make friends, we sometimes ran into people we knew there, and every time it happened I got a place attachment buzz. Yes. We know them. We belong here.

The Lyric was one of the places that made Blacksburg Blacksburg, and so it felt important to give to the Kickstarter campaign. Ours wasn’t a particularly liberal donation, just $25 or so. As studies predict, donating gave me a brief sense of satisfaction. That was it. No big deal.

It wasn’t until a few months after the fund-raiser ended, when the Lyric began scrolling a “thank you” trailer of the names of the donors who’d coughed up a total $58,561 in pledges, that I felt differently. The list had 844 people on it. It took forever, so many people loved this movie theater. Sitting with my hand in my popcorn, I searched for our names, and there they were, Quinn and Melody Warnick, a big-screen sign that we were part of the community. Our $25 investment made the theater—and thus a bit of Blacksburg—feel like it belonged to us.

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are by now familiar venues for crowdsourcing. Sites that raise money specifically for community projects are proliferating as well. The websites ioby (the letters stand for “in our backyard”), Citizinvestor, and the UK-based Spacehive have helped towns and nonprofits crowdfund bike lanes, dog parks, fireworks festivals, playground renovations, and community arts centers, the kinds of placemaking projects that make towns more lovable.

Rodrigo Davies remembers his shock at hearing in 2012 that Spacehive had crowdsourced £792,000 for a multipurpose community center in remote Glyncoch, Wales, thirty minutes from the working-class mining town where Davies grew up. That civic crowdfunding would catch on in San Francisco was predictable. But Glyncoch, a town in terminal economic decline? “These are areas that have been depressed and had chronic unemployment for decades,” Davies explains. “If it can work in a depressed mining town in Wales, something transformative is going on.”

In research he later conducted at MIT, Davies found that civic crowdfunding succeeds better in small towns than large cities, for the same reason that smaller cities do better in Outside’s Best Town Ever contest. Human connections matter. “I think often people assume, well, you introduce a technology platform and it’s the great anonymous masses who are going to make it happen,” he told me. “Money is just going to come from people on the Internet.” Not true. Money for community projects comes from people in the community. When residents know who’s running the fund-raiser, or they know how their place will benefit from it, they’re more likely to donate.

The powerful effect that civic crowdfunding had on places intrigued Davies so much that he took a job with a company called Neighborly, which once functioned as a typical civic crowdfunding site but now takes the fresh approach of allowing small-scale, individual investment in municipal bonds. Munis aren’t charity. Cities use municipal bonds to raise money for large-scale public projects. They’re a government-backed investment vehicle with a 99 percent on-time repayment rate.

And yet, like civic crowdfunding sites, Neighborly is making munis a way for locals to change where they live for the better. This is the big stuff: $100 million to improve a health care center in Livonia, Michigan (population 95,000); $31 million for water system upgrades in Tigard, Oregon (population 50,000). Investing in a local muni, or donating to a crowdfunded local project, is like paying self-imposed property taxes that happen to show you exactly how your money improves your quality of life. That’s empowering.

Because sites like ioby and Spacehive show you how much has been donated, and sometimes who’s doing the donating, you’re not just blindly slipping money into a closed pot. You see that there are like-minded individuals out there, as I did with the Lyric Kickstarter, and that helps you feel part of the community. As Davies explains, “Effectively this says, ‘Look, we’re all doing this together.’ That’s the kind of connection that I think people really crave, especially if they’re new to a place. They’re trying to get a foothold. They want to feel like they belong. This is a way to get there.”

Finding a local cause to support requires determining what you value in your town, a kind of charitable asset mapping. Should you support the cancer care center? The public gardens? Back when I started to shop at Imaginations toy store, I learned that if you don’t want it to go away, you should spend your money on it. Donating to organizations whose services you benefit from, like a public radio station or a community orchestra, is sometimes called “philanthropic consumerism.” That has a materialistic ring to it, but for Movers it’s a helpful way to get started.

Another way to donate locally is through a giving circle, like the one retired teacher Fran Bussey started in Liberty, Missouri. In a giving circle, members each donate a set amount of money per year, then collectively decide which local charity will receive the funds. As a member of several nonprofit boards, Fran knew “there is always a big need for a really good dose of cash to help a nonprofit be really successful.” So she asked three of her neighbors to join the circle with a $302 donation apiece, then those four invited more women.

Eventually the Liberty Giving Circle grew to more than two hundred members. Since 2006 they’ve pumped more than $250,000 into eight local charities, including a transitional home for homeless families and a program for autistic children. Circle members vote on grant applications, and the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation manages the money.

A University of Nebraska study found that giving circle members were highly engaged in their communities, regardless of how long they had lived in town or whether they were homeowners. By requiring friends and neighbors to cooperatively make charitable decisions, the Liberty Giving Circle increases social cohesion and collective efficacy, those forerunners of place attachment. Fran says it gives members a way to “be philanthropic in their hometown.”

I would never say that someone should confine all their charitable giving to their hometown. The world is full of places that need Americans’ money far more than Americans need it. Give to them, and then, to increase your rootedness, support a local cause, too. Donate to the new community theater. Help remodel the hospital. Pitch in for the Kickstarter to build a mountain bike skills park. (I did, in Blacksburg.) Money changes your town. Giving money changes you. When you invest, you feel invested.

Find Your Volunteering Community

Right after moving to Blacksburg I started showing up for elementary school PTO meetings. That’s a form of volunteering that Becky Nesbit says is especially easy for Movers because it transfers so seamlessly from place to place. Your kids attended school in your last town, and they attend school here.

It’s also like a gateway drug for community social cohesion. Most volunteerism involves human contact, the very thing that newcomers (and everyone else) require to feel rooted in their community. By introducing me to that most vital milieu, the parents of my kids’ friends, my hours of shelving books and chaperoning field trips paved the way for relationships at a time when I desperately needed them. After a few years and a couple readathons, I was firmly attached to the school.

Then Quinn had to point out that helping with the PTO was a rather cloistered way to give back. “That’s not really the same thing as volunteering in your town, is it?”

Since my goal was to attach to Blacksburg, he gently suggested that for a Love Where You Live experiment, I find a way to volunteer for the town as a whole, or at least a slightly larger swath of it. Of course, whatever new volunteer gig I picked up would be in addition to what I was already doing. I needed a low-commitment kind of commitment, something less random than the acts of kindness I’d done on my thirty-seventh birthday, but just as rewarding.

The Town of Blacksburg didn’t use volunteers that I could see, so I looked on the VolunteerNRV website for opportunities to help nonprofits. Some of the jobs I was vastly unqualified for (Habitat for Humanity plumber). Some didn’t appeal (data entry for a hospice). The one that did strike my fancy was packing bags of food for Micah’s Backpack, a nonprofit that sends disadvantaged Blacksburg schoolchildren home with something to eat over the weekend, when they don’t get a free school lunch. The group helped all the kids in town, not just the ones in my neighborhood. The packing sessions were once a week. There was no formal commitment. I could just show up.

Everything about this plan seemed brilliant to me, until the evening Quinn and I drove the girls to St. Michael’s Lutheran Church to help load the bags, and everyone in town showed up, too. A long line of volunteers snaked through the hall and into the chapel. We waited five minutes for the chance to drop a few granola bars in a grocery bag. Not only did I feel redundant, I felt like, by adding to the crowd, I was actively making other volunteers’ experience worse.

I tried elsewhere, taking a once-every-three-months shift at the Interfaith Food Pantry. Many of the clients were working poor who couldn’t make ends meet despite having full-time jobs. Some were ill or unemployed. Helping them fill grocery bags with Cheerios and ground beef felt like I was doing something valuable, but like Micah’s Backpack, the food pantry had such a surfeit of volunteers it didn’t need me very often. (Educated people volunteer more often. Hashtag college town problems.) I was encountering exactly the challenges that Becky Nesbit said kept Movers from volunteering where they lived.

In my utopian fantasies, I’d wanted my volunteering to help Blacksburg residents who needed it most. I knew there were poor people here, kids without enough to eat, people living in desperate circumstances. Couldn’t I find a way to make life easier for them, and simultaneously make my town more welcoming? Ninety-five percent of us feel like our volunteering makes a difference in the world, a sensation that is both the impetus and the payback for our acts of charity. We have to feel like that or we wouldn’t bother. So maybe it’s ridiculous that, in the end, the place where I ended up volunteering the most happily was the Lyric.

I know what you’re thinking: The movie theater? Really? Of all the noble causes in Blacksburg that really, truly need your help and money—all those hungry people, abandoned animals, struggling kids—you’re helping at a movie theater?

Here’s why. The Lyric was something I loved and valued. In the same way I didn’t want Imaginations toy store to go away, I didn’t want the Lyric to go away. I tried to go to movies and concerts there when I could, and I never snuck in candy. (There’s a circle of hell reserved for people who sneak candy into a nonprofit movie theater.) Volunteering was just the next step in my existing commitment.

Also, volunteers at the Lyric always looked like they were having an incredibly good time. The people who handed over our popcorn and Sprite were a good-humored group of college students, grandparents, middle-aged folks, and men with crazy handlebar mustaches. Behind the counter, they laughed and chatted. They got free popcorn and soda. Forgive my shallow motivation, but I wanted to join the party.

I started on a winter Saturday morning at a free family matinee of Hook. While Ruby and Ella claimed seats in the empty theater, Betty, the cheerfully competent projectionist, showed me how to pour the proper amount of kernels into the popper, press the green button to squirt in a stream of oil, and add a dollop of salty popcorn flavoring. “Make sure the agitator is on,” Betty said, “and when the pops are seven seconds apart, dump it and start again.”

Despite some initial panic (When do I press the button?), I soon developed an easy rhythm with the two other women working concessions—me filling popcorn tubs, someone else handling soda, the third taking orders, all of us in constant motion, like ballerinas. Later, in the dark theater, I felt a bizarre pride listening to the crunch of popcorn around me. That’s my popcorn, people, I thought. I made that.

Most shifts were already taken by regular volunteers, so I made a habit of signing up to volunteer at special events, like a midweek showing of a documentary about pilgrims along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Since volunteers were always invited to see the show for free, a few minutes after the screening began I fumbled my way to a seat in the dark balcony to watch a film I never would have bothered to see otherwise. In one scene, a hiker speaks exuberantly about the transformative powers of the camino journey. “I came on the camino hoping my brother would change,” she said. “But instead, I changed.”

Her words made me wonder: Am I changing? How were all my Love Where You Live experiments adding up? Did I really feel differently about my town?

Changes were happening in subtle ways. I had more friends, or at least more people that I recognized, including women like Betty. Volunteering, getting to know my neighbors, hiking, and most of my other experiments had increased my social capital. My numbers on the place attachment scale were steadily going up. I not only knew my way around, but I was genuinely interested in what was going on, and I knew that if something exciting was happening in this community, I’d want to be involved. I identified more with Blacksburg; I felt a part of things. In small ways it felt like I was having an impact on my town, and that felt good.

A few weeks after I started at the Lyric, I received an e-mail inviting me to march with other Lyric volunteers in the Blacksburg Holiday Parade. Quinn, Ella, and Ruby categorically refused to go with me. I contemplated saying no, then I reminded myself of a principle I’d learned from my earlier Love Where You Live experiments: to feel attached, you have to act like an attached person. Was there any question that a person who loved Blacksburg would march in the holiday parade?

That night, Betty the projectionist was the first to see me searching for the Lyric group among a coiled line of floats and marching bands. “Hi, Melody!” she called. “We’re so glad you made it!” As I waved at the gathered volunteers with a mittened hand, someone instructed me to put on my cat ears.

The Lyric is a nonprofit. It wasn’t going to miss a chance at free advertising, holiday theme be damned. We were all marching in the parade dressed as cats to promote the Lyric’s upcoming Internet Cat Video Festival. Someone donned a Nyan Cat costume, a piece of cardboard painted to look like a pink Pop-Tart, with rainbow streamers drooping out the back. The rest of us strung signs around our necks that said things like, “Nom nom nom” and “I can haz cheezburger.” Our entire motley crew of concessions volunteers was a walking Internet meme.

I can verify that not everyone in Blacksburg is familiar with the corpus of cat-themed Internet memes. For every spectator who yelled, “I don’t know, can you haz cheezburger?” there were five that squinted in bafflement. “What are you, anyway?” they called as we hustled past, flinging our candy canes willy-nilly.

By the end of the parade, I had a new theory: The crazier you act in loyalty to your place, the more attachment you build. Once I’d worn cat ears in front of ten thousand Blacksburgians, I had a stake not only in the Internet Cat Video Festival (to which I took Ella and Ruby the following day—wouldn’t miss it), but in the Lyric movie theater and the whole of Blacksburg.

In Minneapolis, I had met a twenty-five-year-old woman named Jennifer Prod. Over donuts and macaroons at the Wuollet Bakery, she told me the story of how she had moved to the Twin Cities a year earlier with her husband and basically become a professional volunteer. In addition to working with official charities like the Junior League, she developed a sideline doing what she called Random Acts of Happiness—like my birthday acts of kindness, but wackier and more creative.

Jennifer had balloons printed with encouraging messages she had written herself—“A day without you is like a morning without coffee,” or “Your smile made me forget my parking ticket”—and she tied them in random spots around town. She passed out homemade cookies on a street corner in honor of Thoreau’s birthday. One afternoon, she walked around downtown Minneapolis taping jokes to signs and planters, doozies like “What does a nosy pepper do? Gets jalapeño business.” Strangers started following her around to read the next one.

I asked her if doing her Random Acts of Happiness had made her love her city more. She thought about it a second, then said she didn’t think so. It wasn’t like she was doing those things because she wanted to like the city more. She was just doing them to be (Minnesota) nice. And yet she did love her adopted city, passionately so, and I couldn’t help thinking those Random Acts of Happiness were part of the reason why.

There are a million good reasons to volunteer, one of them being that “you don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one,” as urban activist Majora Carter has said. Falling in love with where you live is simply a side benefit.

Love Your City Checklist

Consider the things about your area that break your heart, like the homeless guy on the bench or the packs of teenagers you see shuffling around at loose ends. “Once you know where your grief lives,” says Kathy LeMay, author of The Generosity Plan, “you can lean into it,” using those feelings to guide your contributions. Or you can work to enhance the things that bring you joy, by volunteering for a gardening club, for instance, or starting an after-school ballroom dance program at the local YMCA.

Find a place to volunteer. Big cities offer endless variety, so it’s easy to find a match for your skills. Smaller towns often have their own volunteer centers. Or check a national website like VolunteerMatch.org or the local branch of the United Way to track down interesting opportunities.

Check your city’s website to see if your city government needs volunteers. The work (ahem, filing) might not be glamorous—or then again, it might (forensic work with the police). Bonus: You’ll develop a greater appreciation for where your tax money goes.

Perform random acts of kindness, either on a special day like your birthday or a day you’re bored. RandomActsofKindness.org lists dozens of ideas, which you can filter by cost or time investment. Other resources include Robyn Bomar’s TheBDayProject.com and Jen Prod’s website, StudioKindred.com, which includes details on more than fifty clever and very nice acts of happiness.

Donate. If it’s tough for you to give regularly, save change in a jar and let your family decide which local organization to donate to once it’s full. Touring the organization’s building or volunteering there will enhance the place attachment premium.

Give to a civic crowdfunding project. Find one at Kickstarter, ioby, or Citizinvestor.

Join or start a giving circle. GivingCircles.org spells out how to do it.