Editor's note: The article below originally appeared on the Larson Report as a From the Editor in December 2004.
If there is one indicator of the quality of life in any region that best defines it, it's volunteerism. And if there is one segment of life on Cape Cod that is at times overlooked as an essential underpinning of our community, it's the nonprofit sector. Although clearly recognized both as a provider of wide-ranging services to people and as an advocate of social concerns, the nonprofit sector is less often credited as a significant employer, purchaser of goods and services, and source of innovation and ideas. The sector includes hospitals, schools, chambers of commerce, youth groups, symphonies, choral groups, libraries, service clubs, environmental organizations, wildlife and animal protection groups, land trusts, think tanks, conservation groups, museums, art guilds, and many more organizations that make up the fabric of the life we live.
Each of us has volunteered at some time and in some capacity. Apart from the forty or so volunteers that support the operations of the Boys and Girls Club of Cape Cod, there are many more who assist the various youth teams and leagues that the club organizes. The Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School can call on more than three hundred volunteers to assist the programs of instruction, youth development, sports and music, and other activities that contribute to the mid-Cape community. And when you compile these numbers across the more than a thousand nonprofit organizations conservatively estimated to operate here, the number is staggering. It swells even more when you add to it the number of people who volunteer in the context of their houses of worship.
In preparing the two sustainability-indicator reports that the Cape Cod Center for Sustainability has published in the past ten years, we have relied almost exclusively on volunteer input. Furthermore, in the last few years, more than 150 volunteers have contributed their knowledge, experience, energy, advice, counseling, networking, technical expertise, and professional services to the center's efforts. And we're building our organization on this support.