Seattle Residents Do Lots of Good

We catch some flack around the Seattlest newsroom for being too snarky sometimes and felt like we should trumpet some of the pride we honestly do feel about our city. It's hard not to love this place what with our staggeringly cool views, great live music scene and vociferous yet generally congenial civic debate. Now we can add generous service for the public good to that list.

In a new report released by the Corporation for National and Community Service, Seattle ranked fourth in volunteering and we logged the third highest number of volunteer hours among the 50 largest cities in the country. Our 35.5 percent volunteering rate, thanks to 932,000 volunteers serving 123.2 million hours per year, contributed $2.4 billion annually to the area's economy.

Great job, people!

Compared to last year's report, the city moved up one spot in both of the rankings, though the percentage of people who volunteered fell slightly. We could take the easy way out and blame that on the economy, but we prefer the reasons given by the study:

Metropolitan areas with shorter commutes to work also tend to have higher volunteer rates. Nationally, the average time spent commuting to work is 25.1 minutes. In Seattle, the average commuting time is 27.1.

Two minutes may not seem like a lot, but according to last year's report, if the average commute time in all 50 of the cities increased by three minutes, national volunteer rates would drop by 2.3 points.

Taking the top spot in the report was Minneapolis/St. Paul with a whopping 39.3 percent volunteering rate, followed by Salt Lake City and Portland. Rounding out the top five is Austin. Washington ranked 13th among the 50 states and DC.

Resource Recovery at the Seattle Green Festivals shows a bunch of volunteers learning what can and can't be recycled at this year's Seattle Green Festival (volunteering at next year's would be a good way to add to next year's volunteer total). Thanks for putting it in our Flickr pool, chip py the photo guy.