Leaders in volunteerism look to the future of service in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY — "I've learned to listen; I've learned to observe. I've learned not to judge and forgiveness, and those are elements I practice every day because I need to know and understand and feel for whoever I am with, because they have a story too that I need to hear," said former national Peace Corps director Jody Olsen Wednesday as she reflected on a life of volunteerism.

During a panel hosted by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, Olsen shared how her years of service and volunteering — in Africa and Asia and the Pacific, in places like Tunisia and Togo — have impacted her and why she wants to help inspire more young people to get involved in service.

Wednesday's panel focusing on volunteerism and civic engagement is a part of the institute's monthly newsmaker breakfast series. Alongside Olsen, the panel also featured Loggins Merrill, director of UServeUtah, and Shireen Ghorbani, a former Salt Lake County councilwoman. The institute's director, Natalie Gochnour, moderated the panel.

Olsen, who was born in Utah and studied at the University of Utah, served as a leader in the Peace Corps for years and was the 20th director of the Peace Corps from 2018 to 2021. Among many other accomplishments, Olsen opened a Peace Corps program in Vietnam, led HIV AIDS mitigation in Africa and also led the evacuation of Peace Corps volunteers around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Out of all 50 states, Utah ranks the highest in volunteerism based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau and from the Office of Research in AmeriCorps. Merrill, a Utah native, shared that Utah has ranked No. 1 in volunteerism since it started being tracked in 2002. Merrill leads UServeUtah, the state's commission on service and volunteerism, which was started 30 years ago.

Gochnour added that in 2023, 46.6% of Utahns formally volunteered.

Inspiring young people to get involved in service

One focus of the panel was getting the younger generation more into service. Olsen shared that recently she has been speaking with college students and other young people in an effort to understand how to get them more involved in service. Many young people don't get involved because they don't feel that they can make a difference, and they're scared of the world they live in.

After speaking to some students at the University of Minnesota, she asked them what they needed to be more engaged in service and volunteering.

"They said, 'We need your stories. We need your mentorship, and we need heroes,'" Olsen said.

Olsen said she realized that society is destroying some heroes, and young people need examples, they need stories and they need heroes to inspire them to be involved and engaged.

She said it is so important for people with experience to mentor the next generation and share stories and help them know what they can do and the impact they can have. The advice works with anyone who is nervous about getting involved.

"Putting ourselves in the shoes and the minds and the thoughts of those that are more nervous and showing the way, and more than showing, being the way for others, is so key," Olsen said.

Ghorbani, who also served in the Peace Corps, echoed what Olsen said about being an example and added that sharing what you're doing to serve and what it looks like can be very helpful. She recently has been using social media to invite people to serve with her at different places and has received many questions about what it looks like and details of what people would actually experience as a volunteer for specific things.

As she has started answering these questions and helping people better understand what they're getting into, she has seen more people join her in service.

"We can invite people into practice of engaging in some of these more difficult spaces or unknown spaces, if they have that person who's willing to kind of take their hand and lead them through it," Ghorbani said.

She also encouraged those who are nervous about serving to find someone to be their guide.

"If you can find that person that's going there, that is there, and if they can help you, or if you can just ask, 'I'd like to do this, but here are the things I am nervous about,' that's reasonable," Ghorbani said. "It's difficult to engage in some of these most difficult failures in our society, but it is also possible."

Change starts with our neighbors

The panelists all emphasized that making a difference is something that starts in our own communities and our own neighborhoods.

"If we don't understand our neighbors, if we don't understand the challenges that they have, if we're unwilling to have conversations on our own street, organize our own community, it gets really hard to figure out how to push back or be effective in this broader context," Ghorbani said. "We have to be working together to understand the needs in our community."

Working together with our neighbors and communities is also important to help people become more involved. Merrill shared that one of the biggest barriers to getting involved is not knowing what to do or where to go. But you can invite your neighbors and those around you to join you in service. It helps strengthen communities and gets more people serving.

Olsen emphasized that a major part of this civic engagement is trust, specifically highlighting when she served in the Peace Corps in different countries.

"I had to trust strangers, I had to learn language, I had to give myself away into a community that was a strange community, but through that experience was trust. I trusted; they trusted. They gave me more of themselves. I gave them more of myself."

Merrill added that service is about connection and finding a way to build connections with others.

"Find a way in how you connect in your community, what is important to you, and go and stand up and do it, be a piece of it," he said. "So find a way to connect that human to human connection, no matter what it is that you're doing."

Changes being made to service and volunteering at a federal level

The panelists also addressed the challenges that those in service and volunteerism are facing due to federal funding cuts to nonprofits and organizations like USAID.

"It is an interesting time that we live in right now, and there's a lot of things coming at us very quickly and very fast right now in our field," Merrill said.

He added that so far he is not sure how national decisions will impact UServeUtah and other service organizations in the state, but they are preparing for whatever shifts or changes may come.

Ghorbani said it is important for individuals and those at the state level to continue to stay engaged and to show up and serve.

"If the federal government is not going to show up, I think we really have to ask ourselves if the state, if we live in a state that is willing to show up," Ghorbani said.

All the panelists emphasized the humanity that comes with civic engagement and serving others and how important it is for us to preserve that humanity. Olsen quoted former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who said that the strongest asset of the U.S. is humanity, empathy and being present to help others.

"It's our humanity, it's our connection, is what our biology is as to who we should be as people, that's now being lost," Olsen said.

Olsen finished with three invitations: to find one moment of joy in each day; to find one word of gratitude every day; and to think everyday "when you put your head on the pillow, can you say to yourself, I made a difference somehow, somewhere."

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