Connie Midey
The Arizona Republic
October 4, 2008

Arizona home to many generous volunteers

It's Friday, Judie Agee's day off, but you'd never know it.

She's busy coordinating Project Linus' next deliveries of blankets to seriously ill kids, burn victims and others in need of comfort.

That night, her husband, Steve Thomas, will be displaying rescued birds of prey at an educational event for the non-profit The Fountain Hills couple are volunteers, among the nearly four in 10 Arizonans who give time to charitable organizations, according to the "Arizona Giving and Volunteering" study from the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation.

"We do very well in terms of how many hours we volunteer and how much money we give," said Carlton Yoshioka, Lodestar Center director of academic affairs.

Almost six in 10 state residents donate money, he said.

Study results are based on a telephone survey of 1,100 households conducted in 2007 and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

In Arizona, the study discovered, volunteers spend an average of 4.9 hours a week performing community service, most often with youth groups (21.1 percent) and religion-based groups (19.5 percent).

The survey found that donors statewide give an average of $2,018 annually, mostly to non-profits that meet community members' basic needs (42.1 percent) and to churches and other religion-affiliated groups (40.6 percent).

Contribution figures are for formal giving, or donations reported on income-tax returns, rather than informal, direct giving to relatives or friends.

Remarkably, the doers and the givers often are the same people, Yoshioka said.

"The people who do both - about 28 percent of those surveyed - are fairly typical," he said. "They are high givers but also very involved in helping agencies by volunteering."

Agee and Thomas assist one another in their volunteer work, transporting rescued birds to the Wild at Heart rehabilitation center in Cave Creek and filling every corner of their house with blankets awaiting delivery.

"My husband jokingly calls it my other part-time job," Agee said, referring to the Phoenix-East Valley chapter of Project Linus (www.phoenix pl.org) that she started in 1998.

She coordinates the work of about 700 volunteers, who have made and delivered more than 19,000 blankets since the chapter's founding, and she has learned that many work for multiple organizations.

"One does rescue work for stray dogs," Agee said. "Another takes her dog to visit patients in hospitals. That's just the way they are."