A few weeks ago, I became a card-carrying member of the Boulder Fitness Club. Well, no: There are no cards, really. But there certainly is a fitness club, in a former dance and gymnastic studio tucked behind The Gift Box in downtown Boulder. It offers a circuit of hydraulic resistance equipment, a few commercial-quality treadmills, a Bowflex gym — and all the Montana Public Television you can watch.
I love the story of how this little gem came to be. Back in 2005, a group of women friends from Boulder enjoyed a free visit together at a fitness club in Helena. “We said, we really need to do this more – but we don’t want to drive to Helena all the time,” recalls Connie Grenz, one of the five. They looked into getting a franchise for the club they had enjoyed, but there wasn’t one available.
So the women decided to create their own.
They pulled together a group of 15 Boulder folks, meeting at first at the Dairy Queen that used to be where The River now operates. Out of that group, five agreed to step up as co-signatories on a $10,000 loan that would pay for the club’s original equipment. They set up shop in an empty apartment in the building that now houses QRS Signs. And they got 21 residents to commit to joining, at $35 per month.
Since then, Grenz says, over 400 people have been trained to use the club’s machines. The club, which has moved twice, is organized as a 501(c)7 tax-exempt entity, with Grenz and three others, Shirley Vossler and Marilyn and Gary Craft, as directors. It’s open 24 hours, every day of the year.
I reflected on this saga as I read my colleague John Blodgett’s report last week about concerns that volunteerism in this community is in decline. Organizers of Boulder’s Fourth of July celebration said they may scale back this year’s activities for lack of manpower. County Fair Board Chair Terry Minow said a shortage of volunteers is “also an issue.” Duane Weinmeister of the Boulder Assembly of God Church reported that the number of hours most people serve the church as volunteers has dropped dramatically over the years.
The decline in volunteer service isn’t peculiar to Jefferson County. Last October, the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland produced a report analyzing data on volunteerism from the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. It found that the total number of hours volunteered is rising, but the percentage of Americans who volunteer at all is dropping – from 28.8% in 2003 to 24.9% in 2015, the most recent year for which data was available.
Montana has the eighth-highest volunteer participation rate in the nation, the federal Corporation for National and Community Service reports. (Utah is tops; Florida ranks lowest.) But its participation rate dropped six percentage points between 2003-05 and 2013-15, from 37.7% to 31.6%, according to the Do Good Institute research.
Why? Here’s where the Do Good study gets interesting. Its researchers examined the relationship between volunteerism and social capital – the extent to which people are connected and engaged in their communities. To their surprise, they found that the higher the historical level of social capital in a state, the greater the decline in its volunteer rate. Not only that, the declines in volunteerism tended to be greatest in rural states.
Montana ranks high in social capital. And it’s mostly rural. That puts places like Jefferson County in the sweet spot of a national trend. Exactly why that’s true hasn’t been well documented. Part of it probably connects to the challenges Robert Putnam identified in his 2000 book, “Bowling Alone”: shifts in demographics, technology, family structure, and work, he concluded, have conspired to weaken social capital. Putnam noted at the time that those factors hadn’t yet affected volunteerism. Two decades later, however, something more seems to have changed.
What the Do Good research doesn’t capture is informal volunteerism — day-to-day, often modest, typically unreported interactions between family, friends, or acquaintances. Since arriving here in December, I’ve heard stories of people plowing out their neighbors’ driveways unbidden and coming together to support a family whose home was damaged by fire. The Corporation for National and Community Service’s 2018 “Volunteering in America” report notes that 57.2% of Montanans say they do those sorts of favors for neighbors, well above the national average.
This under-the-radar service is an important part of the fabric of small communities. “That’s how a lot of things happen here,” Grenz says. It’s why we like each other. People who just visit don’t see that.”
Unfortunately, informal volunteers won’t organize kids’ games for Boulder’s Fourth of July celebration. They won’t run the recycling drive, or the community garden, or Habitat for Humanity home builds. It’s inspiring but not especially healthy that this community’s many, many civic organizations and committees are run by essentially the same small group of extremely engaged citizens. It’s also no secret that many of those energetic leaders are aging.
On the other hand, when I looked in on Saturday’s terrific “Rock the Baldrick” fundraiser in Montana City, I saw plenty of younger people, including many kids, wearing blue volunteer t-shirts. There weren’t many grey hairs among the crew that organized Boulder’s “Ballin’ in Big Rock” charity basketball tournament over the weekend. The school board candidates who you’ll meet on pages 8 and 9 of this issue may represent an emerging generation of civic leadership – fueled in part, as Grenz observes, by young parents who grew up in the county and have recently returned.
So, there’s good reason for hope.
Meanwhile, the Boulder Fitness Club is accepting new members. It’s still $35 a month, 14 years later, and they’ve just bought a new treadmill, rowing machine, and recumbent stepper. So feel free to call now. And while you’re at it, consider joining the board. They could use the help.
