Charting the volunteering activities of U.S. workers
About 61.8 million people engaged in some type of volunteer activity at least once between September 2007 and September 2008, the U.S. Department of Labor reported. Fundraising and tutoring or teaching were the activities volunteers most frequently performed for their main volunteer organization.
The main activity volunteers performed for their main organization — the organization for which the volunteer worked the most hours during the year — was most frequently fundraising (11.4 percent of all volunteers) and tutoring or teaching (10.1 percent). Other frequent volunteer activities were collecting, preparing, distributing, or serving food (9.1 percent), and engaging in general labor or supplying transportation (9.0 percent.)
This data is from the Current Population Survey and were collected in the September CPS. For a variety of information on volunteering, see "Volunteering in the United States, 2008," (PDF) (HTML) news release, USDL 09-0078.