A new ranking shows Kansas is in the top 10 states when it comes to volunteering.
Kansas is 7th out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, having more than 688,000 residents who volunteered last year. According to the annual Volunteering and Civic Life in America ranking from the Corporation for National and Community Service, 31 percent of Kansans say they did some volunteer work in 2015.
Nola Brown, executive director of Volunteer Kansas, says volunteering comes naturally to the state’s residents.
"People in Kansas just have caring hearts," she says. "When there’s something that needs to be taken care of, they raise their hands, they roll up their sleeves, and they get in there and help each other."
The state fell two spots in the rankings from a year before, however. Brown says Kansans help out in ways that they might not even consider "volunteering."
"Whenever you watch the neighbor's kids so that they can run an errand, or you teach a Sunday school class, that's volunteering," she says. "And it's just second nature to people in Kansas, so oftentimes they don't think about it in those terms."
Kansans did almost 77 million hours of volunteer service in 2015, about 6 million more than in 2014.
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