ABSTRACT
A major American growth area over the past 10 to 20 years is not even recorded in the economic figures: the ‘Third Sector’, comprising nonprofit, nongovernmental community services – both national and local, secular and religious.
About 2.5 million volunteers work for the American Heart Association – a 50 percent increase in three years.
The Girl Scouts enrol one in four American girls between the ages of six and nine. While the number of school-age girls in the U.S. has dropped by one-fifth in the past 20 years, Girl Scout membership has remained the same – a little short of 2.5 million. And while the organization used to be disproportionately white 20 years ago, it now enrols proportionately just as many black girls of elementary-school age as it does white ones.
Local ‘pastoral’ churches — Protestant and Catholic, evangelical and mainstream – that focus on the needs and concerns of their individual members, particularly those of the baby-boom generation, are growing even faster than the large national nonprofit organizations. There are now at least 10,000 181such churches with memberships of 2,000 or more – twice the number of such churches 10 years ago.
