ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the potential that especially serious and project-based leisure have for generating social capital through community involvement. It discusses the nonprofit sector, altruism, and volunteering as leisure, as the latter is manifested in serious, casual, and project-based form. The chapter focuses on care and community involvement. A broader sort of community involvement comes from pursuing volunteer activities, which may be enacted as serious, casual, or project-based leisure. This is the most common conception of “community involvement,” which is often discussed as “civil labor.” Moreover volunteer project-based leisure may be conceived of as civil labor. Project-based leisure has potential in at least two ways for building community. But, given that leisure lies at the heart of community involvement and that leisure also generates egocentric tendencies in some of its participants, selfishness presents a seemingly intractable moral problem for all concerned.
