Starkville, more than any other city in Mississippi, has the volunteering spirit.
The city had more than 25,000 recorded volunteer engagements in 2015, according to data recently released by volunteer centers across the state. That means there were 25,000 instances when someone took time to volunteer at an event or for a non-profit.
Oxford had the second highest number, with around 12,000 volunteer engagements.
Columbus had the fourth highest number, with just over 5,000 volunteer engagements.
Jamey Bachman, executive director of Volunteer Starkville, told The Dispatch on Wednesday there are many reasons for the high number. One of those is that Starkville may simply be reporting high numbers. Bachman has been at Volunteer Starkville for three and a half years, which has given her time to cultivate relationships with the non-profits she’s responsible for getting volunteer data from.
“You have to have a really trusting relationship with that non-profit,” she said. “They need to understand that you’re not claiming their numbers…it’s taken me a little while to build rapport with our nonprofits in town to kind of get them to understand the importance of us being able to report these numbers in our community volunteer report so we can communicate those on the state level and then the state can communicate those at the federal level.”
Volunteer Starkville sends a report to area nonprofits every month asking for the month’s numbers. At the end of every quarter, if there is a nonprofit that has not reported to them, someone at Volunteer Starkville calls that nonprofit and gets the numbers from it over the phone.
“When we started adding that phone call in every quarter, we saw a drastic increase in the numbers we were able to report,” Bachman said. “Simply because it was another reminder for that nonprofit (to say), ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve had this many volunteers and this many hours served at our organization over the last quarter’.”
She also credits Mississippi State University and particularly the university’s Maroon Volunteer Center, which coordinates volunteer efforts among students, faculty and staff. That’s something Oxford doesn’t have.
Additionally, Starkville has an active retired population that gets involved in volunteer work, she said. One such volunteer is Dalton Anthony who moved from Tupelo to Starkville in November 2014 and immediately tried to find a place to volunteer.
Anthony retired early after working in public education for 35 years as a teacher and administrator. He volunteered at the Salvation Army in Oxford for five years, then moved to Tupelo where he volunteered at the library for 10 years.
“A lot of people like myself don’t like to sit around,” Anthony said. “We can’t sit around. If you’ve been active all your life, the television and the recliner is not as attractive to some people as to others, and I’m not one of those people…I need to be out doing something.”
After moving to Starkville, Anthony contacted Bachman who led him to the Oktibbeha County Heritage Museum. When that didn’t keep Anthony quite busy enough, she suggested he go to the Noxubee Refuge Center. In June, Anthony became the volunteer manager of the Noxubee Nature Store, which would have closed down if it didn’t have a volunteer running it. Anthony rearranged the store, cleaned it, ordered new products and began manning it three days a week. At the end of the year, the store had made more money than it had the previous two years combined.
“Because the store was open,” Anthony said. “Not because I was there, but because the store was open. It could have been anybody.”
Like Bachman, Anthony credits Starkville’s student population, but he also says he has met a lot of volunteers who are just enthusiastic about getting involved in the community.
“It’s just sort of in the air, so to speak,” he said.
The Noxubee Refuge Center is one of the biggest volunteer outlets in the community, Bachman said. That, she added, along with Starkville being the base for the Chase a Dream Foundation and the city’s especially active Habitat for Humanity, is another reason for Starkville’s high numbers.
Starkville’s numbers are no surprise to Candy Crecink, executive director of United Way of North Central Mississippi. Crecink said she noticed a spirit of volunteerism after she moved to Starkville from Jackson ten years ago.
“I was quickly aware of a special, special something about Starkville,” she said.
In Starkville, people on the street will ask you how you are, she said. Strangers will help each other out and nonprofits come together to meet needs in the community.
“There’s the most genuine, pure sense of care and concern for their fellow beings,” she said.
A total of 71,000 volunteers served nearly 500,000 hours in 2015, according to the 2015 Mississippi Volunteer Center Results. The majority of those volunteer hours were spent in helping with issues of hunger and homelessness, education and children/family services.
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