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Notes -
Anecdotal, but this was my experience with a decent variety of in-person volunteering (food banks, soup kitchens, summer camps for troubled teens and for mentally disabled, habitat for humanity, special olympics, etc) in the cities I spent my high school through early career years (pops ranging from around ~.5 mil to 1 mil).
For basically all of those, there were either decently long waiting lists, make-work (i.e assigning multiple people to perform a task easily performed by just one) or both. Also similar impression of the people I was helping- I do not believe that was because those cities lacked the truly destitute or the profoundly handicapped, just that they weren't who I was dealing with as an uncredentialled volunteer.
Honestly my experiences with volunteering in my younger years have led me to focus on the near (friends, family, immediate co-workers, same-block neighbors) and the far (malaria nets, etc) for giving. The middle seems saturated.
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