As the holiday season highlights acts of kindness and opportunities to give back, a new federal study shows that 1 in 4 South Carolina residents volunteered through an organization and two-thirds helped their neighbors last year.

The annual Volunteering and Civic Life in America research, released on December 16 by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), shows that service to others continues to be a priority for hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians.