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Thus, voluntary organizations are posited to benefit neighborhoods through two possible mechanisms: 1) providing social services that help residents and therefore reduce the number of potential offenders; and 2) providing a forum for social interaction that increases the social capital in a neighborhood as well as the sense of cohesion.A puzzle has emerged from the literature on voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime: although there are many reasons to expect voluntary organizations will reduce the amount of crime in neighborhoods, the empirical evidence of their benefits is surprisingly weak. Some studies have not only failed to find evidence that certain types of voluntary organizations facilitate efficacious neighborhood control and social action, but have even found evidence to suggest that some types of voluntary organizations are associated with higher crime rates (Groff and Lockwood 2014;Slocum et al. 2013; Wo In press). One commonality for these studies is that often they only capture the presence of a voluntary organization in a neighborhood, and thus one solution to this dilemma is that organizations might be more or less effective depending on 2 how long they have been established in a neighborhood. These patterns suggest a need to understand the timing of when organizations are effective (if at all) at reducing crime.In this paper, we argue for an approach that considers the dynamic nature of the voluntary organization and crime process in neighborhoods. As we note in the paper, there are at least four Although previous studies have considered the diversity of voluntary organizations in relation to crime (e.g., see Slocum et al. 2013), we are aware of no study that has examined how organizational age underlies this process. We argue that studies should take organizational age into account because it captures potential changes that voluntary organizations undergo as well as changes in the surrounding landscape, which in turn may have consequences for determining which voluntary organizations will be most effective in reducing crime. Accordingly, in this study, we do the following: 1) create age-graded measures of voluntary organizations, and also classify them by seven different types, to test their relationship with changes in crime within census blocks; 2) use longitudinal negative binomial fixed-effects models that focus on change within neighborhoods, rather than across neighborhoods; and 3) estimate these models on a sample of census blocks located across 10 U.S. cities, which provide us the statistical power to assess these relationships. The results demonstrate that voluntary organizations have differential effects on crime according to their age, with some types of organizations even showing both criminogenic and crime reducing effects over the life course. In comparison, a measure that mimics the most common approach in the literature-the total number of voluntary organizations regardless of how long they have been in operation-conceals the observed differential effects, thereby overe...

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