Volunteer Awareness Week 2011
The theme for this year "Volunteering - every minute counts!" highlights that volunteers provide an invaluable contribution to our society and that every minute of their contribution counts for something.
For those who manage / organise / mobilise volunteers this means that consideration is needed in how to be more flexible in engaging and involving volunteers so as to enable everyone possible - even the busiest - the opportunity to volunteer.
For everyone who is , or is considering, volunteering this means that every moment they are contributing to their communities through voluntary action has value and counts towards making a difference.
Counting the volunteers the world counts on
The International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies announced the release of a new manual to help statistical agencies around the world track the amount, type and value of volunteer work in their countries.
The manual, drafted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies in cooperation with the ILO and an International Technical Experts Group, and with the support of the United Nations Volunteers, represents the first-ever internationally sanctioned guidance to statistical agencies for generating reliable, official data on volunteer work using a common definition and approach.
Completion of this manual coincides with the 10th anniversary of the 2001 United Nations International Year of Volunteers (IYV), which called on governments to improve their measurement of volunteer work. It also coincides with the launch of IYV+10 and of the 2011 European Year of Volunteering.
The new ILO manual provides a consensus definition of volunteer work and a cost-effective way to measure its overall scale and economic value using existing statistical systems. The manual was approved in concept at the 18th International Conference of Labour Statisticians in November 2008 convened by the ILO, a specialized agency of the United Nations, and a final draft was cleared by an international Technical Experts Group in October 2010. The ILO expects to issue a printed version of the manual in several months. The final approved pre-publication version of the Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work is available at the <a href="http://www.ccss.jhu.edu/index.php?section=content&view=9&sub=12&tri=106" target="_blank">Johns Hopkins website</a>.
