The Universal Declaration on Volunteering:
IAVE Members Share Your Views

IAVE’s vision is ‘a world where volunteering is recognized and supported as vital to creating a fair, peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.’ One of IAVE’s strategic goals is to provide a global voice that values and gives recognition to the important contribution of volunteers. IAVE is creating an advocacy framework that acknowledges volunteering as imperative to a healthy civil society. Central to this advocacy framework is IAVE’s Universal Declaration on Volunteering.

The current Declaration was launched at the IAVE World Volunteer Conference in 2001 as part of the UN International Year of Volunteers. Twenty-one years on IAVE still sees value in having a universal declaration that encapsulates, endorses and promotes the value of volunteering to individuals, organizations, and communities everywhere. It is IAVE’s intention to reinvigorate and  relaunch a new Universal Declaration on Volunteering at the 26^th World Volunteer Conference in Abu Dhabi 24^th – 27^th October 2022. This is an exciting challenge and a worthwhile undertaking; the world is in a constant state of flux and volunteering is not immune to change and sometimes transformation. It is important that we take a moment to reflect and restate the importance of every volunteer and their contribution to creating a better world.