International Volunteer Day is our great opportunity to renew our covenant with goodness, and with the bits of forgiveness and love that we carry in our hearts. So, We thank you for those efforts.
Volunteering is the contribution of time, effort, and talent to a need, cause, or task without financial gain. Volunteering is all about being able to dedicate some of your time to helping people in our communities.
Volunteers support and add to our communities in their unique way using a variety of skills, knowledge, and experience. [1]
International Volunteer Day (IVD) is mandated by the United Nations General Assembly every year on December 5th. It is a unique opportunity for volunteers and voluntary organizations to celebrate their efforts, share their values, and promote their work among their local communities, NGOs, UN agencies, government authorities, and the private sector.
Aside from mobilizing thousands of volunteers each year, The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) program contributes to peace and development by advocating for volunteer recognition and working with partners to integrate volunteerism into development programming. The UNV program coordinates International Volunteer Day on December 5th each year to recognize and promote hard work. Not only for UN volunteers but for volunteers all over the world.
Every day, volunteers dedicate time and effort to ensure that those who are often forgotten and left behind are included, advancing climate action and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). [2]
Volunteering is an important part of creating a more equal and inclusive future for societies around the world. In fact, sustainable development cannot be achieved without people’s participation.
Therefore, encouraging, recognizing, and promoting volunteerism will undoubtedly facilitate the attainability of the SDGs. [3]
Because volunteer work:
Whether you are a student, a fresh graduate, or even an employee looking for a change or something to help you build a career in a new field of work, volunteering is the key to all of this. Volunteering can open doors for you and provide you with an opportunity. It also broadens your horizons to achieve your goals and build the career path you seek.
Volunteering can give you experience in your area of interest and the opportunity to meet people who specialize in your field. Volunteering allows you to practice important skills used in the workplace, such as teamwork, communication skills, problem-solving, project planning, and time management.
Volunteering gives humanity a reason to continue and gives you a reason to live. Volunteering allows you to support the lives of others in the hardships and all the troubles they are going through to help them live another day. When you see all of that, you become thankful for the life you have as you start to see that your problems are not as important as you thought, and thus you become grateful for the life that has been given to you. It makes you a better person mentally and physically. Volunteering provides many benefits in the field of mental and physical health.
Volunteering increases self-confidence and raises self-esteem and self-satisfaction. Your role as a volunteer can give you a sense of pride, belonging, and identity. Reducing the risk of depression is another important benefit of volunteering, as it keeps you in constant contact with others and helps you develop a strong support system.
Volunteering can help you stay healthy, depending on the frequency of movement and the practice of various activities, which contributes greatly to maintaining your health in general. [4]
The journey of change begins with an individual. Your participation in volunteer work, even in its simplest form, may inspire the closest people to you, such as your family and friends, to start their volunteer journey. Similarly, they can inspire those they know to start their volunteer journey. And so on until the idea of volunteering is transferred from one individual to another so that it becomes the culture of a society and an entire generation. [5]
The National Award for Voluntary Work aims to consolidate and enhance the concepts and practices of sustainable volunteer work, and its positive effects on society, sectors, and individuals, to contribute to achieving one of the goals of Vision 2030, to reach one million volunteers with the goal of encouraging volunteer work in the National Transformation Program. [6]
And because we, in the Uplifting Syrian Women initiative, seek to inspire people to advance their communities. We call for volunteering because of its goals that benefit the volunteers and society alike. To have a society that rises with the cooperation and cohesion of its members.
♀️ Uplifting Syrian Women Initiative aims at sustainable peace building in Syria through targeting women and providing them with free online courses, workshops, discussion sessions and trainings, with a view to achieving the goals of Gender Equality, Quality Education and Decent Work and Economic Growth, which all fall into the interest of society as a whole and serve the purpose of rebuilding it.
Also read:
References:
[1] Swan
[3] UNDP
[4] Marefa
[5] Nahno
[6] HRSD
[7] UN