What inspired you to write this book?

What images come to mind when you think of a disaster? Search and rescue teams pulling people from the rubble? Relief camps filled with displaced families receiving aid from international organizations? These are the typical images we see in the media. However, they misrepresent the reality that the vast majority of people are rescued and helped by their fellow community members after a disaster.

Tshepiso steps back and admires his handiwork. As part of his contribution to Mandela Day, he has painted the interior walls of a corrugated iron shack that serves as a crèche for young children in an informal settlement in Johannesburg. In the spirit of ubuntu, he regularly ferries his elderly parents, aunts and uncles to hospital or assists them with shopping. Just last weekend he repaired a broken kitchen cabinet door for his neighbour, Mrs Potts.

Volunteering is difficult to define and measure in a way that is comparable across borders or cultures. When volunteering has been measured, the focus has largely been on organization-based volunteering, rather than volunteering performed spontaneously and directly between people. Many stakeholders fail to recognize the importance of measuring volunteering, especially irregular volunteering, mainly due to the cost and the diffi­culties of getting a representative sample.

In conditions where policies and legislation successfully create a nurturing and enabling environment for volunteering, people are endowed with stronger protections and incentives to engage in voluntary action. When carefully designed and implemented, volunteer schemes can empower people to participate in their own communities to meet development objectives. 

Earlier this year, we launched our social integration strategy. Based on considerable research, it sets out a new definition of social integration – emphasizing that it is about more than simply the degree of contact between people but also includes promoting equality and improving people’s levels of activity and participation in their local communities. But encouraging social integration is a meaningless exercise unless people are provided with opportunities to come together. Volunteering does just that.

By far the best part of my job is meeting volunteers. On Wednesday, I met Joseph. He is from Nigeria and a volunteer in Sierra Leone, as part of the Economic Commission of West African states (ECOWAS) Volunteer Programme (EVP), the first regional Volunteer scheme in the world. Joseph Uzaka Munoye is a basic Science teacher at the oldest secondary school in the country, called Anna Walsh, since September 2017. He didn’t hide his appreciation that the joint ECOWAS-UNV team was paying him a courtesy visit to see how his assignment was going.

In 1999, two large humanitarian crises were unfolding: Kosovo and East Timor. The United Nations was tasked to support local authorities in both places to establish administrative and governance structures.

Kamilia Lahrichi (France) served as a UN Volunteer Associate Public Information Officer with UNHCR in France. With her professional background in journalism, Kamilia’s responsibility included developing communication strategies, producing web articles, press releases, reports and visual content for UNHCR France’s website and social media, as well as disseminating information to the media to promote a better understanding of UNHCR’s work in the country.

  *** Xinzhuang is in Changping District of Beijing. Located at the foot of the Yanshan Mountains, this area has about 2,000 residents, 60% of whom are non-locals. The “newcomers” settle here to take their children to a local school. The rest of the population are mostly farmers, as the village is one of the main suppliers of strawberries to Beijing.  Xinzhuang village is a typical rural community with basic public services for waste and sanitation. But things changed after an incident in the village.