History of volunteering
History of volunteering
Values as solidarity and mutual assistance resurfaced in 1920 as an antidote to the hate and horror of World War I. That summer, a group of Austrian, English, French, German and Swiss volunteers -- some of them former soldiers and thus ex-enemies -- set to work to rebuild a village near Verdun which had been destroyed in a battle that cost more than a million lives. From that very first international voluntary workcamp sprang the first modern voluntary service movement, an organization known by its French name and acronym, Service Civil International. S.C.I. soon had younger brothers and sisters as voluntary service spread in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time it was often seen as a means of building friendships among young people of different European countries. It was also used in countries as different as the U.S.A. and Bulgaria, during the severe economic crisis following 1929, as a means of giving unemployed young people something socially useful to do, as well as a bed and food. In 1934, S.C.I. sent four European volunteers to work with the poorest of the poor in India -- a pioneer team that was the ancestor to the British Volunteer Programme, US Peace Corps, Deutsche Entwiklungsdienst and other such North-to-South long-term volunteering actions, which in turn preceded the UN Volunteers programme.
World War II saw, in some democratic countries, volunteering take the place of military mobilization for conscientious objectors. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s young volunteers played an important part in the reconstruction of Europe, and the establishment of cross-border friendships, in projects that ranged from rebuilding central Warsaw and war-damaged villages in Western Europe to spanning Yugoslavia with the Bratstvo-Jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity) highway. [Thanks in good part to UNESCO and its Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service (created in 1948) volunteers from East and West were soon, albeit symbolically, jointly "rusting" the "Iron Curtain". Volunteers from East also traveled to the West. Emancipation from colonial rule gave birth to national volunteer movements throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. Some were tiny and fragile: in Nigeria, the Lagos Voluntary Workcamps Organization was so poor it couldn't afford postage stamps and its members delivered invitations to potential student volunteers on foot. Other operations were huge: in 1960, 15- to 18-year-old secondary school students formed the backbone of the volunteer force that virtually eliminated illiteracy in Cuba. Long-term volunteering to assist developing countries took off in the 1960s and with it soon came calls to depoliticize it. To ensure that volunteers not be used as T soldiers t in the Cold War, the creation of a U.N. corps of volunteers was advocated. Already in the 1950s, UNESCO had successfully used small teams of volunteers from the U.S.A. and Jordan at its regional adult education centres in the Arab States and Latin America. The 1970s dawned with the creation of the UN Volunteers programme. There are two very important aspects of the end-of-the-century history of volunteering. First is the resurgence of volunteering in the ex-Socialist countries. But a new kind of volunteering has emerged from the ruins, and has taken root in several countries, particularly in North-Eastern Europe, where the UNESCO- and EU-supported EASTLINKS Network forms a common denominator.
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