Volunteers and COVID-19: How Volunteers Help Build Back Better during the Pandemic to Achieve the 2030 Agenda

COVID-19 has highlighted how the one-billion volunteers globally are helping communities respond to the pandemic. How has volunteering changed during the pandemic?  What were volunteers’ experiences and motivations during these times? How can volunteers contribute to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and building forward better to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals? And what do volunteers expect from the ways citizens and states work together to address the most pressing development challenges?

Brief background

UNV is partnering with the Volunteer Groups Alliance (VGA) to hold a virtual side event on Tuesday 6 July 2021 at 1.00 pm EDT or 7.00 pm CEST on the theme of “Volunteers and COVID-19: How volunteers help build back better during the pandemic to achieve the 2030 Agenda” at the 2021 High-level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development.

Event objectives

This virtual side event will share research findings from a recent UNV-Gallup survey on volunteering during COVID-19, coupled with the real-life experience of volunteer organizations and governments around the world to learn more about how volunteers can contribute to sustainable and resilient recovery from the pandemic. In addition, the side event will provide insights on the role volunteering can play in the way citizens and states work together to achieve the 2030 Agenda, and inform UNV’s State of the World’s Volunteerism Report on volunteering and the new social contract.

? Please register here. 

?Back to the UNV Knowledge Portal.

Knowledge about volunteering and its practices, dynamics, benefits and challenges, is spread across many stakeholders around the world. To improve the integration of volunteerism in the 2030 Agenda and leverage it’s transformative power, decision-makers, volunteering stakeholders and development practitioners need specific types of knowledge to inform policy and practice. The UNV Knowledge Portal on Volunteerism contains global, regional and national data and evidence on volunteerism and was launched in July 2020. The portal covers different areas of evidence: comparable cross-country information via the volunteering database; deeper dives into thematic and context-specific issues (especially improving the accessibility of evidence produced in the global South) through evidence library; and spaces to deepen knowledge-sharing among stakeholders via knowledge exchange.