Volunteer work is a crucial renewable resource for social and environmental problem-solving the world over. Despite the contributions that volunteer work makes both to the volunteers themselves and to the beneficiaries of their generosity, however, little sustained effort has gone into the measurement of the scope, scale, or distribution of such work.  What efforts have been made to measure volunteer work have been sporadic and frequently uncoordinated, leaving us without up-to-date, reliable data on the scope of this important social and economic phenomenon. With these facts in mind, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in 2001 calling on member governments to “enhance the knowledge base” on volunteering and to support efforts to “measure” its contributions.  The Secretary General reiterated this call in his 18 July 2005 report to the General Assembly on the Follow-Up to the International Year of the Volunteers.

In April 2007, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies (JHU/CCSS) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding under which ILO authorized JHU/CCSS to produce a draft of a possible ILO Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work through official labour force surveys and a draft Volunteer Measurement Survey Module.  Both documents will be presented for discussion at the 18th International Conference of Labour Statisticians scheduled to convene in Geneva, Switzerland in 24 November to 5 December 2008.

A copy of the press release announcing the JHU/ILO partnership is available here.

As part of the process of developing this Manual, JHU/CCSS agreed to work with a Technical Experts Group (TEG) composed of labor force statisticians and volunteering experts chosen jointly by ILO and JHU/CCSS.  The charge to this TEG was to provide expert advice and input regarding:

• The definition of volunteer work and its characteristics;
• The treatment of volunteer work in the measurement of economic activity;
• The measurement of the volume of volunteer work and its characteristics through labour force surveys;
• The methodology for valuation of volunteer work;
• The design of a Manual for the measurement of volunteer work; and
• The testing of volunteer work measurement through household-based surveys in selected countries.

The first meeting of this TEG took place at ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on 4-6 July 2007.  The report from this meeting is available here.

A draft of the proposed module was circulated to the TEG in December 2007.  This document is available here. The TEG’s responses to the draft module will be available soon.