Year of Volunteers

UBC Commission on Health and Social Affairs together with "Social Hansa" started a new project related to United Nations initiative for the year 2001 - the 'International Year of Volunteers'. With this decision the UN wishes to recognise the great importance of volunteers for the welfare and development of all nations.

The UN is aiming at four objectives:

• Increased Recognition of the voluntary sector to national welfare
• Increased Facilitation of volunteer action by governments, societies and institutions
• Improved Networking of volunteers; exchange of best practices and knowledge in order to increase the effectiveness of voluntary actions
• Promotion of Volunteer's Work to encourage people to participate in volunteer activities

We are sure that your city will have many activities during this year and that it could be of great value to summarise and to show best practices from UBC member cities. In order to get this information we elaborated a questionnaire. It has been published in our Bulletin on Health and Social Affairs and distributed to all UBC cities and many organisations. Next year, after evaluating the questionnaire, we intend to publish the results under the heading 'Volunteer work in the Baltic Sea Region -how people contribute with volunteer actions to the Social and health service'.

This information about the volunteer work in the BSR will be distributed to a wide public. Volunteers from many cities of our region will be given the possibility to show their individual understanding of voluntary work. We hope that in this way the volunteer actions will be enhanced and more people will ask themselves 'What can I personally do for a human society'? We cordially ask you to participate in the project and to send us the completed questionnaire by the 31 December 2000.