International Volunteer Day Seminar
While volunteer work is an important channel for providing social service and promoting community betterment, many feel that the concept of volunteerism is not sufficiently familiar in Turkey and its potential benefits are not widely enough recognized. Volunteer organizations must therefore make an extra effort to explain their goals and attract more people to participate in social service projects. For this reason, the Bilkent student volunteer organization TDP (Toplumsal Duyarlılık Projeleri/Social Awareness Projects) and the United Nations Volunteers program (UNV) organized a seminar on the occasion of the UN's International Volunteer Day, December 7.
At the event, guest speakers Niyazi İlter, Ebru İnanç, Yörük Kurtaran, İbrahim Demirel, Oğuzhan Saçma and Ulla Gronlund from UNV discussed the value of volunteer work.
In the introduction to the seminar, Nilsu Atılgan, co-coordinator of TDP, answered three questions: "What is volunteering? Why is it important? What do we gain from it?" During the first part of the panel that followed, the speakers talked about their experiences in volunteer work.
The final speaker was Ulla Gronlund from UNV, who provided information about the background of International Volunteer Day and the purpose of UNV. She noted that although International Volunteer Day was first celebrated in 1985, it was more of a local activity to begin with. By 2001, the International Year of Volunteers, the celebration had gained a higher profile and was internationally observed. "Considering that volunteer work was new to a lot of people in the world, this was an incredible accomplishment," said Ms. Gronlund. She summarized the purpose of UNV as making volunteerism more visible, and offered the following insight: "Volunteering is not only about doing something important but is also a great contribution to society as a whole."