Deadline: 16 December 2019
UNV is establishing an opportunity for qualified individuals or institutions to develop and showcase approaches to modelling the economic and/or social contributions of volunteer work that governments and policy-makers may consider and apply in the context of the SDGs.
Applicants participate in this Innovation Challenge and share their ideas on measuring the economic and social contributions of volunteer work.
UNV is based in Bonn, Germany, with around 150 staff members at headquarters, and 6,500 volunteers deployed in the field. UNV also has an Office in New York, five Regional Offices in Amman, Bangkok, Dakar, Nairobi and Panama City and around 60 Field Units that represent the organization at the country level. Olivier Adam (France) is their Executive Coordinator.
Meeting the ambitions of the 2030 Agenda requires the efforts of all of society. Everywhere, every day, ordinary people are acting on the issues that they care about. Over one billion active volunteers are carrying out a wide range of roles, from providing care and support to neighbours, extending basic services to under-served areas, campaigning for policy change, or building new relationships across polarized communities.
Measuring the scale and scope of volunteering is important, and UNV has been working with ILO since 2017 to strengthen tools and systems to generate official statistics. Figures like these remind us that achieving the sustainable development goals is a joint effort. For example, in Mongolia, 4 million volunteer hours are contributed per year at a value of 5.5 billion Tugrik, in the UK the health service relies on 78,000 volunteers providing 13 million volunteer hours per year, to name just a couple of examples.
This Open Innovation Challenge therefore seeks ideas of how to apply existing data and research on volunteering to the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, to help better understand:
- Analytical approaches: What are some potential qualitative and quantitative analytical frameworks or models that could help understand the contributions of volunteers at community, district, municipal or national level to the Sustainable Development Goals?
- Alternative data sources: What are some freely available data sources that can be combined to provide insights or analysis on volunteerism and how would this be done?
- Measures: Which supplementary indicators or targets could better integrate an understanding of citizen contributions under specific SDG goals, targets or indicators?
- Models of development: can analytical models incorporating volunteering tell us more about the nature and quality of human development?
Under this Innovation Challenge (Stage I), UNV expects to form partnerships with 6-8 applicants to create and develop possible approaches to the above questions. Selected innovators will produce a 5,000-word paper including diagrams and infographics and will participate in Innovation Challenge activities as part of a community of practice.
Objectives and expected outputs/ Deliverables
The overarching objective of the Innovation Challenge is to share innovative ideas and approaches that use volunteer work data and evidence to reflect on particular policy issues and to raise interest among policymakers, and to increase demand for volunteer work particularly in those geographical regions where coverage is low.
- Due to time constraints, papers produced under this call should use secondary data sources (e.g. existing national statistics, published research or existing organizational or other data) to develop methodologies for, but not limited to:
- Interrogating current and relevant national or sub-national statistical models and theories on priority issues such as reducing employment, eradicating violence, improving service coverage, by integrating existing data and evidence on volunteer work.
- Researching other relationships/correlations between volunteer work and its contribution to specific development goals and targets including via intermediary factors (such as social innovation) drawing on a range of data sources.
- Looking at how measurement of volunteer work can strengthen broader human well-being and development models ‘beyond GDP’.
- Further developing or sharing models regarding the economic and social contribution of volunteers, beyond replacement market value to include current and future benefits to volunteers, to target populations and to wider communities and societies.
- Providing feasible policy recommendations based on methodologies and findings to strengthen systems to enable better estimation of the impact or contribution of volunteer efforts, including possibilities of relevant SDG indicators relating to volunteer work.
- Any other proposed approach or methodology on the value of volunteer work that could be of use to public-policy-makers in the context of the 2030 Agenda.
Budget Information
- Join a dynamic community of practice to share ideas and provide challenge through the study development process.
- All selected innovators will have their work published by UNV, including on the global Knowledge Hub on Volunteerism.
- Based on the final submissions by the innovators, two contributors will be awarded a further USD 15,000 to pilot their idea in relation to one context (country/community) by the end of 2020.
- Based on progress by May 2020, one innovator may be selected to participate in the Global Technical Meeting on Volunteering in July 2020 at the High-Level Political Forum on the SDGs in New York (maximum 2 representatives).
Eligibility Criteria
- The eligible applicants include any individual or organization (public or private) that can demonstrate relevant expertise in volunteerism research and measurement or a related field (governance, social development).
- Collaboration/partnerships under one proposal are possible, however UNV will only be able to issue one agreement with one individual and/or responsible legal entity per proposal and additional internal arrangements must be made by innovators.
- Organizations or institutions must identify the lead personnel who will be involved in the development of the paper in their proposal.
For more information, visit https://www.unv.org/News/Applying-innovation-volunteering-research-Can-you-contribute