Volunteerism benefits both society at large and the individual volunteer by strengthening trust, solidarity and reciprocity among citizens, and by purposefully creating opportunities for participation.

[4] A United Nations Volunteers initiative was proposed in a speech at Harvard University on June 13, 1968, by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi[5] and UNV was established 1970 by the UN General Assembly.

[12] UN Volunteers help to organize and run local and national elections and support a large number of peacekeeping and humanitarian projects.

Field Units and Post-2015 International UN Youth Volunteers supported all six dialogues in several countries, contributing to and conducting local, national and global events and workshops to ensure stakeholders' voices were heard, good practices shared and concrete opportunities identified.

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), people's engagement in planning, implementation and monitoring needs to be facilitated and new partnerships forged.

And volunteer groups can help to localize the new agenda by providing new spaces of interaction between governments and people for concrete and scalable actions.At the seventieth session of the UN General Assembly, the Secretary-General presented a proposed Plan of Action for the next decade and beyond (2016–2030).

This plan aims at integrating volunteering in peace and development policies and programmes through a strategic and collective long-term approach that matches the period of SDG implementation.

A global technical meeting on volunteering will take place virtually in 2020 as a special event on the margins of the 2020 High-level Political Forum (HLPF) in New York.

Over 64 million actions were counted by the time the Rio+20 summit took place — a "remarkable testament to bottom-up, grassroots commitment" yet one more demonstration of how Rio+20 is mobilizing a global movement for change, as the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012.

[24] Drawing on evidence from countries as diverse as Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon and Bangladesh, the UN report shows how ordinary people are volunteering their time, energies and skills to improve the way they are governed and engaged at local, national and global levels.

It finds that communities value volunteerism because it enables them to create collective strategies for dealing with diverse economic, social and environmental challenges.

The report thus explores how governments and development actors can best engage with volunteerism to nurture its most beneficial characteristics, while militating against potential harm to the most vulnerable.

[26] The report finds that volunteerism can foster collaborative relationships and decision-making, bring more power equality between citizens and state authorities, and allow for different types of civic participation.