UN Volunteer Tips

Registering to be a UN volunteer is the first step in the process of joining more than 7,000 volunteers each from all over the world who serve with UN agencies in hundreds of different countries. These professional volunteers have an important role to play in the UN effort to promote peace and development around the world. The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) program recruits talented professionals from a wide range of backgrounds to provide development assistance and engage in humanitarian and peacekeeping work.

Many UN volunteers are assigned to projects in remote areas where they have must live with limited comforts while performing their work. For example, they may have to live in conditions where there is no running water or electricity, and they may find that they are working more than 40 hours per week to accomplish project goals.

The UN volunteering program also engages in special recruitment to respond to emergency situations around the world. However, they do not mobilize volunteers for disaster response work in developed countries like Japan because their mandate it to send volunteers to developing countries. The United Nations has provided other support services to Japan in the wake of the natural disaster there, however.

Volunteers for UNV assignments are selected from the organization's database of registered volunteers. For this reason, the best way to be considered for a volunteer position with UNV is to register a profile in their database so you can be considered as a potential candidate for future assignments. The UNV seeks volunteers with certain types of expertise for some assignments, such as legal researchers and cardiologists.

The UN named 2001 as the International Year of Volunteers, and during this year UN member states took a variety of steps to promote volunteerism within their countries. The UN also passed a number of General Assembly resolutions during that year on the topic of volunteering. One of these resolutions, for example, expressed the UN's view that volunteerism is an important way to promote social integration. Volunteerism helps develop social capital for marginalized social groups who have not participated in development work in the past.

The UN is commemorating the 10th anniversary of the International Year of Volunteers in 2011 by putting a focus on the link between international volunteerism and social development. The UN is encouraging member states to seek the support of media and private sector organizations in organizing activities to mark this anniversary which promote volunteerism for development and social integration.

The UN volunteer organization was first established by the General Assembly in 1970 to promote volunteerism. Today it promotes volunteerism and trains thousands of volunteers around the world to work on development projects which are run by UN partners. The UNV program is administered by the United Nations Development Program from its headquarters in Bonn, Germany and its satellite offices world wide.

The UNV database contains profiles of over 70,000 people from around the world who want to serve as volunteers in different professional capacities. The profile of the average UN field service volunteer is a 37 year old who has 5 to 10 years of professional work experience.