World Volunteer Day

Millions of volunteers engage in activities supporting peace initiatives, humanitarian aid and medical assistance, monitoring human rights and supporting non-profit organisations. The purpose of this Day is to recognise the work, time and skills of volunteers worldwide.

“Solidarity through volunteering”

This is the guiding theme for the 2022 Day chosen by the United Nations Volunteer Programme (UNV) “For the future of our planet, we must act together and we must act now. This is not an era to stand alone, but together, as one, in solidarity with one another. The growing inequalities in the world call for the need to work together to find common solutions. Volunteers, united in solidarity, develop solutions to urgent challenges for development and the common good,’ reads the UNV website. #TOGETHERACTNOW

• In Italy many events have been built around the precious quality of solidarity, starting with the most important one that will take place in Bergamo, Italian Capital of Volunteering 2022, which has interpreted the theme of Solidarity through Volunteering by recognising the strength of the younger generations to put into circulation the energies needed to change the world.

• The invitation to change the world through the power of solidarity opens for us of the Good Shepherd, a door that is already wide open: we have, in fact, long since embraced the key of solidarity as the way to relate with the Earth and among men in a fairer way and capable of dealing with the complexity of this world of ours (and way) to change: deep solidarity.

The real world […] is complex in the sense that it contains phenomena that exceed our regulatory capacities (E. Rullani, 2004), there must be deep solidarity between the members of a society, of a group. […] Complexity is a fabric of inseparably interwoven heterogeneous elements. Complexus: that which is woven together. (E. Morin, 1988)

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Deep solidarity is ‘listen to how your heart beats for me’. It is to share the other’s reasons where sharing means understanding the other’s point of view (position) and, above all, it is to live solidarity-in-understanding, a paying attention to one’s own and others’ ways of being, to making sense of the things we hear, and the things we say. It is not to fail in our duty to create sincere human relationships provoked by a life lived in an ethical stance.