International Volunteer Year 2026
ivy2026
A Call to Action for the Future of Volunteering
Background
In December 2023, the UN General Assembly declared 2026 the International Year for Volunteers for Sustainable Development (IVY 2026) to highlight the role of volunteers in advancing sustainability. A scoping group including Forum, IAVE, IFRC, and UNICEF Generation Unlimited, was formed in early 2024 to drive global engagement. The group identified IVY 2026 as an opportunity to emphasize the power of volunteering, encourage greater investment in volunteering, and secure commitments from governments and others to support volunteering and an enabling environment in which volunteering will flourish. A key message for IVY 2026 is that volunteers can significantly contribute to sustainable development, but only if provided with an enabling environment. As a result, the scoping group has crystallized around a Call to Action that engages all actors in the volunteering ecosystem to help create and maintain this environment. The group has since evolved into the Call to Action for the Future of Volunteering Steering Committee, which includes other key global stakeholders.
Developing a Call to Action
Our goal is to hear from volunteers, volunteer-involving organizations, governments, corporations, philanthropic foundations, and others on what changes they feel are needed to bring about a transformative shift in the impact of volunteering on sustainable development. These will then be captured in a focused, action-oriented Call to Action which governments, VIOs, corporations and others will be asked to endorse and implement.
As a first step, we commissioned a Challenge Paper to surface and explore topics to be addressed in the Call to Action.
From Dialogue to Action
The global consultation phase is now complete. Over the past months, people and organisations around the world came together to shape the future of volunteering. We are proud to share that more than 10,000 people from 163 countries responded to the survey, and over 100 dialogues were hosted across diverse contexts.
These conversations and responses have provided a rich and inspiring picture of how volunteering is contributing to tackling today’s challenges — and how it can play an even stronger role in the future.
Next Steps
Together with our partners, we are now working to turn these insights into two key outputs:
– An Insights Paper, capturing the main findings from the survey and dialogues.
– A Call to Action, which will be launched at the United Nations in New York on International Volunteer Day, 5 December 2025.
How to Get Involved
Keep an eye on this page for updates and for the publication of both the Insights Paper and the Call to Action. In the meantime, we encourage you and your organisation to begin thinking about how you might mark the launch in December and use it as an opportunity to highlight the power and potential of volunteering.
This project was funded with support from Comhlámh and the Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation
