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Research Journal of the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka- Rohana 11, 2019
order to gear up local level development by global organizations like the United
Nations.
The idea that social development is an intervention committed to promoting the
welfare of the population has also been articulated (Midgley, 1996; UNDP 1996).
Midgley (1996) and Pawar (2014) convincingly emphasized that social welfare
would not occur automatically as the result of natural processes. In its institutional
definition of social welfare, United Nations (1967) highlights that social welfare has
a function within the broad space of a country's social development, and in this
sense, social welfare should play a major role in contributing to the effective
mobilization and deployment of human and material resources of the country to deal
successfully with the social requirements of change to enhance people’s well-being.
This indicates the recognition that social development is an action. It seeks to link
the action of social development to economic development in a dynamic way as it
has to happen within the broad context of development.
Modern volunteering
Reaching a universal agreement on the interpretation of the modern form of
volunteering has not been an easy task. Leigh (2011) suggests that it is because the
terms which define volunteering, and the form of its expression vary in different
languages and cultures, though the expressive values and norms could be common
and universal. One of the earliest attempts to universalize the core meaning of
volunteering can be found in the work of United Nations (UNO, 2001). They point
out that modern volunteering is an activity, which should not be undertaken
primarily for financial reward, but be undertaken voluntarily, according to an
individual’s own free-will, and be of benefit to someone other than the volunteer, or
to society at large. This interpretation elaborates several aspects of volunteer action
and implies the fact that volunteers may not benefit from volunteering. However, it
is now widely recognized that volunteering brings significant benefits to the
volunteer as well. For example, Volunteering Australia, an organization which has
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