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Research Journal of the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka- Rohana 11, 2019

               successfully incorporated community volunteering into the country’s  broad social
               and  economic  development,  recognizes  volunteering  as  an  activity  which  takes

               place  through  not-for-profit  organizations  or  projects  and  is  undertaken  with  the

               volunteer’s own free-will for the benefit of both community as well as the volunteer
               (Volunteering Australia, 2015).


               The Universal Declaration of Volunteering (IAVE, 1990) too interprets volunteering

               as a two-way process of benefits – to both community and the volunteer. In much
               broader  context,  they  elucidate  modern  volunteering  as  a  creative  and  mediating

               action.  It  enables  building  healthy  and  sustainable  communities  that  respect  the

               dignity of all people, empower people to exercise their rights as human beings and
               thus to improve their lives, help solve social, cultural, economic, and environmental

               problems,  and  create  a  more  humane  and  just  society  through  worldwide
               cooperation. Furthermore, with an attempt to articulate universal nature and values

               of volunteering, UN Volunteers (UNV, 2020) perceived volunteering as a human
               activity, a basic expression of human relationships that occurs in every society in the

               world,  recognizing  volunteers  themselves  as  being  an  integral  part  of  the  very

               communities  that  they  are  supposed  to  contribute.    While  almost  all  these
               interpretations  of  modern  volunteering  revolve  more  or  less  around  an  identical

               territory,  broadly,  all  resonate  that  at  the  heart  of  volunteerism  are  the  ideals  of

               connection, solidarity and service and the belief that together the world can be made
               a much better place.


               The  common  position  of  the  above  interpretations  of  modern  volunteering,

               especially  in  relation  to  the  key  purpose  of  volunteering,  seems  to  be  somewhat
               different  from  the  way  it  had  been  seen  in  the  past  (Leigh,  2011).  For  example,

               traditionally, it was seen as an act of charity, philanthropy or benevolence, and the
               volunteer workforce as being a part of the frontline workers helping organizations to

               achieve  better  outcomes  of  the  task  of  service  delivery.  In  that,  the  volunteer

               position  was  always  described  as  a  set  of  directed  tasks  so  that,  in  many


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