TUSEV Info Note on Volunteerism: Legislation and Practices

BCSDN’s member TUSEV has prepared an Info Note that analyzes the legislative framework on volunteerism and the key principles developed by international organizations to guide all lawmaking efforts on volunteerism. The text also discusses the current legal situation and new developments with regards to volunteering in Turkey and the Western Balkans. As the Note states, despite the progress that Turkey and the Western Balkan countries recorded in developing volunteering laws, volunteer work is often carried out informally and the contractual relationships that seek to protect volunteers’ rights are usually not established.

Experts from the BCSDN members including TUSEV and other partners worked together to develop the Monitoring Matrix on Enabling Environment for Civil Society Development, through which the project established many different indicators to monitor civil society activities. One of these indicators is
volunteerism. The monitoring mechanism offers general principles, standards and indicators to monitor and track civil society development within the scope of volunteering, which were used in preparing this Info Note.

This Info Note is product of TUSEV’s new platform “TÜSEV Atölye” launched to share the organization’s knowledge and experience through periodically published Info Notes. The purpose of TÜSEV Atölye is to offer a comprehensive analysis of civil society in Turkey with reference to legal and fiscal environment as well as providing comparisons to the international standards on freedom of association and freedom of assembly, and civil society-public sector cooperation.

The Info Note is available for download here.