(JHU: Baltimore, MD) -- The International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies have released a new manual to help statistical agencies around the world track the amount, type, and value of volunteer work in their countries.

The manual, drafted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies in cooperation with the ILO and an international technical-experts group and with the support of United Nations Volunteers, represents the first-ever internationally sanctioned guidance to statistical agencies for generating reliable, official data on volunteer work using a common definition and approach.

“Volunteer work is an enormous renewable resource for social, economic, and environmental problem solving throughout the world, as we are sure to discover again in the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami,” says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. “But the lack of solid data on volunteering has left it undervalued and its full potentials unrealized. This manual promises to change this fundamentally. The challenge now is to secure government commitments to implement it.”

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