A volunteer is a person who works for an organisation without being paid. He offers his service solely to benefit his society and fellow beings. Enthusiastic people can engage in many voluntary activities and do a good deal of work for their society. Although volunteers are not paid for their work directly, their work does not deprive them of its boon.

By performing such activities, they get an opportunity to acquire a first-hand work experience, which may help them in their professional life. Moreover, if young people engage in good work, they will largely avoid doing bad work in society. Thus, their work will give them opportunities to earn a good standing in society.

Meanwhile, many great leaders in the world found voluntary work as a means to serve their fellow human beings and attain greatness thereby. For instance – great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi set rare examples of such voluntary work during his lifetime in South Africa and India.

He gave an account of his experience of such work in his autobiography titled ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’. In spite of being a young Barrister, Gandhi volunteered to teach some traders English language which they found useful for conducting their business.

Barrister Gandhi also raised a bunch of volunteers for ambulance work to save injured soldiers during a war in South Africa under British rule. After receiving a short training, he also started taking care of some patients during a plague that killed many people at that time. Coming back to India, he did much more voluntary work by conducting programmes on education, sanitation, etc.

Usually, youngsters are more equal to this type of work as they are more enthusiastic and have less family burdens. And the enthusiasm for voluntary activities can be instilled in their minds by engaging them in some voluntary activities during their school days. During these early years, they are supposed to receive many types of physical and intellectual training to enhance their abilities.

Hence, instead of confining their efforts to merely acquiring theoretical knowledge, they should be encouraged to engage in some social activities as well, which will help them to learn to work for their communities in future.

Well, there are some voluntary organisations at schools and colleges in the country such as Boy Scouts, Girls Guide, BNCC etc. However, their activities seem to be on the wane at present and mainly remain limited to exercising and doing rehearsals.

In contrast, in many developed countries, volunteers play far more significant roles by performing activities like fire fighting, educating children in remote villages etc. for the sake of their peoples’ benefit. According to some sources, almost all the fire-fighters serving in Australia are volunteers while countries like Austria, Germany, France, the United States, Japan, and China also have large numbers of voluntary fire fighters.

Perhaps, the voluntary organisations existing at our educational institutions could also serve a greater purpose and come to the country’s help directly, if they were trained and encouraged to undertake some beneficial work. Their members could be engaged in different social activities to benefit their society. For example, global warming has heavily affected Bangladesh, and its environment has been jeopardised due to deforestation. The volunteers can play a good role in this regard by conducting massive tree plantation programmes across the country to restore a good environment.

They can make collective and personal efforts to plant trees along the roads and at homes. Then, in many remote villages where underprivileged children do not have a good access to education, country’ youngsters can play the role of volunteer teachers and educate these children during their free times. Volunteers can work to help neglected people in the society who are sick and elderly and require healthcare and nursing.

Finally, a good platform and encouragement from the higher authorities can help volunteers to engage in many constructive activities. Hence, it is essential that the authorities take a hand in the matter and create opportunities for them to work in a planned way.

In our country, the government patronises several defence forces, reserving them around the year for the country’s emergency needs. Instead, if it trained and encouraged volunteers to carry out those work, they could do serve those purpose considerably reducing the burden of extra expenditure of the government. It would also allow the country’s youngsters to contribute to the welfare of their country even in their student life.

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The writer is a Sub-Editor of Daily Sun