Mission
CCIVS strengthens International Voluntary Service worldwide by connecting and empowering its members, promoting and advocating for International Voluntary Service and its values locally and globally.
Vision
CCIVS builds a global inclusive community of changemakers who contribute to a peaceful, just and regenerative world through International Voluntary Service
International Voluntary Service (IVS) is about collaboration between different actors to make projects happen and to obtain change. Volunteers, volunteer organisations, local communities, donors and policy makers are important actors. By supporting the networking of all IVS actors, CCIVS reinforces the social transformation that grassroots members are working on.
CCIVS considers volunteers and International Voluntary Service organisations as changemakers who are committed to social change and human rights and who are eager to create lasting change for both the volunteers and the community.
CCIVS believes that a peaceful world is based on mutual understanding, building trust and solidarity while embracing each other’s cultural differences. This is achieved through working voluntarily side by side thus fostering participatory and intercultural dialogue and learnings. This leads to more equitable and inclusive social relationships and challenges existing power dynamics and discriminatory practices.
Through International Voluntary Service, CCIVS and its members promote the human rights framework as a basis for a just world. We advocate for everyone to live in dignity, be able to take informed decisions and be valued equally – irrespective of gender, skin colour, religion, nationality, age, ability, sexual orientation, social status or political views. CCIVS rejects all forms of repression, violence, abuse, exclusion, discrimination and inequality.
The Sustainable Development Goals are a good framework to show how International Voluntary Projects contribute to the global agenda for a sustainable world. Yet, CCIVS adopts a more radical and holistic approach that acknowledges and integrates our interdependent existence, based on a peaceful, cohabitation model with other species and within the planet’s limits. IVS projects support the social, cultural, economic and ecological transition that is needed to build a regenerative and reconciliatory world that promotes a circular-inclusive economic model based on global, social and climate justice.