Community Service Volunteers (CSV) is the UK's largest volunteering and training charity.
CSV was founded in 1962 by Mora and Alec Dickson, who also founded Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO). In the 2004/2005 financial year, CSV had six operating companies with a total expenditure of £43 million, employing 944 full-time equivalent staff. They organise full-time, part-time and one-off volunteering opportunities for different groups in the community, including young adults (through Millennium Volunteers for 16- to 24-year-olds), people over 50 (through the RSVP - Retired and Senior Volunteer Project) and for employees of large corporations. CSV is one of the largest providers of employee volunteering in the UK, helping businesses to get involved in the community. CSV also runs an annual "CSV Make A Difference Day" on the last Saturday of every October, promoting voluntary and community days of action throughout the UK, which is the UK's biggest day of direct volunteering in the community.
Among the hundreds of volunteering opportunities they can offer opportunities to volunteer in areas of special interest such as the environment, or media. CSV also runs a journalist network through which journalists can volunteer their skills to non profit organisations who need extra promotional help. Additionally, CSV Action Desks work in partnership with the BBC in 36 BBC local radio stations. They broadcast appeals for volunteers, run awareness campaigns and promote Lifelong Learning.
Nearly 16,000 people a year volunteer through CSV, particularly young people. CSV pioneered the idea of teaching citizenship in schools – it became part of the National Curriculum in England in 2002.
CSV has sought to recruit volunteers from all demographics. Over 10,000 senior volunteers who run activities and projects for CSV and recruit other senior volunteers. CSV also runs weekend volunteering projects in London, designed to give busy people a chance to make a difference in one weekend.
The president of the CSV is Lord Levy
Read more about Community Service Volunteers: Full-time Volunteering, Part-time Volunteering
Famous quotes containing the words community, service and/or volunteers:
“When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 17:14,15.
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)