In countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Spain, despite not appearing explicitly in their respective constitutions, volunteer activities have their own statute of rights and duties and a fiscal structure for encouragement and promotion with specific laws that protect them.
According to a 2014 study by the Fundación Trascender , 70% of Chileans believe that we are a supportive country and that voluntary work is better than monetary donations for building a more developed country, with greater social integration, more participation and less inequality.
Likewise, in another study carried out by the same Foundation together with philippine pie telegram Cadem in 2018, it was found that 36% of Chileans declare that they do some type of volunteer work, a positive figure that reflects a high growth compared to the last measurement in 2015, where only 11% reported doing volunteer work. However, the latest Trascender study published in December 2021 shows a 10-point drop in volunteer activities carried out by Chileans during 2021, falling from 32% in 2020 to 22% this year. The majority of Chileans (39%) prefer community work, but they highlight the rise in activities related to environmental protection (from 24% in 2020 to 30% this year) and activities for children and adolescents, and classes (23% and 20%, respectively).
Under this framework, volunteer activities are poorly regulated in our country, unlike in comparative law, where countries such as those mentioned above have specific legislation. In Chile, there is a brief mention in Law 20,500 on Associations and Citizen Participation in Public Management, which only recognizes Volunteer Organizations as Public Interest Organizations “whose main activity is carried out with a charitable purpose, in favor of third parties, and is carried out freely, systematically and regularly, without paying remuneration to its participants,” and generates a registry, without delving into a public policy in this regard.
Legislation
In 2016, a bill was submitted to the Chamber of Deputies that has as its substance the “promotion, encouragement and protection of volunteering activities and actions, the public interest organizations that carry out such activities and the regulation of the relations between volunteers and such organizations.” It is important to emphasize that, in recent decades, volunteering has become a transcendental figure of social participation, since it can function from the so-called Third Sector. For this reason, there is an international discussion regarding the levels of institutionalization and regulation that should regulate such activity; and in this sense, the UN has been a great promoter of the importance of volunteering in international, national and local governance.
In short, it is evident that, apart from the lack of a regulatory framework in legislative terms, volunteering in Chile has increased greatly in recent years - apart from the recent years of the pandemic, where significant emotional and physical strain is evident - and we are faced with an activity that is rooted in the national culture. According to figures from Sociedad en Acción UC, in 2015 there were 234,502 civil society organizations, which increased to 319,819 in 2019, which shows that volunteering is an essential pillar in a caring society. Therefore, it is recommended not to incorporate such activities in the new Constitution, since the increase in the practice of volunteering has been enormous and independent of legislation.
Loreto Estevez