This roundtable panel session will share highlights from IVCO24 Background Paper to unpack the theme of ‘Building and Sustaining Connections for Change: Volunteering for Solidarity’. Panellists will bring diverse perspectives in assessing what the conference theme means for academics, practitioners, government and policymakers who are working in the volunteering sector in a world riddled with unprecedented challenges. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the session will pose critical questions to stimulate conference debates amongst delegates. The roundtable will be followed by discussion time, let’s start unpacking the conference topics based on everyone’s own experiences!

Session objectives:

• Allow diverse voices to position volunteering in an increasingly unequal world characterised by division and intersecting unprecedented crises.
• Explore different ways of understanding/actioning solidarity, particularly in the context of different types of crises, inspiring volunteer-involving organisations to think about it in different ways.
• Start to use the conference as a safe space to navigate difficult conversations in an empathetic manner, rooted in cultures of care through sharing challenges.
• Explore drivers of unsustainability in volunteering and acknowledge interdependence and complicity in systems of harm, such as issues of (neo)colonialism, saviourism, ethnocentrism and eurocentrism in the sector.