- Nigel Watt, Director of the CCIVS (Co-ordinating Committee on International Voluntary Service), UNESCO

The CCIVS was set up 50 years ago under the auspices of UNESCO, initially to co-ordinate the many volunteer workcamp organizations working on European reconstruction after the war. CCIVS's role now is to promote voluntary service, exchange information, and work on volunteer status (including things like visas). It has 140 member organizations and a total network of 260 organizations in over 70 countries, plus close relations with some major non-members including the All-China Youth Federation. Most of these organizations are involved in youth voluntary service.

Participants at this Conference need to take the opportunity of forging links with each other's programmes and need to keep dialogue open after the Conference has finished. Possibilities for action among those present might include sharing information, and research findings and consulting each other as peers, and, perhaps most powerful, working together and exchanging personnel and experiences: for example, participants in Botswana's Tirelo Setshaba might spend a month in a project in Zambia or Mozambique at the end of their service period in their home country? Or a group of CSV's Citizens' Service participants might spend a short period on a project in France? Could a few selected `service-learners' from Argentina go to the USA for a project? What about a joint team from several NYS programmes working together in the former Yugoslavia or after some natural disaster? Exchanges between countries from the developed and developing world need to work both ways, with both countries' NYS participants visiting each other's projects.

International travel, however, is expensive, and there often remains reconciliation to be done within one's own country first. Nigeria's NYS scheme works to help decrease divisions within Nigeria, as will potential programmes in Israel. However, even when there are cost restraints, NYS aid to one's neighbours can be possible and promote understanding and better relations, for example, Nigerian and Ghanaian NYS participants could work as a team, together with local voluntary organizations, towards reconciliation in Liberia or Sierra Leone.