The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast for Sunday 25 November 2001

Glossary

Volunteer: offer (oneself, one’s services) for a particular purpose or enterprise
Remuneration: reward, recompense; payment

The topic of today’s broadcast is:

Volunteers - ordinary people, extraordinary contribution

This year, 2001, has been declared the International Year of the Volunteer by the United Nations.

The International Association for Volunteer Effort (IAVE) held its 11th biennial Conference in Paris in September 1990, and the assembly adopted this declaration.

The Universal Declaration on Volunteering

International Association for Volunteer Effort

Preamble

Volunteers, inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Convention of the Rights of the Child 1989, consider their commitment as a tool for social, cultural, economic and environmental development in a changing world, and believe that ‘each person has the right to freely assemble and associate for peaceful purposes’.

Volunteering:

is based on personal motivation and choices, freely undertaken;
is a way of furthering active citizenship and community involvement;
takes the form of individual; or group activities generally carried out within the frame work of an organisation;
enhances human potential and the quality of daily life, building up human solidarity;
provides answers for the great challenges of our time, striving for a better and more peaceful world; and
contributes to the vitality of economic life, even creating jobs and new professions.

Basic Principles of Volunteering

Volunteers put into practice the following basic principles.

Volunteers:

acknowledge the right of every man, woman and child to associate free regardless of their race religion, physical, social or economic condition;

respect the dignity of every human being and their culture;

offer services, without remuneration, to others by mutual effort or by belonging to voluntary organisations in a spirit of partnership;

detect needs and elicit the involvement of the community in the resolution of their own problems;

may, through volunteering, grow as persons, acquire new skills and knowledge, develop their personal potential, self reliance and creativity, enabling people to take an active role in problem solving; and

stimulate social responsibility and promote family, community and international solidarity.

Considering these basic principles, volunteers should:

encourage the expression of individual commitment through collective movements;

actively seek to strengthen their organisations by being fully informed of and adhering to the organisation’s goals, objectives and policies;

undertake to carry out the jointly defined tasks, taking into consideration personal aptitudes, time available and accepted responsibilities;

cooperate in a spirit of mutual understanding and respect with other members of the organisation;

undertake training as required; and

maintain confidentiality in their activities.

Organisations, taking into account human rights and the basic principles, should:

lay down the policies needed for volunteers activity, define the criteria for volunteer participation and see that the ascribed functions are observed by all;

entrust to each person suitable tasks, ensuring appropriate training;

provide regular evaluation and recognition of their work;

provide adequate coverage and protection against risks to volunteers during the exercise of their duties and seek coverage for damages that may be caused to third persons;

facilitate access to volunteering for all by reimbursing expenses; and

define the conditions under which the organisation or the volunteer can end their commitment.

Volunteers, gathered at the initiative of IAVE in a world congress, declare their faith in volunteer action as a creative and mediating force;

to respect the dignity of all people and their ability to improve their lives and exercise their rights as citizens;

to help solve social and environmental problems;

to build a more humane and just world, furthering international cooperation; and

therefore, they invite governments, international institutions, business and the media to join in partnership with them to create a worldwide environment that promotes and sustains effective volunteering by all people as a symbol of solidarity amongst peoples and nations.

The International Association for Volunteer Effort (IAVE) held its 11th biennial conference in Paris in September 1990, and the assembly adopted this declaration.

To help focus activities for the year, the Commonwealth of Australia has divided the year into twelve theme months. All themes recognise the variety of volunteers from volunteering as community aid, philanthropy and civic participation, as an essential element of cultural heritage.

The theme for this month, November, is Civic Participation.

This month, November, Australia celebrates volunteers involved in supporting their society and community. These include parents and community members supporting young people’s education, those involved in life education and skills, parents and friends groups, service clubs, individuals and organisations.

Our organisation is involved in life education and skills, supporting society and community.

The Victorian Government is recognising voluntary service to the community with certificates of appreciation.

This week on 20 November 2001 at 8:30pm at 33 Brooking Street, Upwey, Victoria. eight persons from our organisation, The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. were awarded with Certificates of appreciation in recognition of their voluntary service to the community in the International Year of the Volunteer by the Victorian Government

Our Founder, Master John D. Hughes awarded the following Members from our organisation with these certificates of appreciation in recognition of their voluntary service to the community; Julian Bamford, B.A. Dip.Rec., Leanne Eames, B.A. M.A., Evelin Halls, Vanessa Macleod, B.A. M.A., Lisa Nelson, Rilla Oellien, Anita Svensson, R.N.Div1, and Pennie White, B.A.Dip.Ed.

Copies of these certificates are on display in our Hall of Assembly.

These persons were well trained as webmasters for our systems by our organisation and service our eight web sites. Our response time to add new material averages one day. As a result we have rapid response to placing text, radio broadcast scripts, library indexing, reports, conference papers, training materials, photographs, internal and external newsletters on our web sites.

To further commemorate the recognition of the voluntary services of our webmasters, a new publication entitled Longhair Australian News commenced on 23 November 2001. The following is an abstract from this new publication:

Welcome!

We dedicate this publication to our women Members who handle the loading of data to our web sites. At present, we have seven female webmasters: Leanne Eames, Evelin Halls, Vanessa Macleod, Lisa Nelson, Rilla Oellien, Anita Svensson and Pennie White; and one male webmaster: Julian Bamford.

Sad to say, our male webmaster at our Centre is bald. The seven female webmasters have longhair. Since it is mainly our female ‘longhairs’ who attend to our web sites we sought a title to reflect this fact. The initials from it read ‘LAN’ that generally stands for Local Area Network.

In the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ‘longhair’ means a person or animal with longer hair than usual; a clever person, an aesthete, an intellectual; a devotee of classical (as opposed to popular) music; later it became to mean a hippy, a beatnik.

We discount this latter meaning.

This LAN publication is dedicated to persons who will come and help us in the future with information technology.

In their operations, our webmasters gather much information each for himself or herself and need to communicate this information between themselves. At the same time, we guess that the information we gather could be valuable to other persons who are confronted with the day-by-day running of web sites.

Many of our web sites operate from different servers, hence, there are variations of technique of loading information. Rather than tie one Member to one specialised web site, we have in mind to skill all our webmasters for operations on all sites.

As a not-for-profit organisation, our dominant culture has not only been self-government but also internal development by volunteers as modes of preparation of task implementation.

The first office of any administration must be order and our Members are taught the art of orderly and continuous industry. For those who measure duty by dollars spent we point out that our systems have paid back a thousand fold all the effort we put into the propagation of Buddha Dhamma from our web sites.

We base our calculations of the savings on our printing and postage costs.

The global spread we offer Members and clients is simple and straight forward.

We believe in the frank acceptance of existing facts about rising publication and postage costs and dealing with them as they are and not on a theory of what they might or ought to be. Our paper printing and postage costs rose to $15,000 per year when we were printing an 80-page version of our flagship publication, Buddha Dhyana Dana Review. We have to meet the new costing demands of our living present supply chains.

The foundation of our publications is to retain copyright for our organisation so we can have the ability to donate information free of charge to those who wish to use it rightfully and legally.

Shohei Ichimura states in his book Buddhist Critical Spirituality (2001, pp. 148-150). In the Buddhist world, the Theravadin and Mahayana traditions have continued to uphold somewhat different ways to link the spiritual and secular domain, but with a growing awareness of the forces of change, leaders in both traditions, whether professional monks or lay devotees, have found it necessary to review old forms of expression and seek new approaches so as to accommodate on-going change with a new set of appropriate meanings and directives. We are able to renew a long overdue critical examination of the existing forms of linkage between the spiritual and the secular, whereby to advance a step toward the reform that is necessary to the future growth of Buddhism and a step toward the unification of the two traditions through the creation of a viable avenue of communication and mutual cooperation.

Moreover, the task has grown today because of the physical presence of the Buddhist tradition expanding globally, moving beyond the geographical confines of the past, and reaching to all parts of the world. In the recent decades, Buddhist tradition has acquired increasing respect as an equal among the other religious traditions of the West. If the Buddhist tradition as a whole, Theravadin and Mahayana, can hope to offer a service to humanity on global terms, it will do so through examination and assessment of this issue of the linkage between spiritual transcendence and secular engagement by introducing new directions and new forms of expression for the period to come.

Our publications stimulate the energy, enterprise and intellect of persons, and quicken human genius. Comparison of IT ideas is educational and this present LAN publication is designed for the common glory of Members’ training since we plan to put this information on one of our web sites for ease of access. It may even become an international asset to others who need to learn.

In addition, we need a record of the new data loaded onto each of our web sites week by week and perhaps print site maps of our web sites from time to time.

This publication, Longhair Australian News, will be loaded onto the Buddha Dhyana Dana Review online web site as well as onto bdcu.org.au web site.

The broad objectives of the Longhair Australian News are:

1. To inform webmasters of what is being done in technical development on our web sites by others;

2. To inform Members, our webmasters and web site visitors of what text or photos or multimedia is added onto our web sites week by week;

3. To map and picture ways of finding out what happens on our sites;

4. To keep an accurate record of backups for what has been uploaded onto our sites and when, as well as a list of CDs we have burnt.

We like the adventure of seeing thousands of visitors come to our sites.

We encourage each webmaster to send an internal email on our LAN giving information of what data was loaded and when. These emails are then copied and pasted into our Longhair Australian News.

Persons involved in voluntary work, in Australia, make important and positive contributions to national life, meet needs within the community and help develop and reinforce social networks and cohesion.

In the Survey of Voluntary Work conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a volunteer is defined as someone who, in the last twelve months, willingly gave unpaid help in the form of time, service or skills, through an organisation or group.

The estimated number volunteers in Australia ages 18 years and over in 2000 was 4,395,600, representing 32 percent of the civilian population of the same age. In 1995 the estimated 3,189,400 volunteers represented 24 percent of the population. Growth in volunteer rates occurred for both sexes and across all age groups, but particularly the 18 to 24, 17 percent to 27 percent and 55 to 56 years groups.

In 2000, volunteers contributed 704.1 million hours of voluntary work, an increase on the 1995 figure of 511.7. However, the median weekly hours of voluntary work remained stable at 1.4.

The costs do not include teaching or webmaster training. We estimate commercial costs to train webmasters for one year to our standard would be 100,000 dollars.

At our Centre, our volunteers train Members to become webmasters free of charge. Once a Member has acquired the skills needed to run our web sites, he or she can then train more Members. This way we have sufficient in-house webmasters that are able to load and update information quickly and with ease.

A webmaster needs to have a complex set of skills that includes editing and research skills. Because of the constant and quick change of the new digital technologies webmasters need to be flexible and adaptable. For example, we use search engines such as Google to locate suitable software online quickly.

We visit relevant web sites to find information, for example, one of the sites we visited to find information for this radio script was the Australian Government web site at www.iyv2001.gov.au that provides information about the International Year of Volunteers. Another useful web site we visited was the Australian Bureau of Statistics at www.abs.gov.au.

Our online library catalogue for the John D. Hughes Collection currently contains 3726 books on our www.bdcu.org web site. Before the end of this year we will have over 4000 books searchable online. Our web site is hotlinked through the Australian Libraries Gateway at www.nla.gov.au/libraries. The John D. Hughes Collection is listed as specialist library and contains rare Buddha Dhamma materials. Our volunteers have helped to build up this specialist library and make it accessible for many persons; they have made extraordinary contributions.

At our Centre we provide many great learning resources for our volunteers in various areas. One area is our extensive library that offers numerous precious and useful materials. We have an internal LAN that is searchable with our ISYS text retrieval system so that information produced and stored over many years is available and preserved.

The authors and editors of this script were: John D. Hughes, Evelin Halls, Kathleen McLean and Pennie White.

Disclaimer:

As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).

Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics, (2001) Voluntary Work, Australia, Summary of findings at URL http://www.abs.gov.au accessed on 17 November 2001.

Commonwealth of Australia, (2001) International Year of Volunteers 2001, available at URL at http://www.iyv2001.gov.au accessed on 17 November 2001.

Document Statistics

Total:

Words: 2576
Sentences: 97
Paragraphs: 111
Syllables: 3434

Averages

Words per sentence: 26.6
Sentences per paragraph: 0.9

Percentages:

Passive Sentences: 13

Readability Statistics

Flesch Grade Level: 14.3
Coleman-Liau Grade Level: 23.3
Bormuth Grade Level: 11.6
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 41.0
Flesch-Kincaid Score: 12.2

Readability Statistics

Display’s statistics about the document's readability, such as the Flesch Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease Score. These statistics help you determine if you are writing at a level your audience can understand.

Flesch Grade Level: Flesch Grade Level indicates the Flesch Reading Ease score as a grade level. See the Flesch Scoring Table.

Coleman-Liau Grade Level: Indicates the grade level of the document based on the average number of letters per word and number of sentences per 100 words.

Bormuth Grade Level: Indicates the grade level of the document based on the average number of letters per word and per sentence. These scores indicate grade levels ranging from 6.3 to 11.6.

Flesch Reading Ease Score: Indicates how easy the document is to read based on the number of syllables per word and number of words per sentence. These scores indicate a number between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the easier the document is to read. See the Flesch Scoring Table.

Flesch-Kincaid Score: Indicates the grade level of the document based on the number of syllables per word and number of words per sentence. This score predicts the difficulty of reading technical documents, and is based on Navy training manuals that score in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3. It meets military readability specifications MIL-M-38784 and DOD-STD-1685.

Flesch Scoring Table

(Reference: Lotus Word Pro Help Files)

May You Be Well And Happy

This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of research and study.

Permission is given to make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY.

Please keep it in a clean place.

"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".

© Copyright. The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.

For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us.

May You Be Well And Happy

This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of research and study.

Permission is given to make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY.

Please keep it in a clean place.

"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".

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