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1. Upcoming policy developments

2. Ongoing debates

Upcoming policy developments

A policy process existed after 2011 to prepare new Draft law of the New Act on volunteering, however it failed. The aims of the process were:

• eliminate legal barriers and support volunteering system development
• introduce a new definition of volunteering and volunteers
• define forms of volunteering (as there is only an insufficient definition in the Act on voluntary service)

The Government Legislative Council approved the factual intention of the Government on September 10th 2015. Subsequently, the Government accepted it as well and assigned the Ministry of the Interior the task of submitting a draft of the Act on Volunteering until June 30th 2016.

The Ministry of Interior requested to postpone the deadline until autumn 2016 and stated as a reason  the fact that it is necessary to resolve the situation whereby an Act on Public Benefit - that is a follow-up law of the new Civil Code - still does not exist.

During 2016, when the inter-sectorial comment procedure was closed, the Ministry of the Interior decided to propose to the Government to withdraw the proposal, because the level of regulation was not favourable to voluntary organisations - so it was against the primary goal. 

However, there are specific initiatives of the Ministry of the Interior to support development of volunteering at a local level, especially within the EU Funded project 'Concept of volunteering development in the Czech Republic with an emphasis on ensuring the regional and professional availability of volunteering in the form of volunteer centres' which in the years 2016-2020 focused on supporting regional volunteering centres and creating guidelines for their operation. Part of the project was to create a national Strategy for volunteering development, however mostly in social services and public administration. Youth is not the main target of these initiatives. 

Outcomes of the project are publically available on the website of the Ministry of Interior including the draft of the new Draft of the State Concept on the Volunteering development 2019 - 2025. It awaits approval by the Ministry.

Ongoing debates

Longer lasting public and expert debates on volunteering pertain to the question of measuring the financial value of volunteering.It is linked to the practical issue of how to project the value of volunteering into an organization's accountancing practices. The aim is to determine the accurate and usable value for, for instance, co-financing projects through in-kind voluntary contributions. 

One solution is offered by the SAFE project: 

• The median of wages published by the Czech Statistical Office for the year 2014 (the most recent) in individual classification categories of the NACE occupation, was used for the calculation of financial valuation of voluntary work. An average hourly wage of 143.76 CZK was calculated (using the weighted average methodology). The Ministry of Interior uses its own calculations and sets a value of 71 CZK (as expressed in the Draft Act on Volunteering).

An important negotiation has taken place between the Czech Statistical Office and the Ministry of Interior on a specialised survey measuring volunteering activities of citizens. Following debates on details with researchers of the Czech Statistical Office, this survey has started in 2023 according to the ILO Manual on the measurement of volunteer work. This means that the results would be comparable to those of other countries. The first results of this survey have already been shared with the working group in early 2024 and should be presented publicly in June 2024.

The National Centre for Volunteering together with The College of Polytechnics Jihlava prepared, with the public support from the Technological Agency of the Czech Republicm an application called "Dobrometer" ("A Goodwill meter"). The application focuses on the evidence of the value of volunteering and voluntary work. It was presented in 2021 and is freely available to interested NGOs and other parties.

Volunteering in general, and of young people in particular, enjoyed a wide boom during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Many youth organizations and other NGOs prepared a broad range of voluntary activities and opportunities for young people to help others..

Due to the nature of the state subsidy system for the youth work for NGOs, a debate started about better definitions and criteria for supporting voluntary youth work, in contrast to commercial youth work activities, in order to provide effective support to youth volunteering and voluntary youth work.