Social activities in Japan are not only developing but also going into difficult situation. All activists in environmental education must know social movement, broadcast about their activity and maintain the connection with people.
Trend of volunteer activity in Japan
Japan is the developing country in volunteer activity field in comparison with foreign developed countries. As well known, the number of volunteer actions has been increased for each great disaster since 1995 in this country. Big calamities have sparked off the growth of laws and familiarity for NPO. Moreover, social media are bringing various social issues to light. Then, activists against such problems become not unfamiliar to most Japanese people. Actions by such domestic organizations must continue more actively and be diversified.
Population decline and growing field
However, it is true that Japanese people cannot avoid decreasing birthrate and aging population at an increasing tempo. It inspires us that organizations against social issues are going to scramble severely each other for the limited number of members, in the same way as commercial corporations. Actually, my volunteer group is coming 12 years soon since our foundation. However it will be difficult to survive for us for 12 years hereafter, if we tried to repeat the same way for management of ourselves.
Although the meanings of aquarium industry and environmental education are not tiny, other international matter or field directly linked to the Japanese government’s growth strategy (subjects of regional society; e.g. regional vitalization, parenting support or nursing care public welfare services) can be more important rather than them.
Future of volunteer teams for environmental education
Even the organization I am belonging calls itself “a volunteer group”, it may be different a little bit from other volunteer teams. Because most members have joined with the motivation not like “I want to work as volunteer.” but like “I love animals and nature.” or “I want to talk with others.”
On the other hand, we need to attract external newcomers at fixed intervals to manage ourselves continuously as a single organization which has more than 100 members. Even recruiting has gone well fortunately for few years, but not straightforward. And then, it may be more difficult as I have mentioned. So we need to understand a current situation of volunteer activities in Japan more deeply.
Additionally, even we have obtained financial support from our aquarium, we need to pay attention to further plan in future because there is no assurance of stability of it.
I am having anxiety for these points but recognizing them as challenging assignments as an advisor position of my volunteer group. What we have to do immediately is to evaluate what role our activity plays and how much effect our activity makes to society and to broadcast those to people. I may consider and commit effective actions for this challenge this year also.
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