Volunteer Partnership Signed with Tokyo 2020Promoting Volunteer Culture for 2020

The Nippon Foundation on June 15 signed a partnership agreement with the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Tokyo 2020) for cooperation and coordination in the area of volunteer activities for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Under the agreement, the Foundation will use its expertise and experience in managing volunteers to work with Tokyo 2020 in a variety of areas to build momentum for the Tokyo 2020 Games and ensure a successful Olympics and Paralympics.

At the signing ceremony, Yoshiro Mori, Tokyo 2020 President, expressed his high hopes for the partnership, noting, “The work of volunteers will be key to a successful Games. This means we will need to train high-quality volunteers, and is why we have approached The Nippon Foundation.”

On behalf of The Nippon Foundation and its affiliated organizations, Chairman Yohei Sasakawa expressed his enthusiasm for the project, noting, “We were extremely happy to receive this request from the Tokyo Organising Committee. This project reflects our aim of achieving a society where all people support one another, and we will devote our energy to making it a success.”

The agreement covers four main areas:

The work of volunteers is said to be key to the success of sporting events. In particular, with athletes from more than 200 countries and territories participating and hundreds of thousands of spectators from around the world, volunteers play an especially important role at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

At the London 2012 Games, roughly 70,000 volunteers, who were called “Games Makers” assisted with the operation of events, helped athletes, and guided spectators, playing an important role that led to the London Games being considered a great success.

Plans for the Tokyo 2020 Games also include the participation of large numbers of volunteers. The application process is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2018, and will be followed by interviews and training. The agreement between Tokyo 2020 and The Nippon Foundation marks a major step forward in this process.

According to a survey carried out by the Cabinet Office in 2015, the percentage of people who “want to participate” as volunteers at the Tokyo 2020 Games was 22.7%, meaning that more than one in five people in Japan are interested in volunteering.

In another nationwide survey of men and women at least 20 years old carried out by the Sasakawa Sports Foundation every two years, over the past 20 years, 6-8% of all respondents have volunteered at sporting events. At the same time, in the 2014 survey, approximately 16% of respondents said that they had provided support for their own children’s sports activities or had been involved with helping at sporting events in their own community. These people can be viewed as having been volunteers without consciously volunteering. In other words, latent interest in volunteering can be considered higher than had been imagined.

Nevertheless, volunteering is not simply a matter of bringing together people who want to participate. Knowledge is needed to handle the process efficiently and effectively, and leaders are needed to coordinate the activities of these groups of volunteers.

For the past 25 years, The Nippon Foundation has been supporting the activities of volunteer organizations and providing direct support for disaster relief. The Foundation is known for having organized and dispatched some of the first groups of volunteers in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake that struck northeastern Japan in March 2011 and the series of earthquakes that struck in and around Kumamoto Prefecture in April 2016. Building on this recognition, we are expanding these activities and creating networks that bring together industry, government entities, schools and universities, and private citizens.

Organizations affiliated with The Nippon Foundation, including the Sasakawa Sports Foundation, the B&G Foundation, the Nippon Foundation Paralympic Support Center, and the Nippon Foundation Student Volunteer Center (Gakuvo), will also play important roles under this partnership.

The Sasakawa Sports Foundation (SSF) has trained a total of 40,000 people as sports volunteers over the past 15 years, and was responsible for setting up and managing the volunteer program for the first three Tokyo Marathons (2007 – 2009). Having passed on this expertise, the volunteer program is now handled by the Tokyo Marathon Foundation.

SSF has also recently concluded an agreement with Waseda University’s Faculty of Sport Sciences to set up a course to train sports volunteers. Using the experience and expertise of SSF’s affiliated Japan Sports Volunteer Network, SSF plans to develop educational videos that will be distributed free to Waseda University as well as to other interested universities and companies around Japan.

The Blue Sea and Green Land (B&G) Foundation has built 480 marine sports centers, equipped with swimming pools and gymnasiums, across Japan. The B&G Foundation has also trained 19,000 local government officials around Japan to be instructors for marine recreation. These marine sports centers and instructors play an important role in their communities, promoting sports and supporting children.

The Nippon Foundation Paralympic Support Center was established to promote para sports and a successful Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. The Support Center has been providing organizational support to Paralympic sports leagues and developing human resources. It is also holding multifaceted educational events to deepen the public’s understanding of persons with disabilities and raising awareness of para sports.

Gakuvo is a cooperative organization of students from 71 colleges and universities around Japan. Activities are coordinated by a student steering committee, and to date roughly 10,000 student volunteers have been dispatched to assist with relief and recovery operations in response to natural disasters including the earthquakes that struck northeastern Japan in 2011 and Kumamoto in 2016.

The Nippon Foundation will utilize the knowledge, experience, and human resources of these affiliated organizations in its development of a training system and human resources with Tokyo 2020. In addition to building momentum leading up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we hope that a firmly established culture of volunteerism in Japan will be one of the Games’ major legacies.