Voluntarism is an age-long virtue of the Ghanaian.  Long before the colonization of the various kingdoms and states which now constitute modern Ghana, the people had always volunteered to do their little bit to protect or advance their family, clan, tribe or community.
                         
They helped each other put up shelters, construct bridges over streams, and fight their enemies.  There have always been these beliefs that “many hands make light work and that there is strength in unity”.

As with many other human virtues, voluntarism has taken different forms and dimensions over the years.  It has developed from unorganized voluntarism to organized voluntarism.  Especially after the past two world wars, groups of young people started organizing themselves according to specific objectives related to community development.  There are such groups as the traditional Asafo companies, church groups and youth organizations and societies like the Young Men Christian Association (YMCA), Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Christian Youth Builder (CYB), the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), Norvilorlor Haborbor, and the La Mansaamo Kpee.  Sometimes people of a community are organized according to their days of birth to engage in voluntary service to their community.  Recently the Calvary Baptist Church in Accra realized about twenty-two million cedis through fund-raising campaigns organized according to months of birth.  The amount realized will be used in the rehabilitation of a ward at the Korle Bu Hospital in Accra.

It was in the midst of similar initial awakening of organized voluntarism that a small group of energetic men and women who wanted to see the leisure of the youth utilized on some useful project, founded the Voluntary Workcamps Association of Ghana, affectionately dubbed ‘volu’.

If the title of “Father and Founder of VOLU” should be awarded to an individual, it would be Mr. Gordon L. Green.  At about the time that Pierre Ceresole, the founder of SCI, was making a number of workcamps promotion missions to West Africa for UNESCO and the Coordinating Committee Service (CCIVS), Gordon Green, and English Quaker civilist was making his presence felt in the Gold Coast.  Gorden has served as a conscientious objector during the Second World War when he acquired a taste for unskilled manual labour at nominal rates.  Then, after a series of post-war camps in Europe, he took part in Quaker projects in America.  Meeting Negroes for the first time there, he got interested in the colour and problems in coming to Africa.

In 1954, Gordon came to teach at Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast.  This was the time the then Gold Caost was agitating for independence. To give students an opportunity to experience and combat underdevelopment first-hand, he helped organize occasional workcamps.  As Independence approached, however, he saw the need to hold camps on a regular basis.

Gordon’s activities  in Cape Coast caught the attention of the then Department of Extramural Studies (now the Institute of Adult Education) of the University collage of Cape Coast which in 1955 allowed him and his volunteers to participate in the building of the present Taito Adult Residential collage at Tsito – Awudome in the Volta Region.  Shortly after the 8th annual New Year School in January 1956, another workcamp was organized at Tsito again, this time jointly sponsored by the Institute of Extramural Studies and the People’s Educational Association (PEA).  This camp attracted volunteers from all over the Gold Coast.  There were also two Nigerians and four whites, namely Watkins and John Hall, who were all teaching at Mfantsipim.  (John Hall later became a lecturer in botany at the University of Ghana).

In May 1956, Gordon and the Department of Social Welfare co-sponsored two camps at Cape Coast (the Neighborhood Centre) and Anomabu (a swimming pool for the Youth Training Centre).  It was at these camps that the idea of forming a viable association was brought up and discussed, and in September that year, at the Anomabu Neighbourhood center, the Voluntary Workcamps Association of the Gold Coast (VWGC) was inaugurated, with Gordon as the first secretary of the Association.  With the granting of Independence to the Gold Coast in March 1957, the name of the Association was changed in line with the nation’s new name – Ghana.  It has since then been known and called as the Voluntary Workcamps Association of Ghana (VWAG), in short, VOLU.

It is worthy of note that the leader of the Anomabu camp, now Lt. Col. Dr. E. K. Ben Korley (then a teacher at Mfantsipim)-domicile of Canada, after the camp was sponsored for training in Europe in voluntary service organization.  On his return he worked at the Anomabu Castle as a full – time volu organizer on a stipend of 14 shillings per week.  In January, 1957, immediately after the New Year School at Legon, David Kimble, the first director of the Department of Extramural Studies, organized yet another camp at Tsito.  Kweku E. K. Frimpong, popularly called Kweku, was the leader of the camp.  After the camp, on the 5th of March, 1957, the eve of Ghana’s Independence, Kweku left the Gold Coast to become the nation’s representative and the only Black African at the conference of the CCIVS in Bonn, West Germany.  Between March and October that same year, he was invited to participate in some camps organized by SCI.  This invitation took Kweku to Switzerland, England, West Germany, France, Tunisia and Morocco.  In Germany he was made leader of the orient-occident camp at Angers, simple because he was the only Black.

With this wide experience in voluntary service organization, Kweku became the first full-time General Secretary of VOLU from 1960 to 1963.  Kweku’s appointment meant that VOLU’s administration no longer depend entirely upon Gordon’s free time and battered Volkswagen.  Such was the humble beginning of VOLU, easily one of the best organized voluntary workcamps associations in Africa.  It’s former General Secretary, Mr. Francis Atta Donkor (Osofo), who appeared to be the most traveled member of the Association was appointed to the enviable seat of Directorship of the UNESCO’s Coordinating Committee for International Volunteer Service (CCIVS) in Paris between 1979 and 1982 – the first from the Third World to occupy that seat.