paddaniels's blog

Managing the future of volunteering

Mar
09

The Association of Volunteer Managers had its inaugural conference today (9th March 2011) focussing on volunteer management and the Big Society. Nick Hurd MP, Minister for Civil Society addressed the conference setting how he saw the role of volunteer management in the Big Society. He came armed with as many questions as answers, but the fact that he was there at all was surely testament to the recognition of volunteer management's value to the Government's current policy agenda.

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Volunteering adding value to services taken away

Feb
20
There's a mantra from volunteer management's missing manual that's often repeated. It goes something like this:
"the role of volunteering in public service delivery is to add value"
It comes with a caveat though: if no public service exists for volunteers to add value to, all bets are off. Up to now, that's meant that volunteers that identify a social need (that no current public service meets), always have the last resort of mustering all the resources they can get their hands on and providing the service themselves.

New territory

This model of volunteering in public services built around adding value has developed over many years. In particular, the emphasis of adding value to established services seeks to avoid the spectre of volunteering roles substituting paid roles. Now with the Big Society we're entering new territory. It's a policy with the express aim of substituting public services that are publicly funded, with citizen-powered services that may be publicly and or privately funded. As David Cameron restates in his recent defence of the Big Society:
"devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny; opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve; and encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community"
Despite these kinds of references to how volunteering is at the heart of the Big Society project, it's still not clear what it's impact on volunteering will be. One defining feature of Big Society policy is how public service reform will impact on how we think about volunteering. Too often this debate has been framed as two competing assumptions about whether volunteering and voluntary action are:
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Volunteer- what's in a word?

Dec
23

This post started as I got sucked into using Google Labs' Ngram Viewer- a tool that offers visual representations of the usage of words in books published going back 500 years ago.

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Bigging up volunteering

Jun
30

Recently there's been a lot of chatter about the idea of the 'Big Society', some of which has direct implications for how we think about volunteering. Those active in volunteering need to speak up for a clearer understanding about volunteering in the wider 'Big Society' debate.

In the Hugo Young lecture last year, David Cameron talked about the Big Society's aim to empower "individuals, families and communities". Volunteering is one key route to empowerment, though Cameron argued, too much state involvement in social issues has reduced volunteering:

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Volunteering: Means to an end, or end in itself?

Mar
15

I've noticed that when we seek to understand the benefits of volunteering, we often do so in two ways: either positioning volunteering as a means to an end, or as an end in itself.

I want to just look at these two approaches and try to understand how these approaches contrast and sometimes contradict each other. But also look at how these two approaches complement each other, so that we can make the strongest possible case for volunteering whoever we're talking to: policy makers, funders, senior managers in our organisations, or even potential volunteers.

It was a post by DJ Cronin on i-volunteer.org.uk that got me thinking on this. His post gives a bit of context, i.e. raising awareness about the personal and social benefits of volunteering and the specific responsibility of those in volunteering development and management to get out of their "cocoon and educate".

Volunteering as a means to an end

"Volunteer is a pay rate, not a job title" - @ChanceUK

John Ramsey's recent post on the Association of Volunteer Managers website "The conflict between want and need" made the case that it makes more sense to view volunteering as a means to an end. He uses the specific example of managing volunteers for an organisation like Age Concern:

"Volunteering is part of our ethos. However, we are not 'about' volunteering, we are 'about' the health and well-being of older people. Volunteering does of course play a crucial role in the health and well-being of older volunteers but we do not exist to provide volunteering opportunities per se."

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Is the web changing the way we give?

Feb
17

I've summarised my thoughts so far on thinking about how the concept of the gift economy can help us understand giving activities, such as volunteering and participation, in the context of the social web. I've done this ahead of the Volunteering Counts Conference March 1st-2nd in Manchester organised by the Institute of Volunteering Research where I'll be presenting.

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International Volunteer Managers Day

Nov
05

IVM day logoHow do you plan to celebrate the day? With a few fireworks? Since 2006 volunteer managers around the world have had their own day to raise awareness about the role of volunteer management and mark the contribution that volunteer managers make in fostering volunteering initiative and energy.

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The latest guidance as issued by the Vetting & Barring Scheme

Oct
13

We recently received this press release from the Vetting and Barring Scheme which summarises the current changes as of 12th October:

"We are pleased to release the official Guidance in relation to the introduction of the initial phase of the Vetting & Barring Scheme (VBS). This is available by clicking on the following link: http://www.isa-gov.org

We are grateful to all of you who have taken part in meetings and events about the new Scheme which have taken place around the country in the past months.

We also appreciate the time that you have taken to send telephone and e-mail queries to the VBS contact centre (available on 0300 123 1111 at lo-call rate) over the same period. These interactions have helped us to shape the guidance which we are now able to share.

As the Scheme moves forward you may find it helps your staff, member organisations or other stakeholders, if you put the following on your website or in newsletters in coming weeks.

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What's a volunteer again?

Sep
20

The sudden belated media interest in the setting up of the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) has been curious. Not least because it has demonstrated once again, the rather simplistic and sketchy outlining of good practice in safeguarding by the media.

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The long tail of volunteering

Sep
13

When Clay Shirky, social media guru, talked about power law distribution, he demonstrated how equal access to participate in an activity almost always resulted in an unequal range of partipation. Some participants were active, while others (usually the vast majority) were a lot less active.

"Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another. Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass participation removes the technological obstacles to participation. Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You'd be wrong." (p.122-123)

After this quote taken from his book 'Here Comes Everybody', Shirky used examples from popular social media websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia. He observed that frequently, you see approximately 20% of the participants delivering 80% of the total value produced, whether that's a Wikipedia entry and a set of photos of Flickr tagged with the same word.

long tail
Taken from Clay Shirky's article, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links.
The data is drawn from N.Z Bear's 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem.
The current version of this project can now be found at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem

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AVM AGM 2009

Sep
09

What is the future for volunteer managers?

Are you concerned about how your organisation values your role? Worried about where funding might come from in the future?

The Association of Volunteer Managers is holding it's second AGM on 23rd September 2009 focussing on what the future holds for volunteer managers.

We will be looking at:

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A tale of politicians, volunteering and control

Jul
07

It was interesting to see Baroness Neuberger in The Times talking about party politics and controlling volunteering:

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Volunteer manager training fund cut by £1m

May
11

AVM's Debbie Usiskin is quoted in Third Sector's article "Volunteer manager training fund cut by £1m"

A long-awaited fund to p rovide training for volunteer managers will distribute £1m less than first promised.

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Future of youth volunteering

Apr
30

Jamie Thomas, CEO of Red Foundation, has started a debate reacting to the recent announcement by the Prime Minister about the new community work scheme.

So let me get this straight. The government has decided to spend £146m of taxpayers money to launch a new community service programme for 16-19 year olds. This is on top of the £100m plus that has already been spent on the same age group to do practically the same thing, with another £100m already committed to extend this same activity over the next three years, for a demographic that has been proven time and time again to be more likely to volunteer or get involved in the community than any other. Am I the only person that thinks this is nuts?

‘But this is community service not volunteering!' I hear you cry. Well yes technically that's true, but the actual work of identifying and creating meaningful opportunities that can demonstrate community impact whilst at the same time hold enough interest for teenagers to stick with them for 50 hours, is pretty similar in my opinion, and the chances are it will be the same organisations, that currently offer volunteering opportunities, that will be most likely to deliver the scheme. And I don't suppose for a moment that the majority of young ‘community servers' will be able to distinguish the difference.

Jamie Thomas' blog post 'vDaft' asks the question about how effective the Government has been in promoting volunteering amongst young people.

One of the biggest problems with the announcement is how it is another step by the Government towards making volunteering compulsory. This language in the official press release itself doesn't seem clear about whether it's volunteering or community service.

What's clear is that volunteering has to be voluntary. At least if David Blunkett is to lead a taskforce looking at youth volunteering this should be clear. Remember this memorable quote by Blunkett in The Guardian in November, 2008?:

When asked whether the scheme should become a form of compulsory national service Mr Blunkett replied: "It's been reinforced to me in the last year that you can't have volunteering unless it's voluntary."

It would be great to get your views.

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Spring cleaning

Apr
01

At AVM we've had the dusters and scrubbing brushes out. We've put the new spring-cleaned version of the AVM website live. We've reviewed and redesigned what we had before, to improve the experience for everyone using the site. We hope it all helps us to network and support each other better.

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