paddaniels's blog

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.

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.

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:

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.

How 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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.