Exploring Volunteering

Economic, Social: What are you talking about?

When you open your eyes to this economic/social double speak, you start to see it everywhere. I remember seeing an enormous banner unfurled across a large section of a building on the Thames in Central London at the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Splashed in bold, it proclaimed:

“Best wishes to the Queen on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee”.

Immediately after these words emblazoned with corporate branding, came the name of the company that coincidently inhabited the building the banner was hanging from. This very public act struck me as a poignant example of just how adept we are at communicating publicly at these two levels: the social and the economic. Both are ways of valuing what we do. Both are embedded in our everyday way of thinking through what we do and why we do it.

What was going through the minds of this company’s employees who drafted this very public statement? And how can it be explained in economic and social terms?

First, the ‘best wishes’ part of the message plays to the idea of social value. It’s the company reaching out to connect with the society in paying tribute to the monarch’s achievement. It represents a nobler cause- a wealth that’s not simply economic. In paying tribute to the Queen, it’s a chance for the company to very publicly defer to a common sense of nationhood that exists independent of the size of national GDP.

At the same time this company isn’t being altruistic. The prominence of the name of the company, pushes the brand and provides economic value to the company. It’s a reminder of the economic imperative that underwrites so many social gestures.

Conscious or otherwise, the calculation is subtle and certainly subjective. In the end, it comes down to associating the commercial brand with a public act of seeming altruism (such as sending best wishes to the Queen) in a way that’s obvious enough to be commercially beneficial, without being too obvious it becomes an empty and vulgar exercise in the pursuit of self-interest.

Economic, Social: distinguishing between the two

So if these two types of values are used interchangeably, how can we distinguish between them?

Economic value can be fairly narrowly defined as:

“The worth of goods or services as determined by individual preferences as expressed in the market”

While social value is harder to pinpoint and as a result is defined in much broader terms:

“The worth of goods or services for those who live in that society.”

In the last few years, there’s been a lot of work in particular, to try and define what social value is and reach a consensus on a much narrower definition. Much of this work has tended to move away from this view that economic and social value are two separate value systems that coincide. Instead coming to the fore, is the view that far from being a broader kind of value, social value can be understood as a subset of economic value.

Of this work- there are kind of circular explanations on what social value actually is, e.g. social value is whatever social organisations produce:

“Many people have attempted to measure what is sometimes called social, public, or civic value—that is, the value that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social enterprises, social ventures, and social programs create” – Source: SSI Review

There’s the old Marxist notion that social value is critical in the establishment of a communist society:

“the concept of social value is the only available instrument for explaining the economic life of a communistic society” – Source: Schumpeter – Marxists.org

There’s social value as a fuller (broader) explanation of the potential benefits from economic investment:

“Social value is about maximising the impact of public expenditure. It looks at what is created, and sometimes what is forsaken, through a commissioning process. It is therefore also about what we value in the public realm.

Social value considers more than just the financial transaction. It includes:

• Happiness

• Wellbeing

• Health

• Inclusion

• Empowerment

These types of value often accrue to different people, communities or organisations and are not always easy to measure. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be part of a commissioning process.” – Source: NAVCA

Most of those attempting to define social value sooner or later admit it is complicated, such as this from the Demos Report:

“There is no single authoritative definition of ‘social value’”

But all sooner or later, attempt to find a process for transferring non-financial impacts into financial terms.

“‘social value’ refers to wider non-financial impacts of programmes, organisations and interventions, including the wellbeing of individuals and communities, social capital and the environment. These are typically described as ‘soft’ outcomes, mainly because they are difficult to quantify and measure.”

“It is based on stakeholders and puts financial value on the important impacts identified by stakeholders that do not have market values. The aim is to include the values of people that are often excluded from markets in the same terms as used in markets, that is money, in order to give people a voice in resource allocation decisions” – London Business School – Source: Demos (PDF)

But expressing social value in economic terms, and measuring social value in economic units, is what has in effect today rendered social value a subset of economic value. This is curious, given how not long ago it was much more common to think of the economy in terms of what it did for society. In other words, today we’re facing a complete reversal in how we view social and economic value.

Further links

Further examples of when advertisers latch on to national disasters to distasteful effect- Media Post.

In medieval times there was no difference between economic values and social values. It didn’t make much sense to differentiate; the concepts of ‘economy’ and ‘society’ were in their infancy.

On a personal level, life was not thought of in such grand economic or social abstract terms. It was toil, tears and sweat that gave it value. A worker would slog away for the value to themselves, their family, their feudal master and their God. Activities were valued in as far as they contributed to keeping themselves and their loved ones alive (quite apart from anything else).

Economic and social values were bound together under feudalism. This changed with thinkers such as Adam Smith who began to tease out the individual actions that lead to the economic system. We were beginning to understand how our lives could be understood in terms of their potential to generate economic value.

At roughly the same period, Enlightenment ideas put forward by thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, began to coalesce around the idea of the social contract. A succession of thinkers discussed the nature of this contract and as the idea of the social contract took hold, so did the possibility of valuing actions by how they damaged or upheld this contract between the individual and society.

The growth in free trade and the industrial revolution, led to a sense in which it was possible to “do business” and to “do good”. We were learning to separate out the economic from the social, and value each in its own right in the process. Volunteering, as we understand it today, arguably has it’s roots in this period.

Yet, this separation of the economic and the social, exists precariously as if it were based on an illusion that involved two sides of the same coin. Now we act in our economic interest, now we act in our interest as a society. Absurd as it seems to separate this out, we’re now stuck with this way of perceiving our modern lives.

To extend the conceit, whatever its actual basis in historical fact, it’s like there was a moment when the economic and social concept filter was switched on and now there’s no going back. We can no longer not see where economic and social values join and where they are the same thing. Our brain’s inability to process a negative is our undoing here. Once something’s known, we can not actively forget. Just as once we’ve seen both facets of a visual illusion in our mind’s eye, we cannot ‘unknow’ or actively forget what we see. The man above is in the cash machine and however much we tell ourselves that’s not actually right, we can not erase it as a conceptual possibility.

Perhaps due to this phenomenon, this economic and social value differentiator seems to have progressively grown.

A more literal example are omnipresent commercials or advertisements. Typically, these work on two levels. They speak to us as social creatures (they make us laugh, cry, feel shocked). Yet, they also speak to us as economic beings, with a wallet and in need of a product or service. Viewed from one angle we see the sales pitch, the invitation to do business. From the other, we see the human greeting and the invitation to connect with us and consider others, to do good.

The art of the advertising exec is to balance doing business and doing good so exactly, we can not or wish not to see the join. Bad advertising is often where this join is too blatant. Great advertisers, the real mad men, are masters of recreating this ahistorical time when both doing business and doing good were one and the same, and we knew of no such difference.

By understanding strategies employed to reconcile these different paradigms of doing business and doing good, we can begin to unpick what lies behind the values (economic and social) that we give to different activities. My aim in coming blog posts is to explore how this effects the way we value volunteering.

If I’m honest, when I joined YouthNet nearly eight years ago, I was a total newbie when it came to knowing how you go about providing online services to young people.

I came with a geeky fascination of the coming of ‘web’dom. I guess I was also caught up in the idealism of that time; it seemed like almost anything was possible.

<Hey, this time we could really change things [if only we could tweak the algorithm right].>

Early days

The early iteration of YouthNet’s mission set back in the late 1990s, to expand young people’s access to information via the internet, seemed to capture this web-fueled optimism. It had something almost poetic about it: we can use the future (the next generation of technology) to change the future (the next generation of people).

Not only could tech bring about change, it could bring about change for good. Yet, I have to admit looking back, I was ever so slightly sceptical about the impact of online support and information. So often at that time, web services were pale imitations of what was available offline. Like newspapers still trying to be more front page than home page. And if info services were limited, formal online support services were practically non-existent. Users might turn to emailing a celeb or posting on a forum. But most support services were still mainly phone-based. Web services at that time were like skeuomorphic design – the analogue rendered digital.

I think my doubt lay in how to create meaningful relationships with those you served when that contact was entirely online. How well could you really get to know someone who remained anonymous? And if you didn’t know them, how well could you support them? How could you be sure of the relationship, when you couldn’t be sure who you were talking to? [[let alone measure is effectiveness]] How could you build enduring connections between people when so many of the online service’s users came today and were gone tomorrow?

Eight years later, I’ve learnt.

I had dabbled previously. Before coming to YouthNet I had had the chance to experiment with the cruder edges of the web, exploring where digital ideas could begin to intersect with the realities of youth work.

In Guatemala in the late 1990s, I had managed a long running project of street libraries, running educational activities for kids and young people ranging from art to reading, from IT classes to street theatre. As part of this work, I began lugging what at the time passed for new technology, into different marginalised neighbourhoods across Guatemala City.

These were places with zero contact with the internet, such as communities living in the municipal rubbish dump or on the strips of municipal land that hugged the sides of the now disused railway line. The IT class consisted of getting out the chunky laptop, propping it up on a wooden crate and asking if anyone could spare an electrical socket to plug the flash new technology in. Once fired up, we would usually pass the time helping those interested to have a go at typing out their name on an electronic text editor that lit up their words in a wonderful green monochrome font.

Sometimes we would invite kids taking part in Guatemala to exchange messages with kids in other similar projects across the world. Back at base we’d recopy all the messages, translate them and send them out via email to the different projects we had a link with.

I remember one occasion where we ran sessions in different refugee camps in and around Guatemala City after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Some of the messages we received at that time came from New Orleans. Years later, those same families sending messages of support from New Orleans lived through Hurricane Katrina. The shoe was on the other foot, those Guatemalan families who lived through Mitch turned to the web to return the compliment. The roles were reversed. The giver became the receiver, the receiver the giver. The web was facilitating peer support across borders. Although not sure I understood that fully at the time. It’s been working at YouthNet that’s helped me understand.

It’s all gone social

There’s a point in time when some bright spark decided that one of the defining features of the internet was that it had become ‘social‘.

And when the web became social, the conceptual leap to web-based support services suddenly became easier to make. Of course, the internet had been social since The Well in the 1980s, but by the 1990s and start of the web, there wasn’t the critical mass of people needed for it to hit the mainstream. Online information and support was still in its infancy.

Reflecting on it, I understand better what really lies behind this word ‘social’. It’s our way today of saying that the strength of the web is in its capacity to facilitate the building of supportive relationships. But that’s a bit of a mouthful! Saying it’s ‘social’ is shorthand that gets to the heart of it.

So what’s the link between online services and the social web?

It’s important to get the role of new technology in proportion. When I started, there was an almost implicit assumption that tech was the key to unlocking the potential of online services. It stood to reason. Surely, the web only existed because of tech. Get the tech right and online services would build themselves [[in other words, the users will come to you]].

The role of tech

Now, we know the tech part of the equation is marginal to the success of an online support service. Today, we live in a world where open-source products have reduced the competitive advantage that investment in tech alone can get you. The advantage lies elsewhere, it’s the strength of the relationships that underpin the service that are the real differentiator between online communities and online support services now. Of course, bad tech implementation and bad design, can destroy an online service. But good tech implementation and good design does not automatically lead to success. Today, all it does is get you in the running.

In this web-enabled world, digital tech is a foundation on which you can pitch your tent. To set out your stall, you furnish that tent with content. Content attracts users with a common interest and need, and a latent community is born. That content can range from a news article to entire encyclopedia. How you foster that community is the decision that any online support service has to make today. That you can, is no longer in any doubt.

The conditions may be different, encounters may be more fleeting in one way, more enduring in another crossing space and time. But fundamentally, online is clearly another way for people to relate to each other, care for each other and support each other. In some situations it’s better, in others it’s limited. The web is social.

Online-Offline

But there’s something of the case of Benjamin Button about YouthNet’s experience. While most youth organisations were established offline, and have embraced online. YouthNet has gone the other way, embracing the web first and youth work later. Now these worlds are converging. In fact, as these things become increasingly interwoven in how young people’s support services operate, it’s becoming less meaningful to specify online or offline, or single out a platform as a unique path to such and such an outcome.

Online is not the differentiator it was when I started at YouthNet- more and more support services are embracing the web.

After all the web is social because the world is social. It’s the nature of the relationships you build, that make the difference.

What you do once your support service has developed such strong relationships with the people it involves is a whole other challenge- something we’ll cover in the next chapter

Once upon a time things were clear. Or at least it seemed things were clear.

Activities with economic value were on one side (we valued activities that led to a stronger economy). And those with social value were on the other (activities that led to a stronger society).

As a rule of thumb, during this time when people formed an association with the primary goal of generating economic value – it was probably a business.

In contrast, when people formed an association with the primary goal of generating social value – odds on it was charitable.

Of course, this didn’t exclude businesses from having social benefits or charities from having economic benefits. The point was the clarity of purpose.

In the first, do business; and in the second, do good.

Although not mutually exclusive, in this time and place, economic and social values were set in a hierarchy according to the organizational context.

Businesses viewed social value as secondary; it flowed from the successful generation of economic value. At one end of the spectrum were businesses whose pursuit of economic value led them to develop exploitative practices that were decidedly harmful to society, while at the other end were businesses with a clear vision of the social value they wanted their economic success to lead to.

For example, the improvement of workers’ housing conditions was important to a businessman like John Cadbury or Joseph Rowntree, but it depended on productive jobs and profitable manufacturing. Business could be a means to improving the lives of those contributing to the economic value of the business. But to work, it had to adhere to the business’s hierarchy of values. In this hierarchy, economic value ultimately came first, while social value came second.

On the other hand, charities were not oblivious to their economic impact. However, this economic value was secondary to the social value at the heart of their mission. The work of someone like Octavia Hill, who founded charities like the National Trust or the forerunner to Family Action, campaigned for better housing and wellbeing for its own sake. It was fundamentally about intrinsic social values such as human dignity and social justice. The value of the work of the charity was in how it made it more likely we would see the kind of society we all aspired to. Although Hill was keenly aware of the positive economic benefits of decent housing, economic value was not the primary driver of this kind of endeavour. Preserving human dignity and furthering social justice was a good in itself. Social value ultimately came first, economic value was a welcome secondary benefit.

Historically, it’s hard to pinpoint this time that so clearly divided activities into social value and economic value. But regardless of precisely when it was, we live with its impacts today albeit with a twist.

We’ve accepted the idea that activities can be separated out into those with social value and those with economic value. Yet it’s almost come full circle. We now seek to demonstrate the social value of activities that were traditionally mainly about creating economic value and vice versa.

Look no further than huge numbers of advertisers that seek to dress economic activities in the garb of social value (e.g. telecoms companies that bring families together or oil companies that work to protect the environment). From the other perspective, look at the charities or public works that seek to assure us of their economic credentials (e.g. hospitals that can turn a profit or charities with a business plan and satisfied customers).

In the next few posts, I’ll be looking at how we understand social value and economic value today – and its impact in the way volunteering has developed to what it is today.

Under pressure, not least from an economic crisis, volunteering’s changing. Its social value is increasingly seen in economic terms. Volunteering’s formal side is eclipsing its informal side and redefining what it means to volunteer in the process. In the midst of this change, moves to professionalise the development of volunteering face greater scrutiny. Rethinking what it means to be a professional offers us a route to rebalance and reevaluate volunteering’s role in today’s society.

Volunteering is a delicate balance of formal and informal giving.

This distinction between formal and informal volunteering goes beyond the usual characterisation of this balance as structural, i.e. that formal volunteering is mediated by formally constituted organisations and entities, and informal volunteering is unmediated mutual help between individuals and groups.

The formal and informal go to the heart of what volunteering is. Whether that’s to do with how we understand the social need volunteering addresses, how volunteering’s ethos is manifested or how we fund volunteering, again and again we see how volunteering lies at the interface between the formal and informal.

In the last decade, when it comes to valuing volunteering’s contribution to society, there’s been a discernible shift in this balance towards the more formal side of volunteering.

Why aren’t we better able to value the contribution of more informal kinds of volunteering?

Typically, the reaction against this more formal volunteering has come in the guise of calls to rein in bureaucracy. Overcomplicated criminal records checks and inflexible insurance policies have, for many, become emblematic of this unnecessary formalisation that shackles volunteering. It’s part of a narrative that sees this formalisation as a kind of creeping institutionalisation of volunteering.

In the last few years, these appeals for a counterbalancing of this formalisation, now also point towards the trend to professionalise the voluntary sector as the latest example of this phenomenon.

Sparks of initiative and enthusiasm

Initiative and enthusiasm, freedom and fun, all are traits commonly associated with a more informal kind of volunteering. For example, can you think of a time when volunteering has been made more fun by making it more formal? More financially secure and more officially recognised may be. But more fun?

Such a crude approach to the balance in volunteering rarely exists in practice. Of course, it’s possible to be fun and financially secure. The point is that we know the art in volunteer management is in understanding the nuanced interplay between the formal and informal nature of volunteering.

It’s about formally conveying the seriousness of the issues that each volunteer works so hard to address. While at the same time, it’s about respecting the inherent informality that comes with relying solely on the personal commitment of each volunteer to get the job done.

How to balance these components of volunteering is the subject of endless conjecture. Fascinating as it is, the point that’s often overlooked is that this discussion now has an added sense of urgency.

Volunteering under pressure

It’s clear there are a number of pressures, not least the current economic climate, bearing down on this delicate balance between formal and informal kinds of volunteering. These pressures pay scant regard to the consequences for how we value volunteering in our society. Such is what’s at stake, at times it almost feels like this comes down to a struggle for the soul of volunteering itself.

Describing these pressures is extremely difficult to summarise. Michael Sandel provides a recent and comprehensive analysis (“What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets“) of the transition we’ve made from the market economy as a tool, to the market society that brings with it the implicit assumption that social value can be measured in economic terms.

Economic values, social values

The formalities and informalities of volunteering may appear esoteric at first glance- a quaint backwater- but each taken together provides glimpses into a form of giving that’s at it’s most meaningful and resonant. In the past, volunteering, a form of giving, was predominantly valued in social terms. Today, the trend is to value volunteering in dual terms: economic and social.

Fundamentally, it is this trend that accounts for the pressures on the balance of the informal and formal kind of volunteering. Economic value is suspicious of the imprecision of the informal and the dependence on the qualitative. Seekers of economic value long for the clarity and certainty of the formal, so often transferable into the quantitative.

It does not need to be this way. There is a balance to be struck. Greater professionalisation if introduced imaginatively, can lead to a better balance of the formal and informal aspects of volunteering.

Volunteering at one with its formal self, commands respect and radiates the self-confidence of an activity that can truly claim to change society. Volunteering’s formal side provides the paperwork that justifies the assertion to be more than mere pastime.

A volunteering that embraces its more informal nature is fleet of foot and capable of reaching the parts other kinds of social action can’t quite reach. It’s often volunteering’s informalities that ensure that when we give in this way, we do so as freely and authentically as we do. It’s giving without pretension. Social change without hubris.

Professionalisation and volunteering

And so to the issue of professionalisation. If it is to succeed in volunteering, we need to be capable of explaining how professionalisation will develop this informal side of volunteering, as well as the formal side.

If the road to professionalisation leads to an even greater imbalance in how we value volunteering, it may come at the expense of freedom and fun.

This requires a complete rethink about what professionalisation means for those involved in the development of volunteering. Too often with most areas of work, greater professionalisation is associated with greater formalisation (greater institutionalisation). According to Richard Reeves and John Knell, there are four principle ways in which professions can define themselves:

1. Restricting entry into the labour market, e.g. by requiring specific formal qualifications
2. Organising labour to maximise the profession’s political and economic leverage
3. Creation and articulation of a professional ethos (set of shared values by which the profession’s work is conducted)
4. Establishing recognition of the impact of the profession’s work

On the face of it, it’s not evident how any of these aspects of professionalisation help volunteering to professionalise informally, as well as formally. Herein lies the challenge for volunteering’s professional development.

There’s a crucial reason for this, which takes us back to this struggle for the soul of volunteering. While other professions have achieved professionalisation replacing amateurs with paid equivalents, for volunteering this presents all kinds of contradictions. Instead, it must navigate a way through to genuinely fuse professional ethos with amateur spirit.

In fact, this is a view that’s increasingly gaining momentum in the public and private sectors, where the question of balancing the formal and informal is more tactical, than fundamental to how it values its work, as arguably it is for the voluntary sector.

Historically, professions have developed assuming what is best for the profession is also best for their customers, clients, patients or service users. Such user groups have had little say in the development of the professions. Ever so slowly, this is changing. Increasingly, professionals seek to understand the ideas and experience of the people who use their services.

In volunteering, we’re equals

There is an attempt to encourage the traditional professions to embrace a culture of egalitarianism, and move away from an overreliance on hierarchy.

There’s a growing body of academic literature on characterizing social relationships in this way that’s developing theoretical frameworks to better explain why these should be distinct social roles. For example, the work of Alan Fiske and Nick Haslam is a case in point which identifies four forms of sociality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. It’s interesting to note how the concept of ‘social value’ is arguably stronger in Communal Sharing and Equality Matching, while the concept of ‘economic value’ is stronger in Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.

The demands for greater participation have been energised even further by growing adoption of social media and the networking facilitated by the web. The professions, particularly in commerce, are waking up to the value of the informal. Businesses hail the hidden value of serendipity of networks for their efficiency, they praise personalisalition for its potential to connect with customers, and promote gathering together in more participatory fashion such as in unconferences. Serendipity, personalisation and participation are all products of an informal approach.

Now consider where the case of volunteering fits into this story of change affecting the established professions.

Volunteering is premised on the cooperation of all involved. As a result, in volunteering the value of understanding between those managing volunteers, the volunteers themselves and the service users, has long been viewed as so central, it goes to the heart of what makes volunteering what it is.

Volunteer professionals often lack the equivalent authority invested in a doctor or a lawyer donning the trappings of formality. The volunteers who gift their labour, knowledge and experience freely, have a clear claim on informality. They are not beholden to any formal contract or wage agreement. Service users supported by volunteers are unlike the patients often caught in a moment of need and expected to submit to where they come in the established hierarchy.

The very strength of the link between a service user and a volunteer is its informal character which bestows it with a flexibility and adaptability more formal roles just can’t have.

The relationships in volunteering are often naturally much more egalitarian than hierarchical. Hierarchy has been unable to take root in volunteering due to the need to blend and balance the formal and the informal. Could it be a fear of hierarchy that lies behind the worry that professionalism leads to a volunteering less free and fun, dampening the spark of initiative and enthusiasm?

Rethinking professionalism

The starting point of any process to introduce professionalisation into how we develop volunteering, must be a belief that volunteering professionalism is founded on a mastery of both its formal and informal elements.

It must reaffirm the spirit of egalitarianism on which volunteering is founded.

It must accord the links that join the professionals, the volunteers and the service users, with the value they deserve.

At a time when the established professions are searching for a less formal path, it would be more than a little ironic if the volunteering profession headed in the opposite direction.

We must learn how to value the unique blend of the formal and the informal that’s testament to volunteering’s enormous heritage.

If we have to rethink professionalism in the process, then so be it.

It must reject the pressures to value volunteering’s social outcomes in economic terms.

This is not a simple challenge. For starters, if there are to be professionals in volunteering they require payment- and this presumes a business model that services this payment.

However, this doesn’t mean that we should jettison the one model that makes it all worth while: the tried and tested model of volunteering. The formal and the informal side by side.

Further discussion

The question: “Has the professional management of volunteering diminished that vital spark of initiative and enthusiasm?” will be debated at the Volunteer Fair (Directory of Social Change) – 31st May 2012.

Background notes on this post with research on informal and formal aspects of volunteering and views on bureaucracy. 

Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein – A Short Film from Ian MacKenzie on Vimeo.

In this post, I thought I’d just paraphrase Charles Eisenstein (rough and ready transcript) from the video above. He’s an engaging writer and speaker on the role of the gift economy today.

I’ve pulled out the part of the explanation which is particularly pertinent to a lot of the subjects I’ve raised on the blog. For example, how volunteering connects with the idea of the gift economy.

“A new story of self…

Money is an agreement. It doesn’t have value all by itself. It has value because people agree that it has value.

Scarcity is built into the system. On the most obvious level this is because of interest bearing debt. Any time a bank lends money into existence, there is a corresponding level of debt. And because there’s always interest payable on the money, the amount of debt is always greater than the money in existence. It essentially throws people into competition with one another -for never enough money.

Growth is another thing that is built into our money system. If you’re a bank, you are going to lend to those people who are going to create new goods and services, so that they can profit and pay you back.

You’re not going to lend to people who don’t create goods and services.

So money goes to those who will create even more of it.

Growth means you need to find something that was once nature and turn it into a good/commodity; or find a gift relationship and turn it into a service.

You have to find something that people once got for free, or that people did for one another for free. You take it away from them, and then you have to sell it back to them- somehow.

By turning things into commodities, you cut people off from nature, in the same way that we’re cut off from community (when gift relationships are transformed into relationships between service user and service provider).

(The money economy encourages us to) look at nature as just a bunch of stuff. This leaves us very lonely. And it leaves us with many human needs that go unmet.

(One way we) fulfill this hunger (is) through purchasing, through buying things.

We know life is a gift. Well, if we know we have received a gift, then our natural response is gratitude.

In a gift society, if you have more than you need, you share it. This is how you build up status. It’s also how you build up security too. If you build up gratitude, then people are going to look after you too.

No gifts, no community.

(For this reason) you can’t just have community as an add-on to a monetized life. You have to actually need each other.”

More here: Charles Eisenstein

It occurs to me that with the changes currently taking place with volunteering, that we could be going through this process for a second time.

We’ve already seen the money economy take things we did for one another as gifts, and turn them into paid-for commercialised services.

An example Eisenstein frequently cites is food preparation. Rather than cook for one another (in our families and communities) as was the case, it’s more typical now to eat food that we purchase and that’s been prepared outside our home by others.

In this way, Eisenstein suggests, the gift economy has been displaced by the expansion of paid-for services.

However, with the recent growth in volunteering, the gift economy has struck back.

Meals on Wheels are services typically driven by volunteers, who give their time to help distribute and offer meals to the vulnerable in our communities. It’s a gift economy solution to a gap, left by the trend that’s transformed food preparation from gift into a paid-for service.

Gradually, voluntary services that sprung up spontaneously as expressions of the gift economy spirit, are being encouraged to present themselves as services. This is the money economy reasserting itself.

For example, anecdotally there are many cases of volunteers being told that for the sake of financial cost and economic efficiency, they should cut down on the time spent having a chat and fostering a relationship with those they deliver to.

The influence of the money system is deep and profound. It has changed the way giving relationships make our society and economy what they are today.

If you want to make the case for the value of volunteering, there are broadly two lines you can take.

Arguments for the value of volunteering

The first is to argue that volunteering has a social utility, and the second is to argue that volunteering has an economic utility. Traditionally, people have tended to use the first line: that the merits of volunteering lie in its value to society. However, over the last quarter of a century or so the second line, pointing to the economic value of volunteering has gained credence.

As the 2008 economic downturn bit, a curious thing happened. These arguments became enmeshed. Many people in the voluntary sector began to argue the economic value line when it came to inputs (what’s needed), but continued to argue the social value line when it came to outputs (what results). Conversely, many policy makers began to argue the social value line when it came to inputs, but went on to argue for the economic value of volunteering when it came to outputs.

This is how it worked:

Volunteering advocates

As investment in volunteering came under pressure with the downturn, so advocates for volunteering highlighted even more vigorously the need for financial investment in volunteer management and infrastructure. The reason they cited for this financial investment was the social value of volunteering, not the economic value of volunteering.

In fact, when it comes to economic value, many in volunteering were resistant or even sceptical about the merits of expressing volunteering’s outputs in economic terms, pointing out it exposed volunteering programmes to all kinds of unwelcome comparisons involving job substitution and exploitative work practices, devoid of social value.

Policy makers

On the other hand, policy makers seized on the need for volunteering to become much more socially acceptable and valued as an input. This new embrace of volunteering across society they argued was vital at a time of economic fragility. In fact, the economic situation meant we didn’t have any other choice. If policy could remove the social barriers to volunteering, it made economic sense as a value for money solution. In fact, volunteering could actually produce a return on investment.

So how did we get to this point?

The search for clues as to how volunteering advocates and policy wonks got their economic and social value arguments intertwined, takes us back to the 1960s. In the 1960s, economists started to become concerned with the decline in the UK’s manufacturing base and the relative growth of the services sector.

This concern grew and grew into the 1970s and 1980s.  Economists at this time had become used to dividing economies into three parts:

• the extraction and production of raw materials
• the transformation of raw materials into products
• the provision of services to consumers and businesses

With the growth in the relative importance of the services sector of the UK economy, attention was turning to the cost of labour in delivering services. While increasing labour costs could be covered by productivity gains in manufacturing, in services where productivity was often flat, it was not so clear how an increase in wages could be paid for out of productivity growth.

An artist’s labour

In 1966, a couple of American economists called William Baumol and William Bowen published a study called: Performing arts, the economic dilemma: a study of problems common to theater, opera, music and dance. In it they argued that the arts faced a problem in how in it covered the costs of input (wages), through earned income from the output of the arts. Baumol and Bowen argued that this was because an artist’s labour could not be rendered more productive, as was the case with manufacturing industries.

To illustrate this, Baumol and Bowen used an example that has become seminal in modern economics. The example, they chose was a string quartet performing Mozart. This string quartet, they said, requires the same amount of labour today as it did 200 years ago. It requires the same amount of people and same amount of time to perform.

From this standpoint, the classical musician is as productive today as they were 25 years ago, while a technician in a car production plant is many, many times more productive today than they were a quarter of a century ago. Baumol and Bowen concluded, in what was later termed Baumol’s cost diesease that the arts, which is intrinsically labour intensive, is destined to have a flat productivity rate, now and going into the future.

Baumol and Bowen were fascinated with how despite having a flat rate of productivity, the performing arts managed to survive as its costs increased. Conventional economic wisdom explained that manufacturing industries could afford to pay higher wage costs to those providing the labour through increases in productivity.

This productivity growth was often based on at least five factors:

1. Technology improves over time
2. Capital investment
3. Skills of labourer develop
4. Management of production process is refined
5. Economies of scale can be made

Industries with productivity growth can afford to pay higher wages without always charging higher prices. However, more labour intensive services such as education, health and social care face an income gap as they increase wages to keep up with other sectors of the economy. The result is that industries where productivity is flat, costs and prices just keep going up. This affects everything from football tickets to repairing worn out products through to nursing.

Baumol’s cost disease

Baumol’s cost disease helps explain this sense that there are two economies, rather than one. There’s one where we’ve got used to paying less for more for manufactured goods (such as from supermarkets or clothes shops), while we pay more for the same for services (such as the theatre, child care or train fares). Labour intensive services can become more efficient.

They can improve their use of technology, invest in new equipment, skill up, improve management and merge. However, in labour intensive services where productivity is flat, these measures tend to only have a marginal or short term impact. Instead, sooner or later, and particularly in an economic downturn when money’s tight, attention turns to measures that reduce the cost of labour (typically services biggest single expense). Other than increasing productivity, this can be down in a number of ways, including:

1. Decreasing the quality of the service
2. Decreasing the quantity of the service (supply)
3. Increasing price charged for the service
4. Increasing amount of unearned income (e.g. grants, donations, etc)

There was also a fourth way to combat higher service costs without huge increases in productivity. In the economic jargon of the time this was to increase the non-monetary compensation of those offering their labour to provide the service. This meant offsetting wage costs with non-monetary compensation such as training or perks, but it also meant involving volunteers and interns.

Volunteering and the services sector

As the services sector grew in the UK, so volunteering and interning began to become sucked into economic strategy. The idea that you could attach an economic value to volunteering, suddenly took it out of the gift economy and placed it squarely within the services sector. As the services sector of the UK has expanded, so did many voluntary and non-governmental organisations who began familiarising themselves with the growing sector they found themselves in.

As volunteering expanded through the 1980s and 1990s, it had begun to catch the eye of policy makers and think tank wonks. Increasingly policy makers became interested in the economic value of volunteering to the UK economy. The focus on the economic value of volunteering also suited the interests of those in the up and coming volunteering sector who wished volunteering to better recognised and appreciated.

Having a better way of understanding the economic value of the output of volunteering, provided the evidence base they required for arguing for greater financial investment in volunteer management and infrastructure. As Susan Ellis, a key volunteer management advocate put it: “Many resent the hold that the dollar has on our thinking and would prefer to live in a world in which human activities would be assessed and esteemed on the basis of their contributions to others. But we don’t live in such a world yet. Only things we value in dollars and cents get the attention of decision-makers.”

Economic value of volunteering

Many recognised that it’s the economic value argument that holds greater sway with policy makers, than the social value of volunteering argument as many in the volunteer management profession prefer.

Gradually, since 2000, more and more work has been done to establish the economic value of volunteering in the UK. The UK Civil Society Almanac in 2007/08 put the economic value of formal volunteers at an estimated £22.7 billion to the UK economy.

Kakoli Roy and Suzanne Ziemek in ˜On the economics of volunteering explained the idea: develop a conceptual framework to measure the economic contribution made by volunteer labor, thereby hoping to raise its societal appreciation. At the same time, governmental organisations were keen to highlight the economic value of volunteering. In 2001 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on governments to establish the economic value of volunteering.

Then, in its 2005 resolution on the follow-up to the Implementation of the International Year of Volunteers, the UN General Assembly further encouraged Governments, with the support of civil society, to build up a knowledge base on the subject, to disseminate data and to expand research on other volunteer-related issues, including in developing countries  (UN General Assembly, 2005b).

In a 2008 resolution the European Parliament encouraged Member States and regional and local authorities to  recognize the value of volunteering in promoting social and economic cohesion. In 2011, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) published its ˜Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work that aimed to make it easier to include volunteering cross-national comparative analysis in economic statistics.

The economic crisis

As volunteering embraced the economic value argument, the economic climate changed. In 2008, the banking crisis in the UK led to the first signs of pressure on an unprecedented period of growth in voluntary sector services in the UK. As a result of the economic crisis, the old underlying tension surfaced, first identified by Baumol in the 1960s.

Sooner or later, the pressure of labour costs catches up with labour intensive services. As with the 1960s, the policy makers faced six possible responses. The wonks scratched their heads and went through the options. While critics pointed to signs of decreasing quality and quantity of services and increasing costs (charges), policy makers attempted to offset these through recourse to finding alternative sources of unearned and earned income, productivity gains (so-called efficiencies was a buzzword for all political parties) and the increased use of labour that’s compensated through non-monetary means, including volunteering.

In 2011, the UK Government published its Giving White Paper. It highlighted alternative sources of income, pinpointed new technology and productivity gains for giving to charities, and went on to promote volunteering. It was exactly as the theory had predicted. What was novel was that it used a social value argument for volunteering.

The White Paper announced that the government would lead by example and volunteer in the hope that it would inspire people to do what they can to support their communities and will demonstrate that social action can fit around people’s busy lives in ways that benefit both the volunteer and the chosen organisations. Volunteering, in other words, was something socially valuable that all (even Ministers) should input into.

Included in the White Paper was a commitment to developing impact reporting and a mention of the work of New Philanthropy Capital (NPC). NPC, according to its website, was set up by Goldman Sachs staff who were trying to find the best way to give away money to charity. NPC is part of growing movement of philanthrocapitalists who believe economic and financial knowledge can be applied to help resolve social problems. In short, they apply economic value to entrenched social problems.

Based on this philanthrocapitalist approach, policy makers began to reverse engineer the economic value argument, starting with the output they wanted (hardheaded, independent, high-quality information to be able to decide where to invest their capital). They had ended up with a social value of volunteering argument for the input where everyone, even the Prime Minister, should take the time to volunteer.

Reducing labour costs

At the same time, since 2008 and the banking crisis, volunteer management and infrastructure has come under increasing financial pressure as with the rest of the service sector. This pressure has manifested itself in different ways. In particular, these growing comparisons between the volunteering and rest of the service sector have led to tensions.

For instance, many services across the service sector are relying increasingly on internships and work experience (e.g. the government’s work programme) to reduce labour costs, often drawing comparisons to volunteer programmes. As cuts are made to services, comparisons are being made by trade unions, statutory bodies and others, between the roles of volunteers and the roles of paid staff made redundant to reduce labour costs.

Many advocates for volunteer management and infrastructure, have rebutted these comparisons by employing the social value of volunteering argument. Essentially, this rebuttal rests on the point that it’s not valid to compare paid roles to volunteer roles, because paid roles are justified on an economic value basis, while volunteer roles are justified on a social value basis.

Likewise, it’s not valid to compare internships or work experience with volunteering, because one follows an economic rationale, while the other has a social value one. It’s as if the social value argument puts a firewall around volunteering during these pressures resulting from the economic downturn, while an over reliance on the economic value argument for volunteering exposes volunteering to complex dilemmas such job substitution.

Curiously, it’s the reverse of the policy makers position. Volunteering advocates seek to argue for the economic value of volunteer management when it comes to input, by campaigning on the message that volunteer management merits an appropriate financial investment. Yet volunteering advocates frequently turn to the more traditional social value arguments when it comes to outputs, even though they tend to emphasis the need for economic recognition when it comes to funding volunteer management.

Conclusion

This current economic downturn has revealed how closely enmeshed the arguments for both the economic value and social value of volunteering have become. It’s demonstrated that those policy makers calling economic-style outputs for volunteering, should logically also be much more open to social value type outputs. It’s also demonstrated that those calling for increased financial investment in volunteer management, should be more prepared to explore the dilemmas that the use of economic value inputs logically implies for outputs, alongside the more traditional social value arguments for volunteering.

 

What’s happening to volunteering? It’s an oversimplification to say volunteering is becoming increasingly institutionalised. However, something is definitely afoot.

In this post, I’m going to try and break down what this process of institutionalisation of volunteering might mean.

I think it’s possible to identify different levels so I’m going to present six possibles.

Whatever the case, what’s happening to volunteering is complex.

Institutionalisation covers a lot of ground. It’s important to see it as a continuum. In the middle of the process it’s hard to categorically say whether this or that kind of volunteering is “institutionalised”. At the extremes, it tends to get clearer.

Institutionalisation is also a gradual process. It’s been developing over many decades, if not centuries.

Looking at the kinds of volunteering around today, the picture is clearly very mixed. The extent to which institutionalisation of volunteering is happening, probably depends on more immediate factors like the nature of the volunteering in question and the scale on which the volunteering is taking place.

Setting out the levels can be useful to help us better understand what’s influencing the development of volunteering today.

1. Networks – modes of giving (non-financial)

A key sign of institutionalisation is the shift away from giving to people we know, such as with one-to-one giving or communal giving that’s rooted in specific communities. With institutionalisation there’s a distinct shift towards giving to people we don’t know, through intermediaries like an institution such as the church, the state or an formally constituted organisation. In fact, as this aspect of giving has become more institutionalised, we’re often giving to people we don’t know, even after we’ve volunteered. For example, a volunteer giving blood will rarely know the specific individuals they are helping.

• Give to people we know (communal or one-to-one giving) – direct reciprocity (level of a community)
• Give to people we don’t know (via institutions, state, organisations) – indirect (generalised) reciprocity (level of a society)

This dimension of giving to strangers is an important feature of the institutionalisation of volunteering. Many definitions of volunteering deliberately exclude giving to relatives, the effect of this is to focus volunteering on the more institutionalised type of giving.

In the Giving Green Paper, we highlighted a number of schemes across the country which facilitate and promote sharing between people who may never have met before – for example, time banking and complementary currencies. [Giving White Paper - Cabinet Office, UK Government]

Mutualism and self-help which by most definitions are recognised as volunteering, tend to be based on a model of giving that’s more aligned to direct reciprocity. Close-knit, smaller scale communities where givers and receivers know each other and reciprocate in turn, are a far cry from the more institutionalised volunteering of giving to strangers, that’s behind most common usage of the term ‘volunteering’ today.

Indirect giving: service user and provider

There’s a growing assimilation culturally, of this principle of a more generalised reciprocity. The growth of this principle is connected to the development of volunteering where people frequently step forward to help those they don’t know. We don’t even expect to meet or get to know those we help directly. And if we do get to know them, we often assume there’s not a direct gift relationship between the service user and provider.

It’s ironic, but this change is often framed by the language we use. When it was introduced, the term ‘service user’ jarred with the notion of gift exchange where both participants are giver and receiver, both are users and providers.

It’s the norm that the giver doesn’t expect the receiver to be able to help them in the future and reciprocate. The rise of the concept of social capital is an attempt to quantify this proliferation of generalised reciprocity, driven partly by the development of volunteering.

Institutionalising reciprocity: filling the tangibility gap

The growth of giving on the web has reopened this discussion about these different kinds of reciprocity: direct and indirect, in human relationships. Technology seems to offer new ways to render reciprocity more tangible, something policymakers aspire to. When a reciprocal relationship is direct the impact is usually very tangible. Tangibility has become an issue because of the push to more indirect forms of reciprocity, behind this is the trend for greater institutionalisation. It feels like we turn to institutionalisation to fill this tangibility gap.

Online communities are opening up new opportunities to forge ‘giving’ networks across and beyond societies in new and different ways. Much online giving in this way has challenged the presumption that giving will become increasingly institutionalised. The rise of the language of participation presents a renewed challenge to the presumed dichotomy between user and provider.

Online communities either provide new ways for givers to connect with receivers and reciprocate, or it enables gift economies to scale without the need for formal and traditional intermediaries such as a charity, state agencies or religious entities.

2. Resources – financial capital

The next level is understanding the growing importance of financial resources in enabling volunteering to take place. Volunteering that’s financed through free (libre) donations (without strings attached) is not institutionalised. Often these donations are small gifts in kind, where it’s the volunteers themselves who pick up the costs incurred as part of their volunteering. However, the greater the operational costs and the bigger the need for financial certainty, the more institutionalisation is on the cards. It becomes a cycle: growing volunteering, requires more resources, which in turn require higher volunteering outputs, which down the line need yet more resources.

Volunteering at scale often requires an investment that needs to be resourced by mechanisms such as:

• grants that are formally agreed,
• service contracts that are commissioned,
• services that are purchased/transacted, or;
• funds restricted to a particular charitable purpose

While these costs are diffuse and low level, volunteering activities remain largely uninstitutionalised. However, as costs and scale of demands increases, so does the pressure to institutionalise the volunteering doing the heavy lifting. Moreover, there’s often pressure institutionalisation creep from those entities that agree to bankroll the development of volunteering.

• Volunteering as an end in itself – financed by free/libre donations not linked to actions (generalised)
• Volunteering as a means to an end – financed by commission, contract or transaction – linked to actions (particular)

Over time, these different models of funding, whether by grant or by commission, seep into the way we talk and think about volunteering. For instance, describing volunteering as a currency (see complementary currencies as referred in the Giving White Paper), a type of gift exchange or means of achieving an organisation’s mission. These developments are a direct response to the changing nature of the way volunteering is financed. This growing requirement to finance volunteering at scale, has led to greater institutionalisation.

Scaling and distribution of volunteering

Once again, the web presents opportunities to rethink this model by reducing the costs of scaling volunteering, distributed giving and linking the giver with receiver. These elements effectively counter the trend towards approaching volunteering a means to an end. If the same scale of volunteering impact can be achieved through distributing the workload across a network of volunteers, there’s the prospect of new funding models where the burden of funding volunteering can also be distributed. Currently, the ways in which these models can be applied to volunteering is being explored, but it offers a possible route to funding high-impact volunteering in a less restricted, less institutionalised manner.

Where volunteering activities are primarily financed by libre donations that are unrestricted, volunteering can afford to be primarily an end in itself. However, as funding begins to become increasingly tied to more and more specific outcomes and deliverables, so volunteering becomes primarily thought of as a means to an end, and takes on the feel of greater institutionalisation. Institutionalisation, after all, comes about largely because it is a means to an end.

3. Aims: rights and duties

Volunteering as a gift relationship is built on the twin ingredients of freedom and impact: positive personal freedom and beneficial social impact.

The motivation for volunteering can be explained in terms of rights and duties. On a very simple level, volunteering balances the right of the individual to be able to freely give as they wish, with the acceptance of the duty to bring about beneficial social impact. All volunteering activities are a mixture of these two principles in varying amounts.

• Volunteering as a way to give as you wish (rights-based)
• Volunteering as a way to achieve socially beneficial outcomes (duty-based)

Volunteering that’s low level and on a short time scale, may often not be able to demonstrate tried and tested impacts. However, they have enormous value in that they are based on people freedom to respond to needs they identify and wish to tackle. At the same time, it’s this kind of volunteering that tends to be less institutionalised.

On the other hand, volunteering activities as they become more established and embedded in a community, engender a duty to maintain and support this work on the part of its volunteers, where the beneficial impact is a matter of record.

An example of a voluntary activity that has become thoroughly institutionalised over many years after becoming a key civic duty is jury service. In ancient Greece, jurors were selected from volunteers. Today, it is barely recognisable as a volunteering activity, given the sanctions available to the state to enforce it. However, it is still a service with no pecuniary reward to the individual carrying out their duty and responding to their jury summons. The juror takes an oath to give “a true verdict”. As such, this is still a giving activity of sorts, but one so weighted towards duty that it has become profoundly institutionalised. Despite its historical roots, it is no longer volunteering in any meaningful sense.

History is full of these kinds of examples where voluntary action has emerged out of the liberty to respond to a social need, and once established has become a question of service and civic duty. From the police to firefighters, from the military to medics, from holders of political office to religious leaders. Each have very distinct histories. All though show how volunteering can become institutionalised over time, by making the transition from individual responses to immediate need, through to an acceptance of an established duty.

4. Ethos: culture of volunteering

As volunteering becomes more institutionalised it is increasingly possible to codify and articulate the ethos and moral values central to it.

• Amateur: uncodified ethos, unorganised labour, unrestricted access to the labour market (no regulated training and qualifications)
• Professional: codified ethos, organised labour, restricted access to labour market (regulated training and qualifications)

The term volunteering is value-laden. However, these values whilst they remain uncodified are a matter of individual preference and public debate. Once they become codified, there is a body that is credited with the authority to adjudicate and make substantive decisions about what that ethos is. It’s no longer simply recommended good practice, it’s enforceable practice.

As institutionalisation progresses, this authority restricts access to the labour market by enforcing sanctions and upholding quality standards. For example, the General Medical Council can decide which medical practitioners are registered, while Ofsted can decide which childminders are registered to provide childcare. Professional bodies can organise labour to leverage political and economic power to achieve its strategic objectives. Qualifications and training are no longer simply added value, they become the minimum requirement to entry.

At this point volunteer management has a body of knowledge and different professional codes exists around the world, there are no professional qualifications that serve as a minimum requirement. There are more and more people who see themselves as volunteer managers, knowledge of ethical codes and professional standards is not high.

5. Structure: formal and informal volunteering

How volunteering activities are structured is one of the most obvious and explicit forms of the institutionalisation of volunteering.

• Informal: individuals, groups and unconstituted associations (subject to general law)
• Formal: (formally constituted) organisations, charity, state, corporations, companies (subject to specific law)

There is a clear range of structures starting with individuals on their own and groups that are completely unconstituted, right through to other structures such as charities, companies and state agencies that are formally constituted and legally recognised. These more formal structures provide legal and bureaucratic frameworks in which volunteering takes place. Formal volunteering is in this sense closer to being institutionalised.

6. Need: Services

Volunteering provides services addressing the needs of the people using these voluntary services.

• Particular: volunteering that addresses the needs of a specific community
• General: volunteering that addresses the needs of all society

There is a range of these needs from those providing ‘particular’ services, to others providing ‘general’ or ‘universal’ services. Volunteering activities have traditionally been understood as adding value to public services. The difference has to do with the how widely those services are understood to hold moral responsibility to those in need and be publicly accountable to them.

Services that aim to provide particular services to specific users, have a limited moral responsibility to a specific community. However, over the last 50-60 years in the UK, public services have traditionally been delivered by the same agency (the state) that accepts this broader moral responsibility to all those in need across the whole society (whether that extends just locally or nationally).

An example might be the difference between the UK Neighbourhood Watch network and the police. Neighbourhood Watch provides a service in particular communities where people volunteer. The police service takes on a more general responsibility across all society in the UK. While Neighbourhood Watch might be able to reasonably argue their accountability is restricted to where they’re present, the accountability of the police is much broader, i.e. they’re an institution. The greater this moral responsibility and accountability of voluntary services extends, the closer it comes to institutionalisation. Another interesting case in point is the relationship in the UK between the RNLI’s (voluntary) search and rescue responsibilities and the responsibility of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (state).

The policy ideas floated along with the Big Society have courted controversy precisely because they seek to shift the moral responsibility of voluntary services from limited sections of the community, to taking on moral responsibility for the needs of society as a whole. For example, while a voluntary services might in the past seek to add value by filling the gaps not met by public libraries, now voluntary services are aiming not just to fill the gaps, but to take over the public library itself. Once it does, it takes on a wider moral responsibility for all users needs. In addition, volunteering is positioning itself as a means to an end and angling for commissions to deliver specific services. This all adds up to greater institutionalisation of volunteering.

Conclusions

So how can we identify institutionalised volunteering? Why would we want to?

This is not about oversimplisticly labeling institutionalised volunteering as bad, and volunteering that isn’t institutionalised as good.

It’s about fighting for a balanced approach to volunteering that includes both volunteering that’s institutionalised and volunteering that’s not. Neither is necessarily better than the other.

In practical terms we need to encourage:

• Policymakers to address volunteering in the round, and not just focus on an institutionalised outlook of volunteering and giving
• Researchers need to spend more time to understand and analyse the complex relationship between volunteering and institutionalisation
• Those working and volunteering in the voluntary sector need to develop networks and resources that span the whole of the volunteering sector
• Those in the media need to discuss and communicate a more rounded version of volunteering that includes both the non-institutionalised and the institutionalised aspects of volunteering

Towards the state’s sphere of influence

Different volunteering projects, programmes and initiatives may fit one or more of the six levels of institutionalisation outlined above. However, it’s interesting to note how these factors stack up. In particular, how as volunteering leans towards institutionalisation, it’s also in many ways more within the sphere of influence of the state.

 

For example, with institutionalised volunteering the following factors prevail:

1. Volunteering that’s oriented to a mode of giving that’s based on indirect reciprocity
2. Volunteering that’s financed through exchange/transactions such as commissions, agreements or contracts, and as such, is developed as a means to achieving a specific end
3. Volunteering that’s well established and fosters volunteers primarily by appealing to their sense of duty or service
4. Volunteering that’s developed within clear codified professional values and ethos
5. Volunteering that takes place within the structure of formally constituted organisations
6. Volunteering that aims to deliver services with a general remit and a sense of moral responsibility for the needs of society in general

Conclusion

Institutionalised volunteering is no better or worse than volunteering that’s not institutionalised. The reason for understanding this distinction is to ensure we maintain a broad approach and an open mind when considering different types of volunteering.

All too often, it’s the more institutionalised volunteering that attracts debate, resources and thinking. As a result, it’s this volunteering verging on institutionalisation that dominates when we think about developments in volunteering. In particular, it is certainly worth looking at whether this is due at least in part to the increasing influence of the state on the development of volunteering in the UK.

If we allow this one-sided view of volunteering to dominate, ultimately we’ll become more fragmented as a sector. If we learn to include these alternative approaches to volunteering, the development of volunteering in the future will be all the more rounded for it.

“We shall always have alongside the great range of public services, the voluntary services which humanize our national life and bring it down from the general to the particular.” – Clement Attlee

This quote from Clement Attlee, quoted in Briggs and Macartney, Toynbee Hall: First Hundred Years (1984) 35-6, via An Introduction to the Voluntary Sector – Eds. Justin Davis Smith, Colin Rochester and Rodney Hedley (Ch 1, The Voluntary Tradition, J Davis Smith).

“Many of us have been in this business of labelling and re-labelling the concept of voluntary service. I now find this process irritating – politicians labelling and re-labelling, capturing and re-capturing something which anybody with any sense knows that, regardless of government or regardless of the results of a General Election, is the essence of English society – the concept that people go out and do things which they are not forced to do and which they are not paid to do.” – Douglas Hurd

˜Society’s responsibility for the irresponsible individual’, Friday 23 October 1998, by The Rt. Hon Lord Hurd of Westwell CH CBE, Chair of the Prison Reform Trust

Summary

The relationship between the state and voluntary sector has been a source of controversy for many years. Frank Furedi believes that the state’s close interest in volunteering has led to it becoming institutionalised. Does the prospect of official and unofficial volunteering threaten to split the voluntary sector in two, between those who cooperate with the state’s agenda for volunteering and those who don’t?

The following post started off life as an off-the-cuff analysis of Frank Furedi’s recent article in the Australian, “Do good, but do it our way” (3rd December 2011). You can’t read it there (unless you subscribe to that paper), but you can read the full version on his website.

Furedi’s opinion piece touches on the thorny issue of how the state promotes and supports volunteering. If (for arguments sake) you conflate volunteering and voluntary services, this is not a new issue, as the quote from Attlee intimates.

Ironically, Furedi’s criticism is that volunteering is precisely not doing what Clement Attlee identified as voluntary services’ great contribution when he worked at Toynbee Hall over a hundred years ago. Attlee famous for presiding over the creation of the modern welfare state in the UK, worked at Toynbee Hall as Secretary for around a year early in his career. Furedi asserts that voluntary services are effectively being constrained by the state in how they can ‘humanize our national life’ and how they can go from the ‘general to the particular’. Not to put to fine a point on it: volunteering is becoming institutionalised.

There’s confusion about how we resolve the issues that arise, the more the state gets involved in the development of volunteering and voluntary services. Issues such as independence, influence and professionalisation of the voluntary sector are just some examples. Meta Zimmeck and Colin Rochester’s recent summary of the issues with the Compact (an agreement between government and the voluntary and community sector first published in 1998) provides more practical examples of the kinds of issues in formalising the relationship between government and the voluntary sector.

We’ve come a long way since the antipathy and suspicion of the Thatcher years, the formalised partnerships with the Deakin Commission and the Compact under Blair, the grand plans under Brown, and the cuts and optimism with Cameron’s Big Society. However, while prime ministers come and go, volunteering appears to be on an inexorable rise on the policy agenda. But is this evidence of a creeping institutionalisation of volunteering as Furedi suggests?

Although I don’t buy Furedi’s central argument about a golden age of volunteering and public virtue, behind his column lies a pertinent question about the institutionalisation of the voluntary sector. We ignore it at our peril.

• What are the implications of the state’s steadily growing involvement in the volunteering agenda?
• Is institutionalisation an inevitable part of the government and the voluntary sector working closer together?

Since the 1970s in particular, governments across the world have taken an increasing interest in volunteering, providing it with greater recognition and financial assistance. Is institutionalisation the next step in this evolution of the relationship? Will the state get a greater and greater say in the kind of social order and rules that govern volunteering?

In 2009, Colin Rochester set out the positions in the debate about state and volunteering as follows:

State can play a role in the development of volunteering

• State is both benign and competent: for example, state can set strategic direction for volunteering; (issue is one of making technical improvements to policy and implementation)

State can not play a role in the development of volunteering

• State is neither benign nor particularly effective;
• Volunteering is – and should be – every bit as anarchic, ungovernable and untidy (Dahrendorff; Kearney) – “if government has a role, it extends no further than ensuring that there are few, if any, obstacles to volunteering. Otherwise it needs simply to ˜get out of the way’”

Panel Session- NCVO conference: Making a difference? Reviewing government’s involvement in volunteering, ˜Losing Soul’: Should we be concerned about the independence of volunteering?’ (PDF), Colin Rochester

The contrast between how the state-volunteering issue is usually discussed, is that Furedi’s tone is substantially more pessimistic. He has no time for the achievements that have come from this closer working relationship between the voluntary sector and the state. A forward looking analysis must assimilate both the benefits, as well as the costs. What Furedi does do that’s helpful, is to sound a warning shot to all those currently rethinking the nature of the relationship between state and volunteering in the future.

Just yesterday, the Policy Exchange published a report (PDF) by Anthony Seldon which called for a revived Big Society. It was laced with the kind of institutionalised version of volunteering we’ve come to expect from policy proposals (emphasis added):

• “retired people should volunteer and continue to be actively involved in helping others in their communities”.
• “dramatic boost to volunteering and training schemes should be urgently introduced to ensure that every young person can be occupied in meaningful employment”
• “All schools to have compulsory volunteering afternoons: those children who volunteer when young are more likely to continue when older”

It’s a quick step from “should volunteer”, to volunteering “as occupying time”, to “compulsory volunteering afternoons”. Is a world where volunteering becomes an institution desirable or not?

• Can volunteers be trained to combat terrorism?
• Can access to the police be made dependent on prior volunteering?
• Can state benefits be linked to volunteering?
• Can volunteering be the condition of access to subsidised transport?

These are just some of the examples of current practice by UK government. But at what point do they effectively institutionalise volunteering?

I feel like this question gets to the nub of the issue and reveals the shifting tectonic plates in how volunteering is developing in the UK.

On the one hand, there’s the cause for greater professionalisation in the voluntary sector that could be advanced with the greater status and recognition that institutionalisation confers. On the other hand, the cause for a fuller appreciation of volunteering’s potential is set back by its institutionalisation.

Let’s face it: we have difficulty enumerating volunteering’s secret sauce, let alone bottling it.

The question of insitutionalisation alludes to a very real tension that’s ratcheted up, each time volunteering climbs higher the policy agenda.

I don’t pretend to have the answer to such a fundamental question, but I feel like it’s an issue that needs airing outside the political arena. Thinking it through helps to articulate the juncture that we’ve reached in volunteering today. A fork in the road where we run the risk of seeing officially recognised volunteering and unofficial unrecognised volunteering splitting the voluntary sector in two.

Supporting notes

I’ve written up my notes for this blog post below, including a running commentary on Furedi’s original article on volunteering’s institutionalisation.

Furedi is an academic (Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent). He’s widely published across the media who appreciate his combative style and headline-friendly polemic. This is no accident, given his political activist background. I think it’s fair to say that he’s a seasoned critic/skeptic of government’s policy towards volunteering over the last decade or so. Very broadly, he argues that public policy which promotes volunteering, actually undermines, more often than not, the essence of what volunteering is. Although I think it’s also equally fair to say that a narrative on volunteering hasn’t (until recently) been one of his central concerns.

In recent years, Furedi’s growing concern about volunteering has really manifested itself in his criticism of the extension of the reach of Criminal Record Bureau checks which he cited as negatively impacting on volunteering. This attention to volunteering really features as part of Furedi wider thesis about a developing “culture of fear” (‘Culture of fear: risk-taking and the morality of low expectation‘; first published in 1997).

Culture of fear

His concern can be summarised at the level of the state: volunteering has been co-opted by the state in an attempt to address the state’s own crisis of legitimacy. In the ‘Culture of Fear’, he says:

“During the past decade, successive governments have actively encouraged volunteering and have increasingly sought to use non-governmental organisations to deliver services.”

He goes on:

“Official patronage of advocacy groups represents an attempt to mitigate the effects of the loss of legitimacy previously enjoyed by the political class.” [p.186, Culture of Fear]

In turn, his concern is also at the level of the citizen: as a result of the co-opting of the voluntary sector by the state, citizens have been encouraged to view volunteering as a means to further narrow self-interested goals. As he states in an article, “It’s time to stand up for courage and conviction“:

“Now call me old-fashioned, but when I was young you volunteered because you believed in something. You wanted to help people; you wanted, for instance, to give blood. You didn’t do volunteering because it looked good on your CV.”

Furedi fears volunteering has become a mere transaction, rather than a transformation.

Moral maze

Coincidentally, in a year when the sector has faced unprecedented cuts, Volunteering England, invited Claire Fox, Director, Institute of Ideas, to their AGM in November to discuss: ”What is volunteering for? Is the volunteering movement so taken up with current needs we’ve lost a vision for the future?”.

Claire Fox is a fellow member, along with Furedi, of the so-called informal Living Marxism network. She has been echoing fairly similar arguments. You can get a flavour from this opening remark she made on a recent episode of Moral Maze on the relationship between the state and the charity sector (23rd Feb 2011).

“I have been worried about the dangers of crushing the lifeblood out of a very distinctive part of society, civil society, which is the third sector, by the fact that often I can’t tell the difference between it and the state. So the idea that it is going to do even more work commissioned by the state seems to me to be destroying the very voluntarism of the voluntary sector.”

So we kick off this discussion of Furedi’s recent article:

Volunteering has been turned into an institution that is promoted on the grounds of its benefits for the volunteer and for the community, and its meaning has been thoroughly transformed.

Ok. Here’s what Furedi contests: that volunteering has been turned into “an institution”. I take this to mean that volunteering is somehow less human now. In other words, it’s really human for people to want to help each other. Helping each other doesn’t need to fit a formally agreed definition of volunteering, to be legitimate cooperative behaviour.

It’s worth being wary of a sociologist’s use of the term ‘institution’. It comes packed with significance. There’s not much more in the way of clarification from Furedi about what he means exactly by the word ‘institution’ in the context of volunteering. But from his comments, you can hazard a guess that he’s particularly concerned with how volunteering is being used as a way of enforcing a layer of social order and rules in how people help each other, which is needless in his view.

“the culture comprised of attitudes and norms that is aligned to the formal and official complex of tasks and rules might compete with an informal and unofficial culture that is adhered to by a substantial sub-element of the organisation’s membership” [standford.edu]

Here’s the rub: with institutionalisation of volunteering, there’s a sense in which there’s a right way to volunteer and a wrong way. One example of how this plays out is in moral disapproval meted out to those not at the standard expected. The other is through the law where legal sanctions have been used against those engaged in bad practice.

“It is sometimes claimed that in addition to structure, function and culture, social institutions necessarily involve sanctions. It is uncontroversial that social institutions involve informal sanctions, such as moral disapproval following on non-conformity to institutional norms.” [standford.edu]

Of course, it’s not often as simple as that. At present, volunteering is often impacted by the law in unintended ways, in part because many of these laws are not drafted with volunteering specifically in mind. For this reason, many of the legal implications on volunteering practice is open to the interpretation of courts, tribunals, lawyers and the government. This situation has led to controversial decisions particularly in employment tribunals.

This predicament has everything to do with the issue of institutionalisation. The solution legally is to opt for greater clarity. However, greater clarity comes with greater codification of the rules, norms and values surrounding volunteering, i.e. greater institutionalisation.

For this reason, most balk at greater legal clarity, despite it often leaving volunteers with less protection in situations of bad practice. A case in point, is the recent debate about volunteer rights and whether greater regulation of volunteering is needed. Many called for powers for a volunteering ombudsman to be able to adjudicate in cases. Others saw this as a step too far towards institutionalisation. It’s ironic that on the issue of volunteer rights it’s often the volunteering professionals who are reluctant to pursue further institutionalisation, while it is volunteers on the receiving end of bad practice who advocate greater institutionalisation.

I say ironic because Furedi argues it’s actually the professionals who want institutionalisation, rather than the volunteers. We’ll explore this further later in this post. Anyway, back to Furedi:

Not so long ago, volunteering was associated with a genuine ethos of service and with an act of altruism.

To paraphrase, I understand this as: ‘Volunteering was (note the past tense) previously based in our common humanity (our sense of altruism) to a much greater degree’. Can institutions be altruistic? I don’t think they can. This argument feels like a distant cousin of the ‘forcing people to volunteer’ debate. So I think Furedi’s point here is about this kind of denuding of volunteering (it used to have a ‘genuine ethos’ and now it doesn’t).

Mislaying altruism

It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of language and the use of word ‘altruism’. It was more than a little ironic that Sir Stephen Bubb, Chief Exec of ACEVO, mislaid the word altruism when trying to pinpoint the defining factor between the state and the charity sector live on Radio 4′s Moral Maze. Bubb’s oversight revealed why the charge has begun to stick: that the state has so set the volunteering agenda that the sector has lost sight of why people want to volunteer.

To digress for a second, the programme also highlighted the difficulty where the issue of the state’s role in volunteering, is overshadowed by the higher profile issue of rolling back the state. For example, Nick Seddon’s work to highlight state funding of charities. This blog post is an attempt to show how it’s broader than the question of funding. After all, this issue of charities compromising mission is equally true for those accepting large donations from rich individual philanthropists who can influence the volunteering agenda. However, the issue of the institutionalisation of volunteering hints at an even more profound (though less discussed) dilemma in the relationship between state and voluntary sector: institutionalisation (can you bottle volunteering’s secret sauce without undermining it?)

Added to this discussion of altruism, comes the idea of ethos (moral character). The issue of ethos gives a critical nuance to this debate because it makes the link between how we get from volunteering to a state’s claim to legitimacy (volunteering and the sense of citizenship). Volunteering as a route to citizenship has always held a certain attraction for politicians of all colours. I think it was Douglas Hurd who was first to utter the phrase the ‘active citizen‘. Other examples has flowed from this close connection in the minds of politicians: the citizenship survey to track volunteering, corporate citizenship and earned citizenship for refugees through volunteering. Interesting to look at ”Volunteering, Active Citizenship and Community Cohesion: From theory to practice” by Angela Ellis Paine, Institute for Volunteering Research; Michael Locke , Centre for Institutional Studies, University of East London; Veronique Jochum, National Council for Voluntary Organisations (July 2006) [PDF].

If a state can claim it underwrites an ethos (or moral disposition/beliefs) that provides a key part of today’s cooperative social order, it begins to get a say in what the ethos is or what those beliefs are. Previously, other long established social institutions such as family or religion could have claimed to underwrite an ethos of giving, now as their influence wanes, the state seeks to fill the gap with other forms of cooperative social order. Increased state funding of volunteering clearly not only supports the development of volunteering, but has lead to the state influencing the kind of volunteering that develops as a result.

What endowed volunteering with an attractive moral quality was that people performed an action or provided a service to others without any compulsion. This was an act based on one’s own free will and motivated by the conviction that it was the right thing to do.

So to pursue this thought- the natural consequence of this institutionalisation of volunteering for Furedi, is an increased tendency to constrain interpersonal relationships. He doesn’t say this directly here, but I’m assuming that he sees the growth in formalised processes and structures around volunteering (such as legal entities like charities or government), as unnecessary intermediaries between people in the pursuit of volunteering.

The act of volunteering continues to retain its inspiring moral qualities to this day, and we rightly regard the volunteer who helps others as more virtuous as someone whose behaviour is entirely dominated by self-interest. When the ethos of service appears to be conspicuously absent in much of public life it is not surprising that volunteering is celebrated as a highly valued accomplishment.

Ethos in service

So this is where Furedi shifts gears.

He praises volunteering (and by extension those promoting it). He gives a nod to ‘moral qualities’ which seemed implied by his previous reference to ‘ethos’.

Despite this it feels like it’s praise reluctantly given. Even if volunteering is not as human as it could be, less human is better than actively antagonistic to others (or as Furedi phrases it- ‘entirely dominated by self-interest’).

This praise comes with a sting in the tail.

This celebration of volunteering by the state, conceals an even greater bureaucratisation/institutionalisation of service in public life (I’m guessing this is behind his claim that there’s an absence in the “ethos of service”). Frustratingly, Furedi doesn’t get into why government can successfully co-opt volunteering’s ethos of service, but not the ethos of service in public life. The argument, I think, is that the state can co-opt the ethos of volunteering through influencing charities, but has no such proxy for co-opting the ethos of public service.

Regrettably, volunteering has been turned into an institution that is promoted on the grounds of its benefits for the volunteer and for the community. Consequently the meaning of volunteering has been thoroughly transformed. When governments self-consciously promote and administer volunteering schemes it is evident that it has nothing to do with the exercise of free will.

Now this is where Furedi begins to reveal his hand. His problem is not just that volunteering has taken the wrong path (towards ‘institutionalisation’), it’s that governments are co-opting people’s better instincts for the governments’ own benefit. This goes to the heart of Furedi’s argument. For me, it’s the strongest part of his argument.

The list of failed government-sponsored volunteering initiatives is long for sure.

Yet, I can’t help feeling Furedi profoundly fails to diagnose where the incompatibility lies between government and volunteering.

In government-sponsored initiatives, the element of personal freedom is often overpowered by the focus on social benefit. But this is not to say free will is non-existent.

Take the organisation Volunteering Australia. It was established by the government’s Office for the Not-for-Profit Sector. Volunteering Australia claims to represent the diverse views and needs of the volunteer community while promoting the activity of volunteering as one of enduring social, cultural and economic value.

Volunteering Australia denies this is how it was established in it’s formal response to Furedi, and stresses that it is an independent non-for-profit, yet it doesn’t go into details about how it is currently funded in its response. Looking at it’s accounts for 2011 (PDF) though, it seems clear the vast majority of its funding comes from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

State funding

The issue seems to be how we in the volunteering sector recognise the extent to which our work to develop volunteering is influenced by our state funders. It’s worth remembering that this is not just an issue with state funding of volunteering, it important to consider corporate influence over the ethos of volunteering through how and what kind of volunteering development it funds.

The preposterous concept of a volunteer community is testimony to the professionalisation of what was at one time perceived as a spontaneous act. A community of professional volunteers would be a clearer representation of the lobby that Volunteering Australia speaks for.

Volunteer community

To me it’s curious that Furedi picks up on the weakness (relative lack of cohesion) of the ‘volunteer community’. The notion of a ‘community of volunteers’ is problematic for a whole range of reasons. For example:

• volunteering covers a huge range of activity, so many of the most cohesive volunteer communities are built around specific activities, rather than an aggregate of volunteering;
• volunteers don’t often self identify as volunteers, they identify with the cause, issue, or people directly in need they volunteer to serve

As a result, the idea of a volunteer community, on balance, remains more latent than actual. This latent volunteer community exists to the extent that many volunteers (across issues and activities) have shared values, goals and interests. Yet, making this latent community a practical reality is one of the greatest challenges for organisations, such as Volunteering Australia or Volunteering England, that seek that seek to bring together those involved in all kinds of volunteering.

In many sociological definitions, the concept of the ‘institution’ actually presupposes the existence of a community. As a result, this relative incohesion of the volunteer community, would seem to undermine Furedi initial assertion that volunteering’s becoming an institution. That’s to say: institutionalisation implies the idea of a volunteer community is becoming more feasible, not more preposterous. Furedi can’t have it both ways.

What’s even more disturbing is that volunteering is advocated not because it is something that is good in itself but because the Australian government recognises that it delivers a number of key social and economic benefits.

Is it more “disturbing” that volunteering should be seen as either a means to ‘economic and social benefits’ or as a good in itself? Volunteering is best understood as both. It’s a means to an end and an end in itself. Any approach that focuses on any one motivation or impact of volunteering to the exclusion of the other, simply undervalues or misunderstands what volunteering is.

Means to an end?

The challenge is to understand how to balance these two aspects of volunteering. Furedi’s argument leaves no room for such an idea. What’s interesting is that what Furedi is actually highlighting is the real problem that the government-led volunteering agenda often over-emphasises volunteering as a “means to end”. For example, government volunteering have included making volunteering’s a means to: reducing youth offending, getting offenders to pay back to the community, getting the unemployed back into work, turning immigrants into fuller citizens, etc.

The institutionalisation of volunteering destroys the meaning of an altruistic act. Anyone visiting the website of Volunteering Australia could be excused for interpreting volunteering as an instrument for skills acquisition and enhancing one’s career opportunities. The website declares that good quality, appropriate training and skills development is something (that) Volunteering Australia champions. It runs a National Volunteer Skills Centre and places a great emphasis on training people to be volunteers.

So the basis for this comment from Furedi, partly has to do with his general distaste for volunteering as a means, rather than an end. The example he gives is volunteering to improve your CV, rather than simply to help others or change the world. But he’s also doing something else that merits our attention. He’s conflating how we understand volunteering at the level of the individual, and how we understand it at the level of the society. Can an institution be altruistic? You might equally ask can an institution be egoistic? How altruism at individual level translates into cooperative behaviour at the level of the community is a huge jump and involves levels of complexity that I think Furedi is in danger of glossing over.

Developing training opportunities (that don’t oblige volunteer to remain for a minimum period), can allow people to understand better what it is they’re volunteering for and how to get involved. As a result, training and skills development, can actually enhance people’s freedom. Cooperative behaviour can be organised. There’s a crucial balance to be struck between the necessary organising that facilitates cooperation and unnecessary organisation that hinders cooperation. This is yet another example of this tension between the individual and community level that Furedi simply skates over with the phrase ‘institutionalisation destroys altruism’.

As a volunteer, you have the right to be provided with sufficient training to do your job, it tells potential candidates for the volunteering profession.

And just in case you are worried about paper qualifications, Volunteering Australia provides certificates I, II and III in active volunteering, which it claims are the first of their kind: nationally recognised qualifications for volunteers.

Volunteering Australia’s Paul Lynch makes a similar point in his response to Furedi: “The impulse to ‘do good’ does not guarantee you will know what to do, have the equipment to do it, or know how to use it as walls of flames approach the local community hall”.

The official promotion of volunteering is motivated by the recognition that the disengagement of large sections of society from public life represents a very real challenge for governments. Attempts to confront the problem of civic disengagement often turn into desperate efforts to invent quick-fix administrative solutions to what is a fundamental cultural process of social and moral disenchantment.

So at this point Furedi returns to his central narrative: civic disengagement has led governments to use volunteering in response.

It is worth noting that policymakers throughout the Western world have embraced volunteering as something of a big idea for getting the public to re-engage with society. The European Union designated this year as the European Year of Volunteering. Speaking a language that echoes that of Volunteering Australia, the EU’s official document asserts that volunteering can provide people with new skills and competencies that can improve their employability. It adds that this is especially important at this time of economic crisis.

Furedi singles out this view of volunteering, by many governments, as a means to improving employability of citizens. It’s clear that governments have an agenda. In fact, most funding on volunteering has an agenda such as that coming from corporates or foundations that volunteering advocates should be alert to. The way forward is for the volunteering sector to fight for a better understanding of volunteering by all those promoting it, whether passionate individuals, state representatives or corporate supporters. Furedi is not really interested in developing volunteering for it’s own sake, he seems more interested in using it as a means to bash certain policy-makers over the head.

That said, he does highlight a question that many volunteering advocates have ignored for too long: how can we ensure that it’s the volunteering need that drives the funding response, and not the agenda of the funders that drives the volunteering on offer?

Unfortunately, the bureaucratisation of volunteering makes it hard to promote as a public virtue. People who genuinely feel inspired to volunteer do so because they feel strongly about the need to contribute to their community.

A sense of social obligation to the community and the desire to help others has encouraged millions of people to volunteer in the past. Today’s volunteering professionals do not believe that people can still be expected to serve others out of a sense of civic duty.

In the so-called volunteering community, acts of solidarity motivated by altruism are often caricatured as traditional volunteering. Terms such as anachronistic and traditional are used to disparage volunteering that is driven by the impulse to do good for others. The ideals of selfless volunteering are dismissed as a luxury that only the rich can afford. Civic virtue has been recast as an elitist indulgence.

This final few paragraphs connects this opinion piece with Furedi’s broader thesis: that traditional virtues are denigrated in today’s culture of fear. It would be really interesting to know exactly what he’s referring to when he says that terms such as ‘traditional’ are used to disparage volunteering.

In Britain, advocates of the professionalisation of volunteering argue their so-called inclusive approach permits the benefits of volunteering to be enjoyed by people on low incomes. Their advocacy of a more inclusive approach to volunteering is based on the patronising assumption that, unlike the great and the good, working-class people need economic incentives to act virtuously. It overlooks the fact, historically, people suffering deprivation have been more than ready to sacrifice their time to support causes in which they believed. What drove the unpaid union organiser or the official of a co-operative society were strong convictions and a sense of civic virtue. They did not require a certificate I in volunteering to give up their time to help others. The so-called elitist traditional approach was far more inclusive than contemporary schemes that bribe people to pretend to volunteer.

Necessary organising vs unnecessary organisation

Again, Furedi raises the debate about necessary organising vs unnecessary organisation question without any recognition of the complexity. Different challenges call for different approaches. Over time informal relationships tend to formalise. Volunteers are motivated by their ability to meet the need of those they seek to help. Sometimes formal organisations can play a role in supporting this type of volunteering, other times too much formality and organisation suffocates the ability of individuals to step up and volunteer.

There are situations where paying a volunteer’s expenses is simply good practice. It’s about recognising the value of what people offer as volunteers. There are situations where volunteering takes place on a small scale (or short time scale) informally and where a group not being able to repay expenses or have formal processes in place should not stand in the way of volunteering taking place. This has been a debate in volunteering since the year dot.

There’s another debate that Furedi is failing to mention. Much of what he’s referring to here finds parallels in the debate between the distinction between volunteering and community service and how we understand civic engagement. I contest there’s a trade off in terms of whether we choose to eschew giving- weighted towards achieving social benefit, and giving- weighted towards the individuals personal freedom to act (here’s a previous blog post with more details).

What is truly tragic about the professionalisation of volunteering is that it implicitly evades the challenge of motivating people – especially the young – through appealing to their sense of solidarity and community. Society needs to motivate its youth to possess a sense of civic duty precisely because it is good in and of itself. We can’t always do good, and certainly not all of the time. The impulse of self-interest is always an important element of human behaviour. But self-interest notwithstanding, a vibrant community must always attempt to foster a climate where altruistic behaviour is accepted and affirmed.

Furedi’s lack of balance ultimately leads to a flawed conclusion: a social solution (society promoting civic duty) is the right response to a problem framed at the individual level (altruistic behaviour not accepted).

Thankfully, despite the attempt to bureaucratise a fine old civic virtue, real volunteers are still doing the business. They are those unassuming and often anonymous individuals who don’t possess paper qualifications as mentors or facilitators or animators. Let them thrive.

Yep we knew that. It’s the potential split between formally recognised volunteers on the one hand, and unofficial volunteering on the other that’s ultimately the issue.

The challenge is that these numerous tensions that volunteering bridges will clearly split the voluntary sector, if the state pushes ahead with ever greater institutionalisation of volunteering.

Jocote.org-When Volunteering Becomes an Institution

 

Reactions to Frank Furedi’s original article:

Jayne Cravens – OzVPMs

Martin Cowling – Cowling Report

Paul Lynch – Volunteering Australia

 

 

 

 

The beginning

We often talk about how online community and social media can help promote services and increase their reach. What tends to get less attention is how online community itself can create a platform for delivering information and support services, not simply raise awareness about these services.

What do we mean here?

First, when thinking about how online community can deliver services, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical questions about the delivery mechanism. However, looking at online community through a tech perspective can only get you so far in how it can help deliver information and support services.

It can be more illuminating to explore this potential through a more sociological or psychological perspective, i.e. focusing on how people relate to each other in online communities, beyond the tech that enables these relationships.

Universal and holistic

 

In YouthNet’s case, the challenge it was founded to address back in the 1990′s was about opening up access to information and support for young people. The web has become a key way to making YouthNet’s approach both universal and holistic.

Holistic – across a broad range of issues

Online communities join up issues affecting the lives of young people, making it easier to put issues into a personal context. For example, tackling issues in the round means you can set an issue like housing support in a wider context of relationships and mental health, or an issue like drug use in the broader context of debt and sexual health.

This is an important difference that online communities have brought about in information and support services. For instance, while advice givers or information providers often focus on issues (that’s how most advice services are structured), the young person’s starting point is often much more confused and complex. Set in a personal context of the young person’s life, the issues that are affecting them are usually incredibly fluid and interlinked. It’s often hard for person experiencing the issues just to be able to explain and make sense of them. Online community with a more holistic approach can play a key role here.

It’s interesting that in terms of how the web’s structured following the success of the ‘Google’ model, access to information and support has depended on just how well you as a user can express what you need in terms of specific issues or keywords.

Universal – for all young people 16-25 years old

At the same time, online communities are proving that they’re a powerful way of joining up the people. With regards, support and information services particularly of note is the way online communities link together those affected by the issues and preserve what’s universal about people’s experience of these issues. Issues we may have faced or recognise we could face ourselves at a future point in time.

Online communities joining up people in this way, reinforce the message you are not alone with the issues you face. In fact, online communities where you share only what you’re comfortable sharing, can be a space where people can feel freer to explore the personal context and common humanity behind what can be incredibly emotive and sensitive issues. One particularly important contribution of online communities is how this universalist approach can bring both those directly affected by the issue at hand, together in open discussion with those not directly affected.

In terms of how the web’s structured and the rise of the ‘Facebook’ model, it’s clear that online information and support is increasingly mediated through our own personal online social networks. The starting point many young people now have in the search for information and support becomes the people they’re connected with, not necessarily the issues you identify with.

Ideal advisor: Friend and Expert

Many years ago, YouthNet commissioned some research. It asked young people about how they got the support and information they needed.

Out of the responses I remember reading, came the idea of the ideal advisor -a blend of two distinct personas.

—      The advisor as friend – supportive, provider of emotional support, non-judgmental, a good listener

—      The advisor as expert – someone that knows what they’re talking about, is a source of accurate info and an external perspective

What’s interesting is that with this idea of the ideal advisor lies a basic intuition: when it comes to offering information and support- no one person is enough.

In other words, it’s communities where we’re together, not as individuals acting separately, that are best equipped to respond to young people’s info and support needs.

No one person can easily fulfil both the role of ˜friend’ and the role of ˜advisor’. Each has its limitations:

—      The friend’s intimate understanding often lacks external perspective.

—      The expert’s specialist knowledge often lacks a personal touch.

There’s a growing body of academic literature on characterizing social relationships in this way that’s developing theoretical frameworks to better explain why these should be distinct social roles. For example, the work of Alan Fiske and Nick Haslam is a case in point which identifies four forms of sociality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. It’s interesting to note the strong parallels between idea of the ˜friend’ and that of Communal Sharing and Equality Matching on the one hand, and the idea of the ˜expert’ and Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.

Peer support and specialists

Online community adds something new to the mix between friends and experts. It can blend the values under which friends and experts operate. It can also challenge some of the age-old barriers that have existed between young people and support and info they need.

We know that online communities of friends can be strong – young people can express themselves online, they can feel heard, acknowledged, talking about the situation can help them make sense of their personal issues. Young people as friends online often re-evaluate their self-worth once they’ve supported one of their peers.

We know that online communities of experts can break down significant barriers that stand in the way of many young people’s access to the information and support services they need. Afforded anonymity, the time to express their issues in a way they’re comfortable with and on their own terms – young people reach out for expert intervention.

When you compare and contrast the values that ˜friends’ and ˜experts’ bring to online communities, it’s possible to detect the areas where these values merge.

For example, experts can learn about the benefits of encouraging discussion with the young people they want to engage. Through discussion and participation, experts can benefit from the hard-won insights of young people born of personal experience and knowledge.

Likewise, friends can gain a better understanding of the distinction between advice set out as balanced options grounded in empathy, and emotionally-charged discussion led by a well-meaning friend.

YouthNet’s changing role

If you’d asked us 10 years ago what the role of online community was, we would have probably have explained in terms of YouthNet’s role as a service provider.

In practical terms, that can mean many things: an editor, a moderator, a web developer, a volunteer manager, a partnership broker, and so on.

Today, the emphasis of these roles is very different.

As the idea of online community becomes more embedded in the everyday lives of young people, so it’s become a crucial means of opening up access to information and support for young people. It’s a special kind of service provision, which feels more like service facilitation rather than direct provision, i.e. with service providers on one side and service users on the other.

Facilitating community between friends and experts is in effect facilitating access to information and support.

How? In terms of roles:

—      Editors instil an editorial tone that balances the friendly warmth of a friend- with the eye for detail of an expert

—      Moderators help foster community understanding where there’s space for peer support alongside clear routes to the experts

—      Teams of advisors combine trained peers on the one hand with highly qualified specialists on the other

—      Volunteer managers develop support for volunteers -both from more experienced fellow volunteers and expert trainers or mentors

Online community is transformative

This subtle shift from provision to facilitation, shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s actually transformative when it comes to offering information and support.

For example, a transformation where those engaged in online communities understand and recognise that in the role of ˜friend’, they are themselves a source of support for their peers.

Or, a transformation where those in the role of ˜experts’ learn how to make their services more accessible to young people – in a way that overcomes young people’s practical and personal barriers that stand between them and the info and support they need.

In short, the tech behind today’s online communities may be new, but the challenge is the same.

Clearly, new technology brings with it plenty of new opportunities to take on this age-old challenge of opening up access to information and support for young people.

Whether we can seize this potentially transformative opportunity today, depends on whether or not we’re prepared to accept our new role: that of facilitating relationships and building community between the friends, experts, and the young people they seek to help.

 

Further info

Interesting examples of online communities blending experts and friends:

Netmums – Drop-in Clinic – online forum Parent Supporters (in the friend role) can refer questions to specialist partners (in the expert role)

YouthHealthTalk – is an online space for young people to talk through their health issues – linked to expert research of patients experiences

 

TheSite.org’s Discussion Boards – one of YouthNet longest established online communities

Video of this presentation is available here: