Exploring Volunteering

Recently there’s been a lot of chatter in many quarters about the idea of the ‘Big Society’. I’m going to try to pull out some of the more direct implications of this theme for thinking about volunteering. I think that at present ‘Big Society’ talk is pretty fuzzy when it comes to understanding what volunteering is. Those active in volunteering need to speak up for a clearer understanding about volunteering in the wider ‘Big Society’ debate.

The big speeches

Let’s start with David Cameron’s pronouncements about the ‘Big Society’. There have two key speeches in which he’s talked about the ‘Big Society’. The first was the Hugo Young lecture (10.11.2009). This speech set out one of the stated aims of the ‘Big Society’:

“The first step must be a new focus on empowering and enabling individuals, families and communities to take control of their lives so we create the avenues through which responsibility and opportunity can develop.”

This empowerment of individuals and communities seems to be one of the key reasons for the centrality of volunteering, i.e. volunteering is seen as a key way of empowering individuals and communities. This idea of empowerment is very clearly set with a corresponding retreat in state involvement in tackling a whole range of social issues. Here there’s a historical dimension- recognising the value of state extension throughout the 20th century- arguing that there’s something distinctive about our time now which makes a smaller state imperative today.

Cameron in this speech applies this notion of the state disempowering the individual and the community to volunteering. He argues that too much state involvement in social issues has reduced volunteering. Here’s that argument word for word:

“as the state continued to expand, it took away from people more and more things that they should and could be doing for themselves, their families and their neighbours. Human kindness, generosity and imagination are steadily being squeezed out by the work of the state. The result is that today, the character of our society – and indeed the character of some people themselves, as actors in society, is changing.

There is less expectation to take responsibility, to work, to stand by the mother of your child, to achieve, to engage with your local community, to keep your neighbourhood clean, to respect other people and their property, to use your own discretion and judgement.

Why? Because today the state is ever-present: either doing it for you, or telling you how to do it, or making sure you’re doing it their way.

We can see it most starkly when it comes to children. Through a range of measures aimed at protecting children, the state is actually making them more vulnerable.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority was established to stop children coming into contact with dangerous adults, but by forcing responsible adults to go through the rigmarole of a vetting procedure it will actually reduce the amount of care and love in children’s lives as adults will give up volunteering to help children.”

Misunderstanding volunteering?

It’s worth highlighting that this argument conflates two dimensions of volunteering that are often used interchangeably, but should be understood separately. Those dimensions are ‘to be’ and ‘to do’. Volunteer is a verb, but it’s also a noun. Cameron talks about the ‘character’ of individuals and communities, and is suggesting that volunteering and empowerment can change character. That is to say, what is important is volunteering as a noun, as identity, as part of who we are and what makes us who we are.

But it’s an argument that Cameron couches in practical terms. It’s the ‘rigmarole’ that’s getting in the way of us being to express our identity to do volunteering, i.e. volunteering as a verb. But it should be clear that the real objection for Cameron, to vetting procedures is not that they change the way we do volunteering, it is that they are an attack on our identity, on our character. The offence of the Independent Safeguarding Authority regime is that it implies that the volunteer poses a potential danger to the safety of children, unless the state can attest otherwise.

In terms of a strategy for social action, Cameron talked about social entrepreneurship, community activism and mass engagement. This strategy demands more thinking about the role of volunteering with social enterprises. It requires better understanding of the commonalities between formal and informal volunteering. Finally, in terms of mass engagement, it requires thinking through the development of more participation-type volunteering opportunities. This talk of mass engagement is clearly a nod to the role of modern technology in driving broader kinds of volunteering. Cameron hinted at this:

“if Facebook simply added a social action line to their standard profile, this would do more to create a new social norm around volunteering or charitable giving than any number of government campaigns.”

Cameron’s already invited Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, to Downing Street. Richard Allan, Facebook’s Director of Public Policy in Europe (chief lobbyist), was an Liberal Democrat MP in Nick Clegg’s constituency of Sheffield Hallam and has friendly links to the Deputy Prime Minister. So we should probably be set for Facebook being given some kind of ‘Big Society’ role in promoting volunteering and social action in the UK.

In his next speech on the ‘Big Society’ David Cameron launched the Big Society Network (31.03.2010). With a few weeks before the general election, the idea was positioned at the heart of the campaign.

This speech introduced the ‘Big Society Bank’ that is intended to provide finance for smaller initiatives that tackle social issues and get more involved in delivering public services. The key implication for volunteering programme is that they are going to need to demonstrate measurable outcomes even more than before (strong influence coming from the social enterprise model).

Cameron gave a nod and a name-check to Barack Obama, the volunteer manager, in proposing the role of community organisers in the ‘Big Society’. This is a clear theme of the ‘Big Society’ to focus volunteer development to communities and specific local areas- the so-called ‘square mile‘. One particular challenge of this approach that can’t be rebutted in a single speech, is how this policy of local engagement can work in the most disadvantaged areas.

He returned to the idea of mass engagement and linked it with cultural change. Can a culture of volunteering be created? Culture is always an interesting topic for a politician to talk about, as it’s clearly something that’s out of the direct control of any government. There are ideas like the Big Lunch and the Big Society Day that are part of this, but it’s far from clear how a government drives such a culture, beyond simply institutionalising it. It comes back to this idea of volunteering as a noun (I’m a volunteer), and volunteering as a verb (I’m volunteering).

Volunteering might be made something that’s easier to do, but it also requires volunteers to identify with the social action they are taking. Incentivising volunteering or mandating volunteering tend to focus on the doing, not on how people identify with it. Any campaign will need to respect this aspect of volunteering. Hence the emphasis on terms taken from behavioural economics, such as ‘nudging’ people to volunteer and get more involved in their community. A cynic might observe that campaigns that ‘nudge’ are doubtless cheaper than campaigns that make a big splash. The challenge perhaps will be how to measure the effectiveness of nudging people into volunteering. Here’s the direct quote from Cameron:

The behavioural psychologist Robert Cialdini argues that one of the most important influences on how we behave are ‘social norms’ – that is, how other people behave. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler have argued that with the right prompting, or ‘nudge’, government can effect a whole culture change.

So let’s look at what others have said about ‘Big Society’ and volunteering. Nat Wei has been appointed by the government as a special advisor on the ‘Big Society’. Famously a former consultant with McKinsey, he was a member of the founding team of TeachFirst (founded by Brett Wigdortz) and Future Leaders, and has links to the Shaftesbury Partnership, Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) and the Young Foundation. One theme of Nat Wei’s work has been social enterprise and more specifically how to apply techniques and approaches from the world of finance to social issues.

Wei says he wants to create a slew of financial products that offer a way of making money and doing good at the same time. The financial returns may be lower but the yield comes through a sense of altruism. This idea, pioneered by philanthropists at the Calvert Foundation in the US, has already arrived in Britain. In March, a £5m bond was set up by Social Finance from “high net-worth individuals”, which funded charities to resettle 3,000 ex-offenders in Peterborough in a bid to reduce reoffending rates. If the scheme stops crimes being committed by ex-offenders by 7.5%, then the fund takes a share of the savings made by the government. [source: Guardian 22.06.2010]

George Osborne managed to avoid mentioning the ‘Big Society’ in his 121 page budget document. But it will be interesting to see how volunteering will be promoted and supported as further announcements are made and the ‘Big Society’ programme across government becomes clearer.

One clear programme coming down the tracks is the National Citizen Service that was trailed in one of David Cameron first speeches upon becoming party leader of the Conservatives. It’s likely to be a voluntary scheme for 16 year olds to experience volunteering and social action. The scheme was piloted as ‘The Challenge‘ by the Shaftsbury Partnership (Nat Wei is one of the partners). Last year, the Challenge had 150 places, this year it will have 500 places. It’s hoped that next year it will have around 6,000 places and in eight years it will be able to offer all 650,000 16 year olds an opportunity to get involved.

Nick Clegg has not spoken much on the record about the ‘Big Society’. Here’s one of his pronouncements at Downing Street (18.05.2010) he emphasised the idea of empowering individuals and communities (interestingly equated it to liberalism):

“What we are grappling with, and what we are aiming for, is nothing less than a huge cultural shift, where people, in their everyday lives, in their communities, in their homes, on their street, don’t always turn to answers from officialdom, from local authorities, from government, but that they feel both free and empowered to help themselves and help their own communities.”

Nat Wei extends the thinking on the idea of co-production and explains what this might mean for volunteering:

Voluntary organisations similarly may find the challenge is to make it easier for members to interact with their service beyond the stereotypical image of volunteering – having long meetings in damp halls – using technology, being more flexible and creating bite-sized interactions, and allowing volunteers to manage and convene other volunteers so they feel more ownership; at the same time the challenge again will be to avoid making members into consumers, and ensuring that long-term deep commitment and interaction is still possible, in groups as much as possible.

Wei is clearly hinting here that volunteering needs to change. His, is a vision of volunteering that uses much more technology. Again at some level he seems aware of the gift economy (although not something he explicitly references) and the importance of not slipping into seeing volunteers as straightforward consumers. Volunteering, long-term particularly, is about the strength of the relationships that you can form.

Big political landscape

But there’s something bigger (pardon the pun) happening here in policy terms for volunteering than just a new set of volunteering programmes. There’s a new front opening up in British politics and the voluntary sector may well find itself in the centre of this new battleground. How can this be if many behind the ‘Big Society’ are at pains to avoid left vs right type arguments?

Nat Wei, recently entered the House of Lords as a Conservative peer and gave his maiden speech on 16th June 2010. He touched on a key challenge that the ‘Big Society’ needs to overcome before in will have any major impact on volunteering directly.

“I list a few of the possible risks: unclear goals leading to a dissipation of effort; a lack of even a moderate amount of resource to empower scalable citizen responses; institutional resistance to the change this approach entails; the capture of new powers by vested interests that are so off-putting to the apolitical citizen; and apathy or a lack of critical mass.”

From one perspective, it’s ironic that Nat Wei talks about how off-putting it is to the apolitical citizen that new powers are captured by vested interests. He was a co-founder of the Big Society Network and wasn’t a member of the Conservative Party until he accepted the offer from David Cameron of a Conservative peerage and to advise the government on the ‘Big Society’ issues. The challenge will be to keep ‘Big Society’ as an idea apolitical, or at arm’s length from any one particular political party agenda, after it has been so closely associated with the Conservative Party. This may lessen its appeal and diminish it’s impact on how we understand and get involved in volunteering.

Nat Wei has blogged about the idea of the ‘Big Society’. In this post he made the case for why it is not left or right:

It goes beyond the simplicities of the left versus the right: for those used to a narrative in which generally the state provides the answers, or the market or non-state approaches are always best, Big Society feels very different; the narrow leftist or rightist approach relies on having an enemy who is often cast as the source of many of life’s ills; this cartoonish way of looking at the world is not confusing but comforting, but perhaps simplifies reality too much; life in the Big Society is more three-dimensional: there are many more players for a start than just the market or the state alone, and the emphasis is on a complex eco-system working together with many layers: government, institutions (whether voluntary, local government, or business and shades between), and groups of citizens and individuals.

It feels like Nat Wei is hinting at the gift economy here. It will be interesting to see if volunteering will be able to avoid becoming a political football in the months ahead between those on the left and the right jockeying for position.

For more background on this aspect of the ‘Big Society’ discussion, it’s worth exploring some of the ideas of Red Tory author Phillip Blond. Blond, founder of think tank ResPublica in 2009, has been openly influential in much of David Cameron’s thinking about ‘Big Society’.

His agenda is about opening up new ground between the left’s inclination to favour the state and the right’s inclination to favour the market. Instead, Blond argues, there’s a way forward through to a new politics of group formation and association for social development and economic development (see his speech below for more on this).

I think this is where those in active in the development of volunteering in the voluntary sector need to be very alert. There’s currently a lot of mixed and muddled messages coming out about how the ‘Big Society’ relates to the voluntary sector. Blond postions himself as arguing against the liberalism that’s divided us into atomised individuals under the dominion of an abstract state and market. His interest in volunteering begins where it becomes a form of association that’s independent of the state and the market. This post by Adam Schoenborn on the ResPublica blog kind of makes this point:

Much of our growing need for services and volunteers stems from our inability as communities to self-regulate, to self-police, to care for our elderly family members, to support our neighbours. By focusing their Big Society policies on bringing people out to volunteer (which Britons already do at astonishing levels) or to deliver essential services, rather than on addressing disassociation, the Conservatives have left themselves open to claims of building what their political opponents have referred to as ‘the DIY Society’ instead.

By putting volunteering at the heart of the new politics, we’re more clearly seeing how poorly understood volunteering is and where we need more research and analysis about the role of volunteering and the voluntary sector in our country. Those with actual experience and understanding of volunteering need to speak up in this new debate about the ‘Big Society’ and volunteering’s role in making our society what it is today.

Further information

Big Society Network launch from David Wilcox on Vimeo.