Articles

Sixth issue of Voluntary Action
Autumn 2000 (Volume 2 Number 3)

 

Playing the hand that's been dealt: voluntary organisations, volunteers and the New Deal

Susan Kumleben, Associate Researcher, London School of Economics

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This article examines the potential benefits and costs to volunteering of the New Deal for Young People. It concludes that the benefits outweigh the costs for most volunteer-deploying organisations, principally by enabling them to expand their training capacity and to increase their complement of full-time workers. The programme is also a useful way of introducing young people to the voluntary sector. However, New Deal placements can impose a major administrative burden on voluntary organisations, especially the smaller ones. They must also be managed sensitively: co-ordinators should try to avoid the displacement of volunteers by New Deal trainees, as well as any friction between trainees and existing volunteers. Co-ordinators should also try not to be distracted from the task of volunteer recruitment. Further research is needed into the implications of placing severely disadvantaged trainees with voluntary organisations.

 

The experience of older volunteers in intergenerational school-based projects

Gillian Granville, The Beth Johnson Foundation

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This article brings together theory, practice and current social policy to further our understanding of the experiences of older volunteers working in intergenerational projects. The empirical work was conducted in three school-based projects in London, Salford and north Staffordshire, and involved individual, semi-structured interviews with forty-five volunteers. The findings showed that the volunteers came from a wide range of backgrounds, but that all had a strong commitment to young people and a belief in the younger generation. They brought a non-judgemental approach to the partnership, and were able to see priorities and take initiatives that proved supportive to the young person's learning and the development of their self-esteem. The article also demonstrates the benefits to the wider community of well-planned intergenerational initiatives, and challenges the negative stereotypes of old age. Finally, it highlights the detrimental effects of an ageist society that does not recognise the valuable resource represented by older volunteers, and the need for organisations to recognise and value the special attributes of age.

 

Auditing the capacity of institutions and communities to deliver democratic participation

Danny Burns, Lecturer in Policy Studies, University of Bristol
Marilyn Taylor, Professor of Social Policy, University of Brighton

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This article outlines a framework for auditing community participation in public decision-making. In its various forms - involvement in community groups, school governing committees, partnership boards, neighbourhood forums, etc - it is one of the most widespread forms of public volunteering. Yet rarely does it live up to expectation. Thousands of people retreat back into their communities after bruising experiences, disappointment and broken promises. Common explanations for the failures of participation schemes are often over-simplistic. Our intention was to delve deeper into the politics and the mechanics of participation, and from there to construct a tool which both communities and institutions could use effectively as part of an ongoing assessment process.

 

An instrument to measure the new volunteerism in self-help agencies

Thomasina Borkman, Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Lee Kaskutas, Alcohol Research Group, Berkeley, California

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The 'helper-therapy principle' - people who help others receive benefits themselves - has been widely invoked in studies of self-help/mutual aid, but so far there have been few attempts to measure such helping quantitatively. This article reports on the Peer Helper Activity Checklist, developed to measure the extent of peer helping in substance abuse recovery programmes in California. The research found that programme participants had little difficulty in completing the Checklist, and that they reported a range of time spent helping others. More than half the participants (55 per cent) said that they had spent a total of six to twelve hours on the previous day helping their peers; the longer they had been in the programme, the more hours they spent helping others. The Checklist will, for the first time, enable social scientists quantitatively to study peer helping in self-help agencies and allow practitioners to assess the amount of peer helping in their programmes.

 

Legal advice as student community action: the case of the University of Bristol Law Clinic

Colin Rochester, University of Surrey, Roehampton

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This article discusses the experience of the University of Bristol's Law Clinic, which deploys student volunteers to provide legal advice and assistance to people who are unable to obtain them from any other source. It begins with an account of the origins and early history of the Clinic, before looking at the services it provides and how these are organised. There follows a discussion of the nature of the Clinic as an organisation, the motivation and rewards of its student volunteers and how they are recruited and trained. The article concludes with an analysis of the achievements of the project and the continuing challenges it faces, before discussing the distinctive features of the 'Bristol model' and the possibility of its being replicated elsewhere.