In this guest blog post, author John Mohan reflects on the challenges facing Keir Starmer’s Labour Party as it attempts to reset the relationship between the government and civil society, and gives an exclusive first-look at his new book, Volunteering in the United Kingdom.
In a pre-election speech on resetting the relationship between voluntary organisations and government, Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, set out his vision of a society of service. This constituted a welcome recognition of the contribution that civil society and volunteering could make to national renewal. But what might governments be able to do towards that end? And is generating an increase in voluntary action problematic when people are preoccupied with a cost of living crisis, and governments have limited resources?
Volunteering has long been seen as an integral part of the British national character, as suggested by William Beveridge’s, 1948 statement that “the spirit of service is in our people”. The level of engagement in voluntary action has been broadly stable since, but recent evidence points to a significant and sustained reduction in the proportion of the adult population engaged in volunteering. This is especially true for young adults, for whom volunteering rates are approximately three fifths of where they were 20 years ago.
My issue with current debates in this field is that they underplay the complexities of mobilising voluntary action to achieve public policy goals in significant ways. This oversimplification occurs for multiple reasons. Firstly, there is no real agreement about what volunteering is, or what differentiates it from other social activities such as work or leisure. Secondly, volunteering is socially and spatially patterned, which is challenging for a country characterised by enduring spatial disparities in prosperity. Furthermore, the supposed positive impact of volunteering on civic participation, wellbeing, and employability, is not strongly evidenced, much less guaranteed. Finally, discussion about what governments can do in practice to expand volunteering is not comprehensive enough; appeals and initiatives must be carefully crafted, sustained, and integrated into our everyday lives, not based on short-term boosts from events like the London Olympics. There needs to be more compelling messaging from the government that recognises what Beveridge did decades ago – that there is an underlying willingness to engage in voluntary action so long as the ‘ways and means of dealing with people’s more immediate needs can be devised’.
I tackle these issues in my new book, Volunteering in the United Kingdom: the spirit of service, publishing later this month with Manchester University Press. Read an exclusive extract from the opening pages below.
In her film From Kindness, Michele Allen (2018) invites us to closely observe the activities of a group of people engaged in the restoration of old books. The film directs our attention to the care and deliberation with which these individuals approach this task. The setting is a library in a large English city which was established by public subscription some 200 years ago. A particular challenge for the library is that of maintaining its stock of books, many of which are very old. The library’s response has been to fund the training of volunteers in bookbinding skills. A group of people meets regularly and, with materials supplied by the library, they are repairing books so they can be returned to the shelves. Only the hands of the individual bookbinders are visible, from which (as far as is possible to do so) we can judge that this is a mixed group, mostly white, and most likely (though not in all cases) beyond retirement age.
Advocates of voluntary action often refer to its value in bringing communities together; witness the view of former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who was concerned about the fracturing of communities (see this chapter’s epigraph) and stated that active engagement in voluntary service would ‘restore the glue of society’ (Blunkett (2008), reported in BBC News, 2008). Glue holds books together, but the vital glue that makes the library’s initiative work is the voluntary time and commitment of these bookbinders. Why do they carry out this activity for no financial reward, in a world in which, we are told, a neoliberal calculus pervades all aspects of social life?
Here are some possibilities. They appreciate the chance to use skills they themselves have developed and they find the task intrinsically worthwhile. They may wish to develop new skills, either for their own personal satisfaction or because it may help them in their search for employment. They have an interest in preservation generally, and perhaps a particular appreciation for old books, their aesthetic value and the skills embodied in them. They value what the library offers and perhaps wish to help secure the maintenance of this valuable resource for future generations of readers. They may just have a generalised desire to give something back to the community or have time on their hands and want to occupy it productively. They appreciate the companionship and conviviality of the activity, perhaps because it partly replicates the structure and social networks of the workplace.
How do we understand this activity? Would we describe it as unpaid work or unpaid help? If we were presented with nothing more than a picture of the activity we might say that it appears to resemble work: people are combining materials and skills in a purposeful fashion, with the intention of restoring an artefact. But what matters to classification here, adapting an illustration given by Pahl, are the social relationships within which the activity is embedded (Pahl, 1988). The bookbinders could do this activity for themselves at home, given the availability of tools, materials and a workspace; the beneficiary here would simply be the individual bookbinder, and he or she would be doing it alone. A picture or film of the activity wouldn’t tell us whether the people involved were being paid for bookbinding or whether it was something they were doing purely for themselves. The bookbinders could also be paid employees of an antiquarian bookseller, restoring books for sale at a profit, or of a library service; if so, the core motivation might simply be one of earning a living. What differentiates our library from these examples is that the activity is unpaid, although travel and other expenses may be covered; no formal contract binds the volunteers to the library and no compulsion is involved in the relationship. Moreover, the ultimate aim is the longterm goal of preserving this important collection of books; there is no expectation of monetary gain for the library, which itself is a nonprofit organisation, run by a volunteer governing body whose members also give their time unpaid. In that sense the activity is for a public purpose, rather than for the profits of a company or the private gain of an individual.
I don’t know whether the participants would use the term volunteering at all to characterise what they do. In fact, individuals presented with open-ended opportunities to describe what they do in their spare time rarely seem to use the word volunteering. One example discussed in Chapter 11is a study of how people aged 50 (chosen because they were participants in a longitudinal study of individuals) were asked to write about how they imagined what their life would be like 10 years later and how they would be spending their time. When individuals envisaged activities undertaken for the benefit of someone outside their own household, a widely used term was ‘charity work’. This term doesn’t feature, to my knowledge, in the ways questions are posed about voluntary action in British social surveys. But as we will see (Chapters 1and 2), terminology makes a difference to how we ask people to report certain kinds of activity: if asked whether they give unpaid help versus whether they do unpaid work, the proportions assenting seem to vary even for activities that are broadly similar. In this fi eld, ‘methodology is destiny’: how questions are phrased matters to the answers that are received, and therefore to the estimates generated of the prevalence and amount of voluntary action (Rooney et al., 2004; Dean and Verrier, 2022).
The potential motivations I’ve listed here do not exhaust the range of possibilities, and many of them appear in standard questionnaires about the reasons why individuals become engaged in voluntary action. Typically, these are a combination of perception of need, availability of time, wanting to meet new people and using existing skills or developing new ones. These are very generic categories of motivation which in practice may not correspond very well to a complex and overlapping set of reasons. Each member of the group will have a different biographical narrative about why they come together in this way. The same is also true of voluntary organisations, all of which could produce accounts of a large range of routine activities which justifiably can be said to constitute a ‘kaleidoscope’ of social action (Cameron, 2006). So this is a complex social phenomenon, but we ought not to forget that it is also one made up of the private actions of individuals. In view of this, should we measure it, and should volunteering become the object of political contestation? The quote from the unnamed writer for Mass Observation about the sheer scale of voluntary action suggests that any attempts at estimating its extent would reveal action on an enormous scale. Substantial resources have been devoted to attempts at quantification, and influential voices continue to call for the repetition and extension of such efforts. However, in the process, is there a risk of neglecting the ways in which voluntary action is woven into the social fabric of the entire country, in ways which are – as Roger Morgan Grenville suggests in the epigraph to this book – as invisible as the mycorrhizae which carry nutrients between plant roots and fungi, sustaining life as they do so?
No book of this kind can capture the diversity of voluntary action. We could all, no doubt, think of ways in which the contribution of volunteers touches our own lives, whether that be through supporting friends and neighbours, campaigning for social change or (as in Morgan Grenville’s illustration) sustaining and improving the environment. Rather, this book is about the claims made for voluntary action and the expectations placed on it.
John Mohan is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham.
Volunteering in the United Kingdom is available to pre-order now in Hardback and Paperback.
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