paddaniels's blog

I've summarised my thoughts so far on thinking about how the concept of the gift economy can help us understand giving activities, such as volunteering and participation, in the context of the social web. I've done this ahead of the Volunteering Counts Conference March 1st-2nd in Manchester organised by the Institute of Volunteering Research where I'll be presenting.

Abstract

The rise of social media and digital networks is contributing to the return to prominence of the gift economy. As the web has enabled social networks and online communities to grow, so values such as sharing, openness and collaboration associated with the gift economy, are increasingly influencing the relationships and connections between us. From business strategies through to public policy, giving relationships are seen as offering credible and valuable contributions.

This revolution in values offers volunteerism and other forms of giving such as participation, civic engagement and professional-amateurism, an opportunity to play an even greater role in a ever more networked Britain.

How do you plan to celebrate the day? With a few fireworks? Since 2006 volunteer managers around the world have had their own day to raise awareness about the role of volunteer management and mark the contribution that volunteer managers make in fostering volunteering initiative and energy.

Increasingly in recent years, the growing campaign to establish volunteer management as a profession in its own right has spread and gained momentum. All sorts of questions have been raised by this debate. Some concern social status and formal recognition touching on sensitive, yet, fundamental issues such as earning potential, pay and conditions and career progression. In the same breath, this campaign for social status has explored the issue of merit and the value volunteer managers bring. This has raised questions about the role of qualifications, training and National Occupational Standards in defining better the very particular skill set and professional knowledge of volunteer managers.

However, for all the campaigning, I sense that many in the volunteer management community are reluctant campaigners. Any effort to put volunteer managers in the foreground takes many out of their comfort zone, away from what they are more used to: putting their volunteers' needs and their beneficiaries needs before their own. Julia Neuberger's characterisation of the profession as 'volunteer organisers' rankled because it mistook this reluctance to step into the limelight, with the fundamental value of the role itself.

We recently received this press release from the Vetting and Barring Scheme which summarises the current changes as of 12th October:

"We are pleased to release the official Guidance in relation to the introduction of the initial phase of the Vetting & Barring Scheme (VBS). This is available by clicking on the following link: http://www.isa-gov.org

We are grateful to all of you who have taken part in meetings and events about the new Scheme which have taken place around the country in the past months.

We also appreciate the time that you have taken to send telephone and e-mail queries to the VBS contact centre (available on 0300 123 1111 at lo-call rate) over the same period. These interactions have helped us to shape the guidance which we are now able to share.

As the Scheme moves forward you may find it helps your staff, member organisations or other stakeholders, if you put the following on your website or in newsletters in coming weeks.

The sudden belated media interest in the setting up of the Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) has been curious. Not least because it has demonstrated once again, the rather simplistic and sketchy outlining of good practice in safeguarding by the media. However, what's been really interesting from a volunteer management perspective is how the current debate suddenly seems to hinge on the definition of volunteering. Many of the criticisms of the VBS have underlined the weakness in the legal definition of what exactly a volunteer is.

Volunteering as an issue seems to have arisen as a result of a press conference where Home Office officials presented the Vetting and Barring Scheme. One of them used the example of parents giving lifts to children to sports clubs, as a way of demonstrating what activity does and doesn't fall within the remit of the scheme. Since then we haven't heard the end of parent drivers.

The Times' Rosemary Bennett reported after the press conference:

"Home Office officials said that informal arrangements between parents to offer lifts or host sleepovers would not be covered".

Bennett's piece continues:

"A Home Office spokesman said: "Anyone working or volunteering on behalf of a third-party organisation - for example, a sports club or a charity - who has frequent or intensive access to children or vulnerable adults will have to be registered with the scheme.""

When Clay Shirky, social media guru, talked about power law distribution, he demonstrated how equal access to participate in an activity almost always resulted in an unequal range of partipation. Some participants were active, while others (usually the vast majority) were a lot less active.

"Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another. Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass participation removes the technological obstacles to participation. Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You'd be wrong." (p.122-123)

After this quote taken from his book 'Here Comes Everybody', Shirky used examples from popular social media websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia. He observed that frequently, you see approximately 20% of the participants delivering 80% of the total value produced, whether that's a Wikipedia entry and a set of photos of Flickr tagged with the same word.

Taken from Clay Shirky's article, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links.
The data is drawn from N.Z Bear's 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem.
The current version of this project can now be found at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem

What is the future for volunteer managers?

Are you concerned about how your organisation values your role? Worried about where funding might come from in the future?

The Association of Volunteer Managers is holding it's second AGM on 23rd September 2009 focussing on what the future holds for volunteer managers.

We will be looking at:

• existing research on volunteer managers
• government policy towards volunteer management
• how we value what we do

The AGM is open to both members and non-members. There are limited travel bursaries for members - please contact us for further details:

Date: Wednesday, 23rd September 2009

Time: 12.45 - 4.00 (Lunch will be provided from 12.00)

Location: Scope, 6 Market Road, London N7 9PW

Networking and refreshments will also be provided afterwards.

To register your attendance by emailing us at: info@volunteermanagers.org.uk.

Please let us know any access needs you have, if you intend to have lunch and if so your dietary requirements.

It was interesting to see Baroness Neuberger in The Times talking about party politics and controlling volunteering:

I am a Liberal Democrat peer, and have just finished being the Prime Minister's Champion for Volunteering. Before that, I chaired the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, which had members from all main political parties and none. This is something politicians of all persuasions have, rightly, recognised as being of great importance. This Government has invested both money and political capital in it - especially with V, the youth volunteering charity, and in response to my commission's conclusions.

Yet the trouble is that politicians also have a sneaking desire to try to control volunteering. Government would like people who are unemployed to volunteer.

Many do and still more will, but we cannot make them. The whole point about volunteering is that it is voluntary.

She was responding to this article about indulging your selfishness:

I was thinking about this selfish selflessness at the Conservative Party's conference on social action this week. It is easy to be cynical about David Cameron's insistence three years ago that every Tory MP and candidate set up a constituency project where local people can bring about improvements in their own lives. What better way to remove his party's greedy, scary, judgmental and uncaring branding than make his footsoldiers dredge canals or coach football teams? And how clever, given opposition is intrinsically reactive, to find a way to look both autonomous and noble.

AVM's Debbie Usiskin is quoted in Third Sector's article "Volunteer manager training fund cut by £1m"

A long-awaited fund to p rovide training for volunteer managers will distribute £1m less than first promised.

The Office of the Third Sector said it would provide £3m rather than the £4m promised last year to support and train volunteer managers. The missing £1m will be diverted into the third sector action plan.

The fund, set up in response to Manifesto for Change, a report by the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, will be distributed by infrastructure body Capacitybuilders from the summer.

Debbie Usiskin, vice-chair of the Association of Volunteer Managers, said she was unsurprised but disappointed by the funding cut. "The need for specific and effective training is urgent," she said.

An OTS spokesman said: "We make no apology for reviewing our budget. Our work has been refocused to support the sector at this critical time."

The fund is part of a £6.6m package of volunteer funds unveiled by the OTS this week. It has set up a £2m, two-year fund for charities aimed at helping disabled people overcome barriers to volunteering; this was also promised in response to Manifesto for Change. The tender process to run the fund opens this week.

The OTS has also announced a £1.6m, two-year fund to build a "volunteering legacy" from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Jamie Thomas, CEO of Red Foundation, has started a debate reacting to the recent announcement by the Prime Minister about the new community work scheme.

So let me get this straight. The government has decided to spend £146m of taxpayers money to launch a new community service programme for 16-19 year olds. This is on top of the £100m plus that has already been spent on the same age group to do practically the same thing, with another £100m already committed to extend this same activity over the next three years, for a demographic that has been proven time and time again to be more likely to volunteer or get involved in the community than any other. Am I the only person that thinks this is nuts?

‘But this is community service not volunteering!' I hear you cry. Well yes technically that's true, but the actual work of identifying and creating meaningful opportunities that can demonstrate community impact whilst at the same time hold enough interest for teenagers to stick with them for 50 hours, is pretty similar in my opinion, and the chances are it will be the same organisations, that currently offer volunteering opportunities, that will be most likely to deliver the scheme. And I don't suppose for a moment that the majority of young ‘community servers' will be able to distinguish the difference.

Jamie Thomas' blog post 'vDaft' asks the question about how effective the Government has been in promoting volunteering amongst young people.

One of the biggest problems with the announcement is how it is another step by the Government towards making volunteering compulsory. This language in the official press release itself doesn't seem clear about whether it's volunteering or community service.

What's clear is that volunteering has to be voluntary. At least if David Blunkett is to lead a taskforce looking at youth volunteering this should be clear. Remember this memorable quote by Blunkett in The Guardian in November, 2008?:

When asked whether the scheme should become a form of compulsory national service Mr Blunkett replied: "It's been reinforced to me in the last year that you can't have volunteering unless it's voluntary."

It would be great to get your views.

At AVM we've had the dusters and scrubbing brushes out. We've put the new spring-cleaned version of the AVM website live. We've reviewed and redesigned what we had before, to improve the experience for everyone using the site. We hope it all helps us to network and support each other better.

We hope it builds on the AVM community that have come together since AVM launched in 2007. We've worked hard to rework what worked well, and hack back the stuff that got in the way. We've also launched a handful of new features for AVM members, which we hope will build and grow in the coming months.

This is still very much a beta version of the site so we would really appreciate feedback and get your opinion on what new features you'd like to see in a future release.

We'd like to thank Red Foundation and the Modernising Volunteering programme for their funding of this redevelopment project. Modernising Volunteering is part of the Improving Support programme funded by Capacitybuilders, a partnership led by Volunteering England with Red Foundation, CSV, Nationwide Foundation and v.

UPDATE: We're currently in the process of synchronising the last of the data from the old database to the new one. This means that if you recently registered on the site, or have recently added content (forum posts or comments) you might find that it's not migrated yet. We will have completed this in the next day or so. If you're a registered user in this situation, you should receive an email alert when your account is ready on the new site.

Our recommendations to the Conservatives' Green paper ‘A stronger society: Voluntary Action in the 21^st Century'

We are pleased to note the commitment to excluding any notion of compulsory volunteering and keeping the distinction between volunteering and other forms of community service.

We are also pleased to note the commitment towards moving to a culture of three-year rather than one-year grants, although we believe this should be a first step towards five-year grants in recognition that the practical implications of recruiting staff, setting projects up etc means even three year funding rarely provides an effective three year project.

1. Direct funding for volunteer management

Effective investment and support in volunteer management is of paramount importance in developing volunteering. The majority of volunteer managers say that on current resources they could not support more than another 10 volunteers in their work (Management matters: a national survey of volunteer management capacity, 2008).

AVM does not believe that Government should permanently fund volunteer management, rather that it is for organisations to recognise that volunteer management is an essential part of their core business and to prioritise accordingly.

However, many organisations do not have a culture of volunteer management and therefore the ability to recognise the importance of volunteer management.

We recommend that a future Conservative government establishes a volunteer management ‘pump-priming' fund, whose aim is not just to develop volunteering in a particular geographical area, with a particular client group or an under-represented volunteer demographic but also to assess the impact of having a volunteer manager so that the organisation has the evidence to prioritise its funding in the future.

This fund would partly replace current funding programmes that target specific under-represented groups to volunteer.

A properly skilled and supported volunteer manager has the skill and knowledge to involve volunteers from under-represented groups. Simply targeting under-represented groups does not always meet the needs of clients and fragments the volunteering population rather than developing volunteering as a continuum through a person's life.

Yesterday AVM held its first AGM - more detailed reports on the content of the day to come. To mark the moment we released our first annual review. We attach it here and have an excerpt from it below:

We’re pleased to say that to date 126 volunteer managers have signed up as members and a further 510 people have registered on the website. It’s not just the numbers though; it’s where they are from. Our members are from all areas of the country, they come from local authorities, universities and volunteer centres, and from the smallest volunteer-led community organisations to the large national charities.

The Morgan Inquiry has just published its report which looks at "the real reasons for more young people to volunteer, the barriers that prevent young people from doing so - and produced a series of practical recommendations for change".

We've highlighted some of the recommendations from the final report:

"It is widely acknowledged that children and young adults often relate better to, and are inspired by, young adults who are closer to their age. However, attracting and retaining young adults into voluntary positions where they have a leadership/mentoring role for young people is proving difficult to achieve."

"There has been a lot of speculation about the introduction of a new national bank holiday, with the notion that it could be dedicated to volunteering. However, from our evidence the introduction of a new bank holiday per se, would have very little impact on volunteering. Instead this Inquiry would like to see the introduction of a new scheme that would grant young adults an extra day a year to volunteer."

"There is also a particular issue with regards to the payment of expenses ‘up front’ to young adult volunteers. Again, DWP along with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) need to produce clearer guidelines on this practice, which is sometimes wrongly regarded as a means of payment and thus means that unemployed young adults are penalised with regards to their benefit claims."

"With volunteering so vital in the development of the transferable skills that employers are looking for nationwide, this Inquiry would like to see the development of a Government accredited volunteering skills award that would be universally recognised and valued by not only industry but also higher/further education establishments."

"Our final recommendation is that we would like to see a consolidation of the information that is available for young adults who wish to volunteer. At present information is confusing to both young adults and employers who are interested in getting involved in volunteering."

The full report can be downloaded here.

Here at AVM we've been staying up late working on a new AVM project- developing a wiki in volunteer management. The idea is to build a resource for volunteer managers which is free, open and community driven. The project itself is still pretty rough and ready- but we have a bunch of articles that are gradually growing. If you're interested put your name down in our community page, check out what's going on and how you can get involved.

One page on the wiki we'd currently really like to draw your attention to is a discussion paper we've drafted with a view to approaching the Office of the Third Sector about the future of training for volunteer managers. We'd love your input in this discussion and would welcome additions (ideas or points we've missed) to the article. 

Daily Telegraph recently (03-05-2008) published a long article on volunteering and the National Trust. It's well worth a read, covering lots of different roles and issues in volunteer management. Here's a quote from one of the volunteers, Darcy, who's interviewed in the article: 

 "Volunteering doesn't feel like a burden," he says. "You do what you can, and it is an enjoyable experience. We're a small team, we're friends."