What I think about the latest Tory proposal on volunteering

Last Friday (10 April 2015) David Cameron announced that if the Conservatives win the UK General Election on 7th May 2015 they would introduce a new legal right for employees in the public sector and large private firms to have three days a year of paid leave in order to volunteer.

Recognising the benefits of employee volunteering, many groups were quick to endorse the proposals.

CIPD (the professional body for Human Resources) welcomed the idea as did the Confederation of British Industry.

Amusingly, the trade union movement - who are usually so quick to criticise volunteers as the enemy of paid workers - quickly backtracked on their initial cautious welcome when it became apparent volunteering for a union would not be considered under the scheme.

Many in the Voluntary and Community Sector have also warmly welcomed Cameron’s proposal.

NCVO’s Chief Executive Sir Stuart Etherington blogged on why it would be good for business whilst Kristen Stephenson helpfully outlined why employee volunteering can be a good thing more broadly.

The Charities Aid Foundation also gave their endorsement as did the sector Chief Executives body ACEVO, whose Director of Policy, Asheem Singh, was quoted in Civil Society saying:

“This is exciting news – it recognises the crucial role of charities in building a better society. The workplace is a new frontier for social action, and this new legal right will help support a new generation of socially responsible citizens.”

However, at an event on Monday some senior fundraisers (not volunteer managers, fundraisers!) called into question the viability of the Conservative proposal whilst both CSV and Timebank have made the point that it needs properly thinking though and resourcing if it is to work.

The Association of Volunteer Managers have said nothing.

So what do I think?

Let’s start with the positive. To an extent I agree that anything which promotes and encourages volunteering is to be welcomed. However, I have two big caveats to this.

First, the solution is not always more volunteers. As I said when I blogged on the Labour Party’s proposals for volunteering back in 2014:

“We are concerned Labour are falling into the common trap of assuming that more volunteers is a measure of success. Any professional leader and manager of volunteers would be quite clear that if an organisation’s mission can be fulfilled effectively with ten volunteers then to recruit 100 to do the same task is wasteful and inefficient.”

Second, initiatives to increase the supply of volunteers completely fail to recognise that the demand needs to be there for these people. Meaningful opportunities need creating to accommodate all these additional time givers and ensure they have a great experiences as volunteers. A shortcut to disaster would be to engage loads of new people, manage them badly, give them a terrible experience and send them on their way. Do you imaging many (any?) of them would be keen to volunteer again? Moreover, as the Boston Globe highlighted recently, employee volunteering can be more of a burden than a help to many good causes.

So, if that’s the positive (!), what about the negative?

First, the Conservative proposals are yet another example of a political party policy initiative on volunteering that looks good but fails to acknowledge that investment is needed to make it happen. Volunteering is freely given but not cost free. As I just noted, if all these additional volunteers are going to come forward opportunities need creating, organisational cultures need to be changed to be more open towards volunteers and resource (time, money, will to act etc.) needs finding to organise it all and maximise the potential impact.

One of the most worrying aspects of the Tory announcement is the failure of most of the main sector bodies to even acknowledge that for the idea to work something needs to change. Whether that something is the attitude of leaders in the sector to properly understand and support volunteering, or it is funding for more volunteer management resource, or both, nobody except Timebank or CSV appears to have even raised this issue. Worse, the professional association for volunteer managers has been totally silent.

Second, and related, is the issue of infrastructure. It has long been accepted that good employee volunteering happens when a competent broker gets involved. This broker negotiates the needs of the good cause with the aims of the employer and matches the two up to best mutual benefit. 

Sadly, the last government’s austerity agenda slashed funding for national and local volunteering infrastructure to the point where the capacity to deliver something like Cameron’s new proposals barely exists compared to five years ago. Not only have the organisations closed or significantly downsized but much of the knowledge and expertise built up over many years has left the roles that were made redundant. 

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the short-sightedness of dismantling the sector's support infrastructure whilst expecting volunteering to flourish.

Third, and finally, what is acceptable volunteering? Set aside the old debate about whether paid time off for volunteering is actually volunteering (and I think it is - is paid time off for holiday not holiday?) but the position on union volunteering makes it clear that the Conservatives view some volunteering as more valid than other ways of giving time. This is not a new issue but one that rarely gets thought through. 

Consider these two previous examples:

1. The Local Government Association (LGA) proposing that people get a discount on their Council Tax if they volunteer, an idea that seems to have stalled when it became apparent how much record keeping and administration is required to assess and approve what it valid volunteering and how much time people give to those causes.
2. The last Labour government’s wizard wheeze to speed up citizenship applications for those immigrants who volunteer, an idea which collapsed for the exact same reason as the LGA’s idea.

So what will constitute valid volunteering under Cameron’s grand new volunteering plan? Who will assess and approve this? Who will record how much of those three days gets used? What will happen to people’s legal right to time off to volunteer for other causes? These questions are all unanswered and until they are addressed I cannot endorse the idea at all.

Of course these proposals may only see the light of day if we get a Conservative government on May 8th. Given the closeness of this election that seems an unlikely outcome. I can see the idea being dropped as quickly as possible in any coalition negotiations. 

So maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about the Tories and their new idea, but we definitely should worry at the response - or lack thereof - of the majority of sector bodies. This is the first chance in a post-Volunteering England age to see how our national infrastructure representatives speak up for the realities of volunteer management. I think it's pretty clear that with a couple of notable exceptions (CSV and Timebank) they failed the test. 

Let’s hope they do better with whatever government we do get.

They couldn’t do much worse could they?

Five things I'd like to say about calculating the economic value of volunteering

Since incorporating Volunteering England into their work, NCVO have started producing some good blogs on volunteering. These are mainly written by their Executive Director of Volunteering & Development, Justin Davis Smith (former Volunteering England CEO) but good material from other authors appears too.

Just a few weeks ago a new blog post appeared entitled "Five things you need to know about calculating the economic value of volunteering". This post summarised a paper from Jakub Dostál and Marek Vyskočil of Masaryk University’s Department of public economy and administration which won the prize for best paper in the New Researcher’s Session at the Voluntary Sector and Volunteering Research Conference 2014.

In the post there are five tips for "confronting economic calculations in your work or in someone else’s". As I read the article I started to feel downhearted yet again at the lack of awareness of the dangers of perpetuating the myth of economic value of volunteering and the absence of vision or ambition to do any better.

I'm not going to attempt a full analysis of the pitfalls of attributing notional wage 'values' to the work of volunteers. My American colleague Jayne Cravens has written an excellent commentary on the problems of valuing volunteers in economic terms. I've also written an analysis of the well intentioned by flawed efforts by the International Labor (sic) Organisation (ILO) to capture economic measures of volunteering globally in their Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. If you are interested in exploring this topic in more depth then both those sources are good starting points.

What I do want to do is provide five responses to the five things the NCVO blog (author unknown) tells us we need to know about measuring the economic value of volunteering.


1 - Remember it's an estimate
Yes it is, but everyone from the ILO down seems so wedded to it that almost no energy is being invested in coming up with something better. Economic value is measured because it's easy, not because it's the best thing to measure. That speaks volumes about the actual value placed on the contribution of volunteer to society when so little effort is willing to be spent trying to get more accurate.


2 - Estimates rely significantly on the type of replacement wage
I absolutely agree with the author here. They flag up why economic measures of volunteering are not only an estimate but a poor one at that. The ILO manual does try to standardise this but in practice that's an approach that is far more complex and involved than people are usually willing to be. Remember, this is an area where we can't even be bothered to develop a decent measure, just the easiest estimate.


3 - There are still good reasons for using the concept of replacement wages
No there aren't!

First of all, economic measures focus on wage replacement methodologies (i.e. attributing a notional wage value to the work done by volunteers) don't actually measure an output or on outcome. Rather, they attribute a financial amount to an input, namely the time that volunteers give. In my view they therefore fail to calculate any kind of meaningful value to the work of volunteers. Rather they ascribe an economic amount to something we'd never pay for anyway. Even if we did accept that there was some kind of value in these measures, it is calculated on the same terms as paid work, from which we know volunteering is distinctive.

In an age where demonstrating actual value - the contribution made to society, the difference made by giving time - is increasingly critical, whether in effectively recognising volunteers for the work they do or for securing income from funders, we have got to get better at evidencing this for volunteering. Replacement wage calculations do not do this and need replacing with something much better.

Second, the author argues that we should use economic measures because there are existing "statistical systems and surveys". That's following the same line of reasoning as before - we'll measure it because it's easy not because it's the right thing to do. They try to justify this by saying that in the absence of any other methodologies we should go with what we've got lest we end up with something of lower quality, done without academic support.

Frankly, this is someone saying, "Look, this is what we are prepared to measure. If you don't like it then we think you couldn't possibly come up with something yourselves and because academics wouldn't be involved if you did it wouldn't be any good".


4 - Ask for more: don’t forget future research
Here, the article's author accepts that there may be a better measure out there and that we should always ask for more. In fact, they say the academic world should ask for more but given the attitudes we've seen thus far I'd argue that it is the volunteering movement that should ask for more. For more interest in this topic by academics. For more vision and ambition that just settling for what's easy to measure. For more respect for the intelligence of leaders and managers of volunteers rather than assuming superiority over us.

They also argue that what we have now is better than we've had in the past. I'd make two observations here.

First, what we have now is not that different than we had 15-20 years ago. Progress on measuring the true value of volunteering is glacial. We may well ask for more but if we carry on as we are we're looking at decades passing before we get anything better.

Second, is what we have now actually better than not having economic measures for volunteering? Do statements like "Volunteers are worth £500m to the NHS" help? Do they instead suggest to ill-informed decision makers that they could cut budgets and get volunteers in for free instead? Big Society anyone? I'm sure many could do without these problems which we encounter because flawed economic measures of volunteering are so common.


5 - Not everything that counts can be counted
Here, the author acknowledges that other methods of calculating true value such as SROI exist. Again though, they state that these, "measure the social impact of volunteering, but it is extremely difficult to cover all the many types of benefits". So they conclude their article with an admission that its hard, so we'll stick what what we've got. Easy is better than meaningful. Again! Sigh.


What do you think?

Are there better ways to measure the value of the contribution volunteers make to society? What are they and how do they work?

What's been your experience (good and bad) of using economic measures of volunteering?

Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Has the time finally come to stop talking about job substitution?

Job substitution is a theme I've written about quite a few times (see these examples from this very blog). For those unfamiliar with the term, job substitution is used in the volunteering world to describe a situation where volunteers replace paid staff. It is a flawed term (as I argued in a posting back in May 2012) and it leads to a parallel and worryingly common belief that volunteers should only complement and supplement the work of paid staff. This position is even enshrined in a charter between Volunteering England (now NCVO) and The Trade Union's Congress (TUC).

It is this doctrine of 'complement and supplement' that I want to focus on in this post.

There are two reasons for this.

First, I attended a joint meeting of EVDC and NNVIA last week where we were invited to suggest policy positions NCVO might take with government in the run up to the UK's 2015 general election. One of the tables said that we might have to change our position on job substitution as it no longer matched the reality that many volunteer involving organisations (VIOs) face. Too many VIOs just cannot afford the levels of paid staff they once had and volunteers need to be a realistic option for delivering the organisation's mission in future, something the 'complement and supplement' position can make difficult to consider.

Instead of disagreement there seemed to be general agreement in the room.

To me this was brilliant news. It signalled that finally people might be ready to have a grown up and intelligent discussion about the roles of paid staff and volunteers in organisations. It signalled that the days of people being slapped down for trying to have a debate might finally be over. It signalled that instead of a wall of silence when this issue gets raised in blogs, volunteer managers might actually be ready to get stuck into the complex and delicate issues involved.

The second reason for writing about the issue again was Susan Ellis' excellent December 2013 Hot Topic, "Don't Let The History Made By Volunteers Fall Through The Cracks Of Time".

I was recently running a workshop in London with a predominantly female group. Over lunch, discussion turned to the 'complement and supplement' doctrine with many people saying how they completely agreed with it. So I asked the women present if they thought they would have the right to vote if we'd argued that the suffragettes should only have complemented and supplemented the work of paid staff.

In the UK, women have the right to vote because of the dedication, hard work and sacrifice of volunteer suffragettes. They weren't paid and to suggest that they should only have complemented and supplemented paid staff is an insult to those involved in the suffrage movement.

You see, as Susan Ellis is fond of saying, nobody gets paid to start a revolution. Social change happens, more often than not, because of the efforts and sometimes sacrifices of volunteers. They may not be called volunteers, they may not be recognised by history as volunteers, but do not be fooled into thinking that the major changes in our society are made exclusively or mainly by paid staff.

In history, as Susan argues, volunteers have played a crucial role in shaping the world we live in. If those individuals had sat around waiting for someone to be paid to make the change or had decided their efforts should only complement and supplement the work of paid staff then we would still be in the dark ages.

In modern society we face challenges unprecedented in human history, from global poverty & hunger to an ageing population, from wealth inequality to the environment. By suggesting that the efforts of volunteers should only 'complement and supplement' the efforts of paid staff working on these challenges is to vastly reduce the pool of knowledge, talent and capacity to find solutions. That is to all our detriments.

My sincere hope is that as we enter a new year the time really has come for the debate about job substitution to move on and grow up.

NCVO gives evidence on Olympic Legacy around volunteering

In response to a recent posting I made on LinkedIn sharing a news article from Third Sector about the volunteering legacy for the London 2012 Games, Mike Locke of NCVO kindly shared with me the transcript of evidence he recently gave to the House of Lords Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee.

You can access this twenty page transcript on the Committee's website where you can also access RSS feeds on the Committee's work and sign up for email updates. Interestingly Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is due to give evidence to this committee on 22nd October 2013.

You can also watch Mike giving evidence to the committee via the video below.



What do you think of Mike's evidence?

What would you add to what he said?

Did the committee ask the right questions?

How would you have answered them differently?

“We’re doomed, doomed I tell you!"

Private Frazer of legendary British TV show Dad’s Army is famed for this catchphrase and its been in my mind a fair bit of late as I’ve reflected on recent events in the English world of volunteering.

Many years ago when the Association of Volunteer Administrators closed down in the USA I can recall colleagues despairing at the loss of knowledge and expertise from the sector. Especially worrying was a loss of any sense of history, of what had been done before, of what had worked and not worked. As a result so called ‘new’ initiatives have sprung up across the pond that aren’t new at all, just old ideas repackaged in fancy jargon and without any heeding of lessons learnt before.

That all happened at a time when the work being done on volunteering in England was being heralded by some as world leading. In particular Volunteering England (VE) was singled out for its bravery and foresight in coming into being (it was previously four separate agencies prior to 2004) and for its work to modernise local volunteering infrastructure.

Sadly I now think we are in the same boat our American friends found themselves in a few years ago. In fact, I think we may be worse off because those who can remember the recent volunteering history in England are alarmingly quiet in speaking up in the face of some of what is going on.

Let me give you some examples.

At an event I recently attended panelists challenged an audience of volunteer managers - including some of the most experienced and respected people in our field - with some pretty bold statements, suggesting that the volunteering movement hadn’t done much to influence the delivery and legacy of the London 2012 volunteer programme & wasn’t well organised in lobbying government. This was supported by a lady from The Office of Civil Society (OCS) who said it wasn’t government’s role to go out and consult with the sector, we had to engage with them.

At face value these may seem like fair challenges. Yet VE led work with a number of partners to help produce the LOCOG volunteering strategy for the 2012 Games, work that started before the UK was even awarded the games back in 2005. When LOCOG opted to focus solely on games-time delivery and not legacy, VE led the work to bring together a range of stakeholders to focus on the volunteering legacy.

Similarly, VE spent the eight years of its existence lobbying and working with government on a range of policy proposals, initiative and developments all on behalf of the sector. Much of that work was behind the scenes rather than in-your-face campaigning and it resulted in many successes, including the retention of volunteering as a key strand of the now defunct ChangeUp programme (when many organisations had lobbied hard for volunteering to get dropped from that key modernisation programme) and securing funding for the Volunteer Management Programme which Capacitybuilders ran for two years prior to the last general election.

For its trouble VE had its funding slashed with no regard to its contributions or its efforts to reduce duplication and increase the effectiveness of the volunteering infrastructure by coming into being through the 2004 merger. The coalition government treated VE the same way as many other infrastructure bodies who actively resisted change - other than when it benefitted them financially - and who now hail the very change they fought so long to prevent, even though it is now driven by necessity rather than purpose. 

But the panel of experts didn’t know this. Nice people though they were they seemed ignorant of anything that had happened in the past around volunteering, any lessons learnt or insights gained. No, they were mainly the kind of people who use bewildering jargon and lots of words but say little of substance. In short, they are exactly the kind of people OCS seem to want to hear from, not those with any real knowledge or experience. Maybe that’s why OCS took away the sector’s voice on volunteering when they effectively axed VE back in 2011. 

[Sorry lady from the OCS but we can’t go and engage with you if you cut of our main means to do so].

At the same event, a senior manager from a well known volunteering organisation suggested that a group of agencies and individuals should come together to define what exactly we mean by volunteering in order to be clear where the sector stands in regard to various initiatives (mainly government driven) that seek to stretch the definitions of volunteering.

Again, a sound suggestion on one level. Except this work was done extensively by the Commission on the Future of Volunteering who reported in 2008 and specifically addressed this very issue in the opening pages of their report. 

I admit that during this event I was totally shocked and I take full responsibility for not saying anything myself. I was angry. I was frustrated. I fear that had I said anything there and then it would have come out as at worst vitriol, at best the frustrated ravings of an ex-VE employee and most definitely not as a constructive contribution. 

However, far more concerning was that a senior member of VE staff in the room said nothing. No challenge. No defence of the organisation’s track record. Just silence.

And this isn’t an isolated example.

After the work of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, its chair, Baroness Neuberger, went on to conduct and publish a review of volunteering health and social care for the last government. Just last month the Kings Fund - under Department of Health funding - published a report that seems to duplicate this work.  What did VE say? Nothing.

Then there is the recent announcement by the Mayor of London’s office that Team London are launching a website next month to match volunteers with opportunities. Unsurprising given innovation in volunteering these days seems to be code for “let’s build another website”. What did VE say about this flagrant duplication of existing infrastructure? Nothing.

So what can we learn from all this? What can we do to avoid the situation getting worse?

In regard to ourselves as leaders and managers of volunteers, I think we need to ensure that individually we know the history of our field and of the volunteering movement. We need to take time to learn this history as well as the nuts and bolts of our day jobs. We need to take responsibility to educate ourselves and each other. We need to hold others - government, VE / NCVO etc. - to account when they ignore or dismiss this history to the detriment of volunteering. We need to learn from the history and apply it to change the way we do our jobs, creating real innovation and change, not the emperors new clothes.

I also think we need to use this knowledge wisely. I think a big danger is that we can come across as thinking we know all the answers because we know some context and history. We can come across as closed minded to new ideas. Yet the reality is that few organisations have done anything to change the way they approach volunteering despite all this knowledge and experience. That leads outsiders - including government - to dismiss what went before as irrelevant and to focus on ‘new’ initiatives that aren’t that new after all.

Finally, I think we need to see some action from VE / NCVO. I accept they are still going through the final stages of post-merger change and that this is a painful process. But right now, probably more than ever, we need a national body to be standing up for volunteering. Freed from what some may perceive as the shackles of government funding we need VE / NCVO to be standing up for real change, real innovation. We need the likes of Justin Davis Smith (perhaps the most knowledgable person on volunteering in this country) to be saying “hang on a minute, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here” not staying silent as VE’s legacy is challenged and re-written by those who weren’t there or who have their own agendas for belittling VE’s contribution.

Of course I will do what I can with what influence I have, as will others. But at the end of the day we need a strong body like VE / NCVO who have the resources and political clout to speak up. The truth is the knowledge and history of volunteering in England are still there, just muted for some reason. They need to find their voice - we all do - or Private Frazer may be right and, whilst volunteering will inevitably continue, the volunteering movement that many have worked so hard to build in this country for so many years may well be doomed.