Volunteers - let's be 'aving you

At the start of November I noticed a small flurry of blog posts and media mentions focusing on volunteering in policing.
The first that got my attention was on the BBC New website, “Volunteer Army may swell police ranks”. This reported on the recent Home Office consultation “Reforming the Powers of Police Staff and Volunteers” which, in a volunteering context, seeks to:

“…enhance the role of volunteers. We are consulting on ending the anomaly whereby volunteers can either have all of the powers of the constable, as a Special; or have none of the powers, as a police support volunteer. We will instead allow volunteers to mirror the roles played by police staff, for example as Community Support Officers.”

The BBC article tells the story of Alan Hunt, a volunteer with Dorset police who monitors CCTV between 730pm and 4am every Friday and Saturday night. Mr Hunt, who has been in the role for five years, radios officers to attend any disturbances caught on the cameras.
It also mentions a volunteer with the National Crime Agency (the UK’s equivalent of the FBI), who uses his skills as a security adviser with and insurance firm to help give a different perspective on projects to the regular NCA officers.

Another article I noticed from my home county of Lincolnshire explored the role of students in a new volunteering scheme with the county’s police force. In this scheme, the police and the University of Lincoln have partnered to to give students the opportunity to volunteer as Volunteer Police Community Support Officers or Police Campus Drop-In Centre volunteer.
Police and Crime Commissioner Alan Hardwick is quoted as saying that this initiative is not about getting unpaid volunteers to do the work of paid officers:

“There are no officers who would come and sit in the drop-in centre so the idea that the volunteers are doing their work is totally wrong. The volunteers will be able to engage with students far better – the students are their peers and part of that community."

Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police, Neil Rhodes, adds:

“What’s different about today’s initiative is that it’s aimed at young people who will be able to act as an interface with us as volunteers policing the streets of Lincoln and at the drop-in centre.The scheme is about having a bridge between the force and the university. Sometimes it can be quite daunting to approach a police officer whereas if you can speak to one of your fellow students who can help you access our services, that should be easier.”

Sadly (but unsurprisingly) the unions seem less enthusiastic. In the BBC article Ben Priestley, Unison’s national officer for police and justice services, raises concerns about competence and accountability.

“There’s a general question about whether the general public believe that policing should be carried out by, in many cases, well-meaning amateurs. Policing is a serious business, dealing with serious crime, and our members who work as police staff are fully trained, they’re fully vetted and they’re very, very committed to the job they do. If you’re a volunteer, you’re not under the direction and control of a chief constable, as police staff and police officers are, and that’s a very real problem, and I don’t think the general public would be happy about that.”

Mr Priestly makes mistakes common to those within the union movement when it comes to volunteers [1]:

1. He confuses amateur with incompetent i.e professional means competent. I’ve blogged on this before so do take a look at that post for my thoughts.
2. He implies volunteers within the police will just be random people, plucked from the street and placed into roles with no training or support. Read the two articles I have already referenced to see that this isn’t the case, police volunteers are properly trained, vetted and supported. Volunteers, when properly recruited, managed and supported, are no less competent at what they do than paid staff.
3. He suggests volunteers, because they are unpaid, may be less committed than paid police officers. Interesting. Doing a job for no pay implies less commitment? If anything, the issue with volunteers is them being too committed!
4. He indicates that volunteers would not be ‘under the direction and control’ of a chief constable in the same way as police staff and officers. Why? Volunteers in policing roles are already under such direction and control and held to standards of conduct and behaviour. Mr Priestly is assuming that you can’t control volunteers or hold them responsible and accountable, an assumption that is simply wrong.
5. He does what all union people who speak out about volunteering do, which is to fail to recognise the the very movement and organisation he represents runs on volunteer labour. As they state on their webiste, Unison employs 1,200 staff and have 1.3 million members, relying on volunteer activists. Without them Unison would not be able to function. Or are all union volunteers untrained, unsupported individuals who can’t be managed or controlled?

My own view is that the role of volunteers in policing, indeed in any public service, is incredibly valuable and should be enhanced. Volunteers don’t simply complement and supplement the work of employees, they bring something else. For example, that could be a distinctively different credibility with the community by virtue of them being unpaid, such as the student volunteers in Lincoln that the Chief Constable highlighted in the remark quoted earlier.

Crucially, the role of volunteers should not be expanded because they are a free or cheap form of labour. That is lazy and wrongheaded thinking that harms both volunteering and the people those very public services seek to help. Where such ill-considered decision making is concerned it should be challenged and we Volunteer Managers should do more to speak up, challenge and help those making the decisions to do so in a better way.

I want to conclude with the words of Justin Davis Smith at NCVO who wraps up his excellent blog post, “We need a better vision for volunteering in policing” like this:

The modern police force was born out of volunteer involvement in the 19th Century. We have a glorious opportunity to re-shape our public services for the 21st Century by harnessing the power of volunteers alongside our paid professionals. It is not a zero sum game, but a complementary, symbiotic relationship, where volunteers and paid staff do what they each do best, operating in consort to deliver a more effective and efficient service better in tune with the community in which they operate.

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1. For more of my blogging about job substitution / displacement / replacement issues, please take a look at the relevant tagged posts.  ↩
   

Three reasons why it’s time to stop talking about amateurs and professionals

For many years I’ve heard and read variations on the same theme: Volunteers are just well meaning amateurs. If you want something done properly then it needs to be handed over to a professional.

It’s a position used as a justification for not giving volunteers meaningful things to do. They’re amateurs, they’d just mess it up.

It’s an argument used to combat fears of job displacement. How many times have we read in recent years that library services will suffer if volunteers are left do the work of professional librarians?

It’s a way of thinking that perpetuates a division in Volunteer Involving Organisations, between the paid staff - who are seen as essential - and the volunteers - who are seen as a nice to have optional extra, a bit like metallic paint on a new car.


We need to stop this thinking now more than ever. Any time we encounter such views we need to start actively challenging them.

I want to share three reasons why.

The first relates to definitions.

Whilst it is true that the word amateur can be used to denote competence, its primary definition is one that refers to an activity undertaken without pay. Professional on the other hand suggests either that someone belongs to a specific profession (a doctor, lawyer or teacher for example) or is being paid for the work they do.

So, whilst some may suggest volunteers are incompetent by calling them amateurs, the labelling of paid staff as professionals carries with it no assumption of competence.

It is one of the biggest myths I encounter in my work that if someone is paid they become more competent. Similarly that the more someone is paid the more competent they must be.

I have worked with highly competent volunteers as well as incompetent ones. I have worked with highly incompetent paid staff as well as competent ones. I bet you have too. Never did someone's level of remuneration effect how good they were at the job.

Second, labelling volunteers as well meaning amateurs, and therefore implying they are incompetent, is just lazy thinking that dodges the need to consider properly how we effectively engage people in our organisations.

Let’s go back to the library example I mentioned above. At no point does anyone who has criticised the idea of volunteer run libraries ever appeared to stop and considered that perhaps there might be very well training, highly competent professional librarians who might want to volunteer to help run these libraries. Perhaps they are retired and want to get involved in their field again? Perhaps they are non-practicing librarians but want time away from their non-library day jobs? Perhaps they are unemployed and/ or returning to work and want to get up-to-speed again?

Nope, straight away the assumption is that we’ll just take anyone we can find and throw them in at the deep end to run a library. If we did that then of course professional librarians would be a better option, but would any competent Volunteer Manager ever do such a thing? No! We spend time finding the right people, selecting them carefully for the right roles, training them up and supporting them to do the best work possible.

Finally, the issues we face in society are simply too big for any one pay category to deal with. No Voluntary and Community Sector organisation is ever going to have all the money to pay people to do all the work that needs doing. That’s truer now then ever. A team effort is needed, one where paid and unpaid ‘staff’ are engaged and deployed most effectively to work together to achieve an organisation’s mission.

We can no longer afford to waste energy discrediting volunteers as well meaning but incompetent amateurs whilst automatically assuming paid staff are always competent and the solution to everything. Instead we need to embrace the passion & potential of volunteers and employees, amateurs and professionals, and harness that for the good causes we serve.

Anything less is at best wasteful, and at worst negligent, behaviour in the stewardship of our resources when so many are in need of our support.

Three ways the Keep Volunteering Voluntary campaign may be doing more harm than good

In my last blog post I wrote about the Keep Volunteering Voluntary campaign (KVV) and the misunderstanding propagated by the UK media that the government's new Help To Work scheme is volunteering.

Let me say it again, Community Work Placements (CWP) under Help to Work ARE NOT VOLUNTEERING. They do not meet the definitions of volunteer (freely entered into being the key issue) and even the government recognises this.

Section 2.14 of the guidance for providers of community work placements states that:

If a claimant is already undertaking voluntary work and you can justifiably advise that the work is beneficial to the claimant by helping them to overcome barriers to employment, you may count that voluntary work towards the full time work placement hours. However, if you do not feel the voluntary work is of appropriate benefit to the claimant, you may require the claimant to do the full-time work in the placement you have sourced for them (but must give the claimant at least 1 weeks notice). Please Note: Where a claimant is already undertaking voluntary work you must also ensure you give the claimant 48 hours notice for any required participation/ attendance.

Section 2.16 states:

Please Note: JCP will refer claimants who have insufficient work history or a lack of motivation; therefore we would expect only a minimal proportion of claimants currently undertaking part-time or voluntary work to be referred to CWP.

In other words, volunteering is not the same as a CWP (if it were, no distinction would be drawn) and if someone is already volunteering it is unlikely they would be required to do a CWP. However, this is up to the discretion of the JCP adviser and that means inconsistent decisions will occur as years of past experience have taught many in the volunteering world.

Also, note that there are no other references to volunteering in the entire guidance document.

Despite this clear distinction - Help To Work and CWPs are NOT VOLUNTEERING - the KVV campaign rolls on, arguing that:

"As charities and voluntary organisations we know the value of volunteering. Volunteering means people independently choosing to give their time freely to help others and make the world a better place. Workfare schemes force unemployed people to carry out unpaid work or face benefit sanctions that can cause hardship and destitution.   We believe in keeping volunteering voluntary and will not participate in government workfare schemes.”

In my view they risk doing much more harm than good to the volunteering cause. Here are my three main concerns.


Number one
By failing to recognise that Help To Work's CWPs are not volunteering the signatories and supporters of KVV are showing their ignorance of and / or confusion about volunteering. The voluntary and community sector sector relies upon volunteers and is the main involver of volunteers so surely they should know better - the KVV statement even claims they do in its opening line!

The potential harm here is that KVV could further confuse others about volunteering and CWPs, with the public an media turning against genuine volunteering and not forced workfare.

A much more sensible approach would be for the KVV campaign to focus on educating the media on the difference between a CWP and a volunteer opportunity so the risk of public opinion being unduly swayed negatively towards volunteering is minimised.


Number two
The campaign is probably having having little influence on government. There are two main reasons for this assumption: first, government know CWPs are not volunteering so they can confidently ignore the campaign; second, as I suggested above, the effort is directed at the wrong people - the media should be the focus.

I also worry how the ignorance about volunteering that is on display from this campaign might harm the credibility of bodies who have signed up when it comes to any future campaigning about volunteering that might be needed. I can hear ministers and officials saying things like, "why should we listen to you on volunteering, you don't even understand what it is yourselves?"

Thank goodness NCVO are not signatories!


Number three
The KVV campaign is perpetuating the media driven myth that CWPs are volunteering and so creating the risk anti-workfare campaigners begging calling for a ban on all unpaid work.

Think that's far fetched? Look at this blog from the USA where someone makes the argument that all volunteering is exploitative and should be banned. How long before similar voices are heard on this side of the pond? We already have the risk of threats to volunteering from the ongoing rumblings about unpaid internships. The risk, however small we may think it is, is real and KVV is adding fuel to the fire.


In conclusion let me say that I think people are genuinely concerned about the blurring lines between volunteering and workfare. They have been for over a decade. There are genuine workfare schemes and issues to complain about and fight for beyond Help To Work and CWPs as KVV make clear on their website. I've fought some of this fights myself and will continue to do so in future.

The profile of the KVV campaign and these issues has grown because of media misreporting of Help To Work and CWPs as volunteering. This coincided with KVV calling for support and so we end up with lots of confusion and misunderstanding about what is and is not volunteering.

I genuinely do not think the people and bodies behind KVV are trying to harm volunteering. I am sure their intentions are good and I hope my views above about the potential damage being done are proven to be wrong.  But until we know that for sure I think the volunteering movement needs to consider the Keep Volunteering Voluntary campaign carefully and cautiously, because if I'm right they could be doing much more harm than good.

See also these related blog posts from me:

Is all work experience equal?
Are we alienating a generation of volunteers?
Is all volunteering voluntary?

Four ideas for educating new staff about volunteers

One of the regular training gigs I have is to run a half-day 'working with volunteers' seminar for people who are thinking of working in the non-profit sector.  The seminar is part of a course NCVO are contracted to run for people transitioning from a career in the armed forces to civilian life. Over a week it promotes working for civil society organisations as a positive career option and explores some of the key issues organisations and individuals face.

When I was invited to run this seminar for the first time I asked myself 'How often does a chance like this come along?  A chance to positively influence how people outside our sector view volunteers before they take the step of working for a charity?'.  The answer was, to my mind, 'very rarely' and came to me about as quickly as it took for me to say 'yes' to the invitation.

I’m very aware that few of us will get such a chance.  We are more likely to only get an opportunity to influence new paid staff after they have started work for our agencies, sometimes long after they start. Let's face it, meeting with the leader and manager of volunteers comes way down the corporate induction checklist.

So how can we make the most of the opportunity we do have an how can we get more of these opportunities?

Here are four ideas:

1/ And now for something completely different

Give new starters something out of the ordinary that will make them sit up and take notice of the volunteer programme.

In one agency I worked at, new starters were never short of paper at the end of the corporate induction course.  When it came to volunteering, we gave them an audio CD, produced to a professional standard by volunteers, that features real volunteers talking about what they do, why they do it, what they get out of it and why someone else should do it  - in under 10 minutes! It was accessible to all (I worked for a sight loss charity), easy to access, quick to listen to and stood out from the small forest of manuals and processes people were supposed to read at their leisure (but probably never did).

2/ Get a slot on the induction programme for new staff

Ask for a slot on your organisations induction programme. Sell it by setting out the impact of the work your volunteers do and the added value they provide to your organisation. If volunteers are that important why not ensure all new staff have at least a basic knowledge of how you engage volunteers?

Once you have your foot in the door, get new starters to think about their own volunteer work, what it means to those agencies and draw parallels with the importance of volunteers to your organisation.  This will help to root their understanding of your volunteer programme within the context of their own experience rather than just bamboozle them with statistics.

3/ Choose your words carefully

Don’t mislead people with the information you give but don’t use language that will turn people off before you have a chance to get started. Steer clear of anything that might worry new starters about volunteers replacing staff. For example, “our volunteers do all this and only cost us 10% of what it costs to employ people”.  Also be careful about saying how highly motivated and dedicated your volunteers are. It may be true but it often implies that paid staff aren’t motivated and dedicated to the cause.


4/ Do your homework

When middle and senior managers start with an organisation they normally have a series of one-to-one induction meetings arranged with other key managers.  Make sure you are one of them.  Avoid using this meeting to find out what the new manager does - do your homework first and instead spend the time helping them see how volunteers could make a real difference to achieving their objectives.


What ideas do you have?

What has worked for you?

How else could you influence new people so they become supporters of your volunteer programme?

Please comment in the space below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Volunteering and the floods: questions and lessons

As is typical when disaster strikes, volunteers are right there in the front line of relief efforts. The current flooding in the UK is no different. Whilst official agencies are criticised for being slow to act, volunteers are getting on with the job of practical help and support to those affected. 

Note: Nobody is complaining about job substitution now!

This volunteer led support is being woefully under-reported by the bad-news-fixated media. The best example of reporting I could find was from Tuesday when Sky News reported on their website how flood victims were being helped by the ’best of British’. 

Interestingly, from my searching online this morning I could find little information from the existing volunteering infrastructure - NCVO, volunteer centres etc. - on how people can get involved in flood relief efforts. 

What reference I did find was largely related to pre-existing, formal volunteer roles that require training and official deployment. For example, Do-It make mention of flood volunteering on their site, directing people to the British Red Cross and Community Resilience. Both links send people to information on opportunities that look like ones which don’t really seem geared to people who spontaneously want to help. The Red Cross itself has a news story online about how its volunteers are supporting flood affected communities. This links to information on becoming one of their emergency response volunteers - also a role that requires training.

What about spontaneous volunteering, people just wanting to help because they see a need and want to get involved without going through weeks of training and induction?

Interestingly this is where there was more information, but none of it linked to the existing volunteering infrastructure. Instead the main focus was on a new initiative called Flood Volunteers. 

Flood Volunteers has been set up by the private sector entrepreneurs behind TaskHub, a site for finding professional services such as plumbing etc.. According to the Metro newspaper and ComputerWeekly.com, the Prime Minister asked the founders of TaskHub to set up Flood Volunteers to aid the support efforts. People simply say how they are willing to help and affected people can link up with them for help.

For me all this raises some important questions:

• Why is the government not turning to the existing volunteering infrastructure for help in deploying spontaneous volunteers? 
• If it did, does the volunteering infrastructure have the resources to be of help at times like this?
• What should be the role of national volunteering infrastructure bodies like NCVO and NAVCA (to name just two) in co-ordinating with government and the relevant agencies to ensure the great British public’s spontaneous help is directed most effectively?
• What plans do the existing volunteering infrastructure have in place so that they are prepared to be of real help in times like this by channeling spontaneous volunteer support to the right places?
• Who is ensuring that the spontaneous volunteering that is happening is being done safely and actually helping, not hindering, relief efforts? We might not realise it but people wanting to help can actually cause more problems than they alleviate, a situation explored in detail by Jayne Cravens on her webpage, Volunteering To Help After Major Disasters.
• Who is monitoring whether people actually follow through on the pledges of support? Take a look at this story (again reported by Jayne Cravens) following the floods in Queensland, Australia three years ago where this was an issue.
• What is being / will be done to see if these spontaneous volunteers who are making a real difference in flood affected communities might want to put their time into volunteering when the flood waters subside?

Quite rightly the focus now is on on helping those affected by the floods. As the efforts move in the coming weeks into cleaning up and moving on, the media will inevitably focus on the lessons learnt from the floods. There will be calls for better flood defences, more funding for flood hit communities, an examination of the political point scoring that seems to be more important to some politicians than helping the people in need.

But will we in the volunteering movement learn any lessons?

Will we be more prepared next time? 

Warning! The volunteers are coming

Earlier this week friend and colleague Lynn Blackadder shared with me the latest issue of National Museums Directors' Council newsletter. Within the newsletter there was a heading reading,"Volunteers may run libraries, parks and museums warns local government chief". Underneath it was the following text:

Writing for the Daily Telegraph the Chairman of the Local Government Association Sir Merrick Cockell warns that it will be impossible for local councils to keep paying for all the services they currently offer as cuts increase.  He writes “with half of local government’s savings still having to be found before April 2016, and more cuts promised thereafter, it will no longer be possible to keep slicing away at budgets without services suffering or, in some cases, disappearing completely.” 

“We now need to be asking whether people are prepared to take a direct role in providing other services like the running of local museums, sports classes, the upkeep of parks and green spaces and the management of allotment sites.” The Telegraph reports that the LGA estimates that local councils will have to find a further £10bn savings from their budgets, on top of the £10bn cuts already made. Telegraph (Sir Merrick’s article), Telegraph (commentary)

In the last few years, whilst the purse strings have been rapidly tightened following the global financial crash, the debate about volunteers making a greater contribution to the delivery public services has been focused almost exclusively on the risks of these volunteers going paid staff out of work. In public fora, leaders and managers of volunteers have remained largely silent on the issue except for occasional support for the position that volunteers shouldn't do the work that paid staff once did - as if the argument were that simple. In fact Lynn and I tried to address this complexity in a piece for The Guardian back in 2011.

Rarely has anyone spoken about the upside to volunteer involvement in public services. The more positive aspects of the (in many ways rightly) much maligned Big Society agenda that focused on local people having more of a say in how services are delivered & taking more ownership of those local services have seemingly been forgotten.

This leads me to think that if we'd had an intelligent, open and informed discussion about volunteer involvement in public services a few years ago we perhaps wouldn't have to resort to the interesting language you may not have noticed in the headline to the article quoted above  - "Volunteers may run libraries, parks and museums warns local government chief".

Why is this something to warn us about? Are volunteers such scary people that we should be in fear of them when visiting the local museum in future?  Or is it a warning that 'the volunteers are coming, be in fear for your jobs'? Or perhaps its a warning to the public, the old 'volunteer or lose it (the library, park, leisure centre etc.)' recruitment tactic.

Either way I can't help but feel we've got a situation of our own making here. With either total silence or well intentioned arguments against job substitution from the volunteer management community, we have perhaps missed a huge chance to speak up and educate. We have perhaps missed a golden opportunity to say how volunteers - either on their own or working alongside paid staff - need not be a threat but an opportunity to transform public services for the better.

The good news is that opportunity need not be entirely a missed one. We can still speak up and be heard. In our own organisations, in online forums, in comments to news articles, on social media, at conference and events, we can take a more positive line on how volunteers can add real value to public services.

Interestingly, the Association of Volunteer Managers (AVM) is developing a code of conduct for its members (and if you work with volunteers here in the UK you should be a member of AVM) which, if adopted, would require them to "advocate on behalf of volunteers at all times". In other words, we would be compelled to take a positive stance for volunteers in the delivery of public services as a matter of professional conduct.

So my question to you is whether you are ready to do this? Are you prepared to counter the warnings about volunteer involvement and champion the value they can add and good they can bring? Indeed, have you done this before and got tips to share? If not, what kind of information and support do you think you'd need to be confident in fighting the corner of the volunteer?

Please share your responses below.



If you'd like to read some of my blogs on job substitution (or, as I prefer, job displacement & replacement) please see  my previous posts on this issue and my column for Third Sector online too.  I've also stuck my head above the parapet and commented on stories about more volunteers working in libraries. 

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.

We need to think differently about job substitution

In April Volunteering England, in conjunction with other strategic partners of the Office For Civil Society,  published "A Guide To Avoiding Job Substitution".  The guide aims to "help organisations ensure volunteers are not substituting for paid staff when services are being cut".

This whole issue is a thorny, complex and emotive one.  It is an issue that mainly effects voluntary and public sector organisations and it isn't a new one.  Sadly it is also an issue that many in the sector, including volunteer managers, shy away from.  Because of its emotive, complex and challenging nature, job substitution is often a topic that, if given any time at conferences and the like, provokes such strong views that few want to face the conflict it raises.

Last summer I wrote an article for The Guardian with colleague Lynn Blackadder entitled "Dispelling the myths around job substitution by volunteers".  Lynn and I wrote the piece to try and constructively help organisations facing the reality of cuts to think through the issues associated with volunteers doing work that was once done by paid staff.  Out intent was good but, as you'll see from some of the comments, we were criticised none the less.

So Volunteering England are to be commended for taking a constructive stance on the issue.  Their guidance is sound, if perhaps a bit brief given the complexity of the matter.  Their exhortation to plan well in advance of any changes from paid to volunteer 'staff' is certainly one that is not heard enough.

What I am less comfortable with in Volunteering England's document are some of the underlying assumptions about volunteering and job substitution.  These aren't unique to VE, I've come across them before, but I do think they need highlighting and perhaps challenging if we are to get the matter in perspective.  I want to pick out the three main ones.

“Volunteer motives vary, but depriving paid workers of an income is not one of them.”
- Noble, Rogers and Fryar.

First up, right in the first line of the Volunteering England document, it says the issue has become critical.  Really?  Is it that serious?  However challenging an issue it is, I don't see or hear of it so often that I'd say it's critical, and I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of volunteerism.  Sure there have been some high profile cases - notably Surrey libraries - but there is also a lot of baseless scaremongering too, usually union driven and linking a modest increase in the number of people volunteering with an inevitable removal of all paid work in an area.

With the levels of paid staff growing again in the sector (after a 40% rise in the first decade of this century) and with volunteering levels largely static, the statistics suggest it isn't that big a deal.  In fact, what may be a bigger issue is volunteers being replaced by paid staff!

Second, the term job substitution doesn't help.  It implies that one volunteer can be brought in to substitute for one employee.  This almost never happens and demonstrates a misunderstanding about volunteering.  

In the article Lynn and I wrote for The Guardian we talked about job displacement and job replacement rather than job substitution:

• Displacement – when paid staff make way for (are displaced) so that volunteers can fill their roles. 

• Replacement – when work previously done by paid staff is reallocated to volunteers, i.e volunteers replace employees as the means of delivering a service.

In my view this is a much more helpful way of looking at the situation.  If paid staff are being deliberately removed so volunteers can do the work instead then I think most people would have an issue.  If, however, the paid staff are going - perhaps because of inevitable cuts - and the choice is to stop the service or bring volunteers in to pick up some of the work paid staff used to do, then I'm sure most people would recognise that the latter option is preferable to the work stopping all together.

To be fair to Volunteering England, this terminology of replacement and displacement does occur in their guidance and they do helpfully make the point that the boundaries between the two can sometimes be very thin.  But why wasn't this terminology used throughout?  Why do people who are supposed to be standing up for volunteering insist on using unhelpful 'substitution' language instead of making a clear argument about the issues?

Take the example from page one of VE's guidance:

"There are a range of scenarios that could be considered job substitution. At one extreme, an organisation may decide to cut jobs and recruit volunteers to fill the gaps. At the other, when a service has been withdrawn due to funding cuts, members of its community or service-users may volunteer themselves to run services which meet similar needs." 

"The first case is clearly a direct replacement of paid staff, and it is therefore likely that the organisation would receive objections from staff and trade unions, and find that volunteers do not want to be involved. In the second case, volunteers are, to some extent, providing services previously delivered by paid staff, but now as a new group taking over the service. This service could, however, be significantly different from the one delivered by paid staff." 

The first case, when looked at as job substitution, may appear to be a case of volunteers displacing paid staff.  But will it be one volunteer for one employee?  Very unlikely.  And what if this were a case of replacement rather than displacement?  Looking at it that way puts a different complexion on the situation.

Interestingly, the logic of the second case suggests it would be acceptable for a public service to make staff redundant, convert to a co-operative set up staffed with volunteers and that would be alright!

Third, the Volunteering England guidance states that:

One of the key principles of this charter is that the involvement of volunteers should complement and supplement the work of paid staff.

This is common language around job substitution and it's language I detest.  It totally fails to recognise the distinct value that volunteering can bring compared to paid staff.  It dismisses anything unique and precious about volunteering and simply subordinates it to a second-class activity next to paid work

I've worked in programmes where volunteers had a credibility in the eyes of the clients that paid staff could never have, a credibility that comes from the client viewing the volunteer as someone who wants to spend time with them, not someone who is paid to spend time with them.  That is distinctive to volunteers.  It isn't about them supplementing or complementing paid staff, it is about them bringing something to the organisation that paid staff cannot.

As long as we perpetuate this second class status through our use of language, then volunteering will bee seen as nothing more than the poor cousin to paid work, and volunteer managers as poor cousins to other professionals.

In conclusion then, please be clear that I am not having a dig at Volunteering England.  As I said at the start, I commend them for publishing this guidance.  Rather, I am commenting on the philosophical basis on which their guidance and many other people's practice is based.  I am doing this to stimulate debate, to challenge thinking and, above all, to try and help us all (myself included) to do a better job of standing up for volunteering in the challenging environment we face.

So what do you think?

Do you agree?

Am I talking a load of codswallop?

Please don't be silent, join the debate by leaving a comment below.

As this is an emotive issue and one I have seen result in hurtful comments in the past, I will please ask for comments to be respectful of others views, even if they don't agree with you.  Thank you.

Happy new year

So 2012 is finally upon us.

Happy new year!

After a refreshing break with family over Christmas I am, as promised before the holidays, turning my eyes to the next twelve months to see what they might have in store for volunteering.

Crystal ball gazing is always a dangerous activity.  I have no more idea about what is going to happen in 2012 than you do.  I could make my predictions and they all turn out to be totally wrong.  So, once you've read my thoughts below please do feel free to make your own predictions by adding a comment.

I want to pick up on three things:


1/ Volunteering and the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games
The first programme on BBC 1 after the coverage of the London new year fireworks was a trail for the Olympics.  The start of eight months of hype.  Which will inevitably be followed by four months of celebration, either for Team GB's performance and/or for the overall (hopeful and peaceful) success of the Games.  Four months of everyone, not least the politicians, claiming the credit for the Olympics and Paralympics.

In reality it will be 70,000 Games Maker volunteers plus many thousands of volunteers across the UK - in host city programmes, the cultural Olympiad and alike - who will make the Games a success.  Without them, all the hard work of LOCOG, UK Sport and others will be for nought.

My first prediction is a negative one - all this effort by tens of thousands of volunteers will go largely unrecognised during the Games and quickly forgotten afterwards.

In the seven years since the Games were announced as coming to London we have been promised a volunteering legacy like no other Games.  Having been sort of on the inside to some of those discussion whilst at Volunteering England I can testify to the frustration of many at the politicking, backtracking and all round marginalisation of volunteering that has ebbed and flowed in the last few years.

Sadly, come the end of the year, I fear the average person on the street will know no more about volunteering as a result of the Games and will be no more inclined to give their time than they might otherwise have been.  The 2012 Games will have been a success because of Lord Coe, Team GB, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

Not a volunteer in sight.

On this prediction, I hope I am wrong.


2/ Volunteering and the cuts
Many commentators think 2012 could be a harder year financially for the voluntary and community sector/civil society/third sector (delete according to what we are to call it this year!).  Despite recent suggestions that voluntary income is holding up in hard times, public spending is going to be hit hard again.  Many organisations are going to face further cuts.

My predictions for volunteering here are a mixed bag.

On the negative side, I fear many organisations will do as they did in previous years and keep trying to do what they've always done, especially when it comes to thinking about how they achieve their missions.  So we'll see organisations trying harder and spending more money to try and replace the cash which is cut, in apparent denial that there simply isn't the same amount of money around as there was before.  Such lack of imagination in how to get things done will sadly see some organisation got to the wall.

For me this myopic approach to sustaining and growing an organisation in our challenging times will remain a key theme of my writing and speaking.  It is also an area I am planning to try and address through work with other consultants to provide a package of support to organisational leaders to help them learn how they can maximise the impact of donated time rather than just pursuing more and more money.  Watch this space.

On the positive side, I think the continuing tough times will lead many leaders, organisations and others to open their eyes to the potential of volunteer support.  They will start to realise that: today's volunteers are increasingly very different from the stereotype of volunteers; today's volunteers want to make a difference, not just a contribution; today's volunteers increasingly bring a wealth of skills, talent and experience to organisations.

They'll begin to appreciate that baby boomers are changing the face of older volunteers and Gen Y are changing the face of what young people can contribute.

I predict 2012 will see many more organisations provide today's volunteers with ways of engaging that meet their needs as well as those of the organisation and beneficiary.  Not through gimmicks like microvolunteering but through real and meaningful change in the way they value and engage people who give their time to good causes.

In doing so they will change the face of volunteering and leave those who fail to adapt lagging far behind.


3/ Volunteer management gets a move on
For such change in volunteering to happen, volunteer management needs to change and, dare I say it, grow up.

2011 saw some fantastic work in support of those who lead and manage volunteers.  The Association of Volunteer Managers held their first conference and Volunteer Centre Warrington, through their EYV2011 funded work for Volunteering England to champion and support volunteer management, helped many volunteer managers to find their voice and start speaking, writing, blogging and tweeting, sharing their views, opinions, ideas and challenges with others.  The momentum built throughout the second half of the year with a final VC Warrington webinar in December which explored, amongst other things, the idea of building a volunteer management movement (search #vmmovement on Twitter).

So my final prediction for 2012 is a positive one.

I think 2012 will be a key year - maybe even the year - for volunteer managers to confidently take centre stage, to be proud of who we are and what we do without resorting to insecurities associated with always comparing ourselves to other professions.

I think we'll end the year with much more awareness of the importance volunteer managers as vital resources to help organisations make the most of the most precious donation they can receive, the donation of someone's time.


So that's what I think but what do you think?

What do you see happening in 2012?

Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

An open letter to Bob Crow

Dear Bob,


Thanks for sharing your views on volunteering in response to London Underground's proposals to engage volunteers in information giving roles during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games.


I'd just like to make three quick points in response to the comments the BBC reported you as having made.


First, according to the BBC you said, "Using unqualified, non-professional, non-trained staff at key crowd control pressure points is a recipe for disaster with potentially lethal consequences. With the Tube already at bursting point, and with millions more expected for the Olympics, the last thing needed is wholly unprepared volunteers controlling hundreds of thousands of passengers through stations like Oxford Circus or Stratford."


Aside from the fact that London Underground seem to fundamentally disagree with your interpretation of what volunteers are being asked to do, why have you assumed that the volunteers will be unqualified, unprofessional, untrained and unprepared?  Nobody who truly understands volunteering would ever put volunteers into such a role who were so ill equipped.  I sincerely doubt that London Underground are expecting to just round up random people off the street for these roles.


Sadly, you seem to have fallen into the trap of assuming that because they don't get paid volunteers are incompetent, ineffective people unsuitable for responsible roles.  Let's hope that isn't the case if you ever need rescuing at sea and the RNLI send a lifeboat to save you, or if you ever feel the need to talk to someone and call the Samaritans, or have cause to rely upon the services of a Special Constable.  That's just three roles performed by qualified, professional, trained and prepared volunteers.  There are thousands if not millions more, all essential to the fabric of society.


Second, not only do you hold inaccurate stereotypes about volunteers you seem to have forgotten that the union movement is reliant on volunteers?  Or did you mean to suggest RMT members who play key roles within the union representing your members were unqualified, unprofessional, untrained and unprepared to do their work?


Finally, I would urge you to look at the Charter for Strengthening Relations Between Paid Staff and Volunteers, developed by Volunteering England and the Trades Union Congress.  This document sets out the key principles and guidelines to be followed when volunteers are engaged in unionised environments.  As a member of the TUC the RMT will have endorsed this so can I suggest you follow its principles before resorting to sharing your inaccurate views of volunteers and scaremongering through the media.


Yours sincerely,


Rob Jackson
Director, Rob Jackson Consulting Ltd and active volunteer

Why Francis Maude is wrong and concerns about the sector response

Seventeen years ago today (4th July 1994) I started work.  I didn't know it at the time but the job I took at the University of Surrey was a volunteer management role, recruiting a placing undergraduates as classroom assistants in local schools.  The experience I gained in that role led me on to subsequent jobs in volunteer leadership and management and to a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding career in their field.


So it is perhaps no surprise that I was intrigued by Francis Maude's comments last week that people made redundant from the public sector should, with little or no training, be deployed into the voluntary sector to manage volunteers because "There is nothing more frustrating than seeing charities with too many volunteers they can't use because there is no one to manage them".


The comments beneath Third Sector's article do a good job of highlighting the stupidity of Mr Maude's suggestion - about the only thing he got right was the need to invest in more volunteer management support for organisations - but I want to make just five points myself.


First, Mr Maude seems to believe that volunteers work in the voluntary sector.  Many do, but large numbers are also involved in the public sector too.  So why does he propose these people only help charities?  One might argue that charities are more used to working with volunteers than many in the public sector and so it is the latter that need more help, not the former.


Second, why would public sector workers automatically make good volunteer managers?  What uniquely qualifies people from the public sector to come into charities with little training or orientation and be able to effectively lead and engage volunteers?


Third, let's just suppose for a moment that Mr Maude's idea becomes reality.  Would this not lead to the displacement from employment of many skilled volunteer management professionals as organisations think they can have the work done for 'free' by Maude's army of redundant public sector volunteers?  Perhaps those volunteer managers can go on to one of the many wonderful private sector jobs currently being created, skilled as they are at asking "would you like fries with that?".  Or is job displacement from the voluntary sector not a concern of the government, fixated as they seem to be (the media even more so) on the public and private sectors as places of employment.


Fourth, aside from displaying his ignorance and lack of understanding on a number of issues, Mr Maude seems to have it all wrong about volunteer managers.  His proposal suggests that organisations could engage redundant public sector workers to manage the large numbers of volunteers those organisations lack the capacity to involve.  But that isn't how the model of volunteer management tends to work these days.  Having the volunteer manager directly managing the volunteers would be like having the HR manager directly managing the paid staff. 


Instead, today's volunteer manager commonly plays a supportive role to other staff and volunteers who provide the line management support and capacity that enables an organisation to effectively engage volunteers.  The volunteer manager is a skilled and knowledgeable expert, adept at influencing, supporting, inspiring, leading, engaging and motivating volunteers, employees, peers, managers, the community and many others in the fulfilment of their organisations mission. 


And that leads me to my fifth and final observation about Mr Maude's comments.  Volunteer management is an increasingly skilled task that requires competence in perhaps a wider, more diverse and more essential range of skills and abilities than almost any other job.  That's why Skills Third Sector recently published an excellent position paper on why volunteer management requires specific skills.   Its is in part why I recently argued that volunteer leadership and engagement is an essential yet under-developed skill the voluntary sector needs to invest in for the future.  And the HandsOn Network in the US have recently spoken about effective volunteer engagement being a collective responsibility of all staff too.


To suggest anyone can just walk in and do a good job of managing volunteers effectively not only shows gross ignorance of the role but is hugely insulting to me and others like me who have built a career in the field through hard work and dedication to the causes we've worked for and to our own professional development.


As you can tell, I feel strongly about this issue.  That's why I have limited my post to just five issues or I could have gone on for hours!  That and the desire to not repeat the excellent points made elsewhere by others such as the comments beneath the Third Sector article.


However, I do want to make one final observation in conclusion.  


As I write this post nearly three working days have passed since Mr Maude's comments were reported.  In that time I have not seen one single comment or response from Volunteering England, the Association of Volunteer Managers or any of the other bodies who purport to represent volunteer managers.  


I may simply have missed such a comment (I was away volunteering in Yorkshire last week) so I would be happy for people to share links to such statements in defence of volunteer management by posting a comment in response to this blog.


However, if, as I suspect, not one single statement supporting volunteer management has been made by any of the key representative bodies, publicly or privately, then some serious questions need to be asked of their ability to stand up for volunteer managers when they come under attack like this.


What do you think of Mr Maude's comments?  Is it right that bodies like VE and AVM have apparently stayed silent?  What would you like to say on this issue?  Please leave your comments below.

People-raising is needed as well as fundraising

NB - This blog post is a longer version of the blog of the same title I wrote for Third Sector in June 2011.

In a recent issue of Third Sector magazine (10 May 2011) there was a short article about the preliminary findings of NCVO’s Leadership 20:20 Commission.  The key finding highlighted was that the biggest challenge the voluntary and community sector will face in 2020 will be funding. 

Perhaps you’re not surprised by that, especially given the state of sector funding at the moment.  The Voluntary Sector Cuts website alone details 483 cuts reported so far, worth £75,541,527.  In some ways, especially as a recent senior manager in the sector and as a victim of the cuts myself, I agree with the finding.  The road to recovery will be a long one and come 2020 there will still be many funding challenges for the sector to face.

However, I do worry at the short-sightedness of the finding.  To focus on the financial challenges above all else is to suggest a mindset in the leaders of the future that isn’t that much different from the one dominating the current sector leadership.  In fact, I might even suggest it smacks of a mindset that has been so prevalent and has been so money oriented that it has led us to the depths of our current problems.  These problems, it could be argued, stem from a failure to look beyond how the voluntary sector can do anything unless there is money attached, much of it public and so now in short supply.  Now that money is scarce many of us find ourselves sailing perilously close to the proverbial creek.

If, as NCVO claim, the Leadership 20:20 Commission contains the “20 most inspiring emerging leaders in civil society” then I hope they and the 512 of their peers who responded to their consultation can break the constraints of this narrow and potentially failed money-focused mindset and seek out something more creative.

I would argue that a key challenge facing the leaders in the voluntary and community sector is to move beyond a slavish focus on money as the only substantial resource at their disposal. 

When you stop to think about it, no organisation is going to have all the money it needs to do all the things it wants to do, particularly in the kind of economic climate that is going to dominate in the coming years.  So, we are faced with two choices: cut back our aspirations to meet our financial means; or find creative ways to make what money we have go further.

The Commission’s findings suggest the former choice might be dominating people’s thinking, something along the lines of “unless we can get the money we can’t do the work, we want to do the work so money is our big problem”. 

To me that’s not leadership but a lack of vision leading to curtailed ambition. 

Instead we should be exploring creative solutions.  We should be saying “OK, we have £x and we want to achieve y. How can we leverage a, b and c to make £x go far enough to realise our goals?”.

So what are a, b and c?

I think one of the biggest areas of potential is in volunteering.  For too long we’ve limited our thinking on the potential for donated time to really have major impact on our organisations.  We’ve focused on what volunteers can’t do because of perceived legal risks, or on how they should meekly complement paid staff.  And God forbid they should do anything that even strays into the territory of work done by an employee, past or present.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for wholesale replacement of paid staff by volunteers.  Nor am I suggesting we open the door to unskilled or unqualified people coming in and doing roles for which there are specific skills and qualifications required.

What I am suggesting is that voluntary sector leaders should be developing their skills in volunteerism and actively supporting and developing people-raising as well as fund-raising. 

They should be looking to find ways to maximise the potential contribution of an increasing number of people who have considerable professional skills that they want to use for social good. 

They should be going beyond the self-imposed boundaries of ‘the way we’ve always done it’ and embrace new ways of working that incorporate the use of the most precious resource many people have to give to charities, their time.

To do this, to move beyond a myopic focus on funding and embrace volunteering, we need leaders who are skilled in leading and engaging volunteers.  Unfortunately, there are too few of them about.  Rarely does volunteerism appear on the programme of many CPD programmes for voluntary sector leaders.  And when it does, it tends to be in terms of governance issues and not creative education about how well run and managed volunteer programmes can add significant value to organisations, making those precious pennies go even further.

Of course, I could be wrong here.  The Leadership 20:20 Commission could have picked funding as a major challenge because it recognised the need to embrace non-financial forms of support.  It has perhaps focused on funding as a key challenge because its members think the issues I’ve briefly raised here will be addressed in the next few years.

Experience tells me that this sadly won’t be the case though and so I look forward to the Commission’s views on what leaders need to do beyond just worrying about money.

Pay doesn't lead to competence

On today's anniversary of the launch of the Titanic it seems slightly fitting to be writing a blog post that could be summarised by the old quote, "Professionals built the Titanic but volunteers built the Ark".  I first heard this quote many years ago to illustrate the point that paying someone to do something doesn't mean they do a better job.  Sadly, this message still needs to get through to many people, especially when it comes to their understanding of the potential of volunteers.


Just last week, Community Care magazine ran an article entitled "Is social care ripe for volunteering?".  Following on from yet another re-launch of the Big Society by the Prime Minister last week, the article looks at the potential for volunteering within the context of the social care field.  


Things don't start well when the sub-heading to the piece states "The coalition government is pushing for more volunteering in social care, but will this encroach on the domain of the paid workforce?".  I'm not going to go into job displacement/replacement issues here (perhaps that's a topic for another blog) but it is sad, if not surprising, to see the article focus on a negative before it has even begun.  Why not phrase it in terms of how volunteering could add value to social work?


Anyway, I digress.  What I want to focus on here are the comments attributed to Helga Pile, National Officer for social work at the public service union Unison.


Ms Pile starts by saying that "There is no doubting the commitment and value that volunteers can offer, but public services must be delivered by trained, qualified staff who are part of a stable workforce. Volunteers cannot be used as a cut price alternative."


My first problem here is the assumption that volunteers are not trained or qualified.  Nobody would advocate to let untrained volunteers loose in the turbulent waters of social care or indeed any other role, yet sadly this is the default assumption.  But many volunteers are highly skilled and sometimes uniquely qualified to do challenging roles.  In the context of the Community Care article this could be because they are retired social workers, putting a lifetime of skills and experience to use as volunteers.  Or they could have undergone rigorous training to be qualified for their role and, as volunteers, perhaps gain the trust of clients because of their unpaid status, something I've seen first hand with volunteers supporting young people in care.


Before anyone comments that nobody would want to put their skills to use in such a challenging context, especially if they have spent their working lives doing similar roles, then take as an example the recent case of the retired engineers volunteering to work at the still very dangerous Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.


My second problem with Ms Pile's comments is that by using 'cut price alternative' language she seems to be implying that part of the problem with volunteers getting involved in social care is that they are unpaid.  Set aside the issues of competence Ms Pile, like many others, seems to be equating unpaid with unqualified.


This thought process seems to be revealed further as the article progresses.


"Trained, qualified workers are able to make very complex judgments around risk - 'spotting the danger signs that volunteers could easily miss,' she [Ms Pile] says. They also benefit from the experience and knowledge of colleagues and, crucially, they are totally accountable to local people."


Let's explore that a bit further.  Set aside the false assumption we've looked at that volunteers are by definition unqualified, the argument seems to be that trained, qualified and (by implication) paid social workers spot danger signs volunteers would miss, make complex judgements volunteers are incapable of and are accountable to local people.  


Really?  


Was that the case with Baby P?  Victoria Climbie?  Khyra Ishaq?  Amy Howson?  Alfie Goddard?  [See this article for details on some of these appalling cases]. 


These are emotive examples and I am not for one second using them to tar the social work profession with one brush.  Nor am I suggesting that volunteers would have done a better job in these tragic and complex cases.  


What I am saying is that we should not blindly assume that because someone is paid to do a job they are more competent, skilled and equipped than someone who might do a similar role as a volunteer.


Like it or not we live in a world where we no longer have the funds to pay for all the things we used to pay for.  Sadly that includes the salaries of employees, as I can personally testify.  


We need to develop new ways of thinking about how we meet the challenges we face.  In human resource terms, this includes how we deploy paid staff and volunteers to maximum effect and client/community benefit.  


To do this we need to cultivate more open minds about what volunteers can do and their potential to meet these challenges.  


Simply dismissing volunteers as unpaid and incompetent has always been insulting.  


Maintaining that mindset today could have serious consequences for our ability to meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of society in future.