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In England, several organisations, generically known as ‘infrastructure’ bodies, provide advice and technical support to the voluntary and community sector. They typically maintain listings of their members and of other contacts both within the voluntary sector and beyond. This article presents an analysis of what can be learned from such listings. In particular, there is a discussion of the characteristics of the organisations (including unregulated third sector organisations) that appear on these listings, of variations between infrastructure bodies in the kind of information they capture and of differences between the kinds of regulated third sector organisations that appear on the listings and the ones that do not. The article discusses the implications of these findings for research that uses the listings as source material to investigate the activities of the infrastructure bodies or the characteristics of the local voluntary and community sector they serve.
This paper outlines the National Service legislation in the USA introduced by President Clinton in 1993. It summarises some of the reasons why national service has attracted widespread popular and political support and considers the claims made for national service. These include: the potential of service for helping to over-come growing socio-spatial segregation in the USA; its contribution to solving urgent social problems; and its value in reconstructing the welfare agenda, replacing entitlements with programmes which emphasise the reciprocal responsibilities of those receiving aid. Some pilot programmes are examined and the claims of proponents of national service are then examined, putting service legislation in the wider context of the challenges facing the American welfare state and drawing lessons which may be of wider applicability.
This chapter examines the nature of British social justice philanthropy, which can be described as a loose social movement of charitable and community foundations and grant-makers that seeks social change by tackling the root causes of social inequalities andproblems. In exploring how charitable and community foundations understand the values and beliefs that shape their grant-making portfolios, the aim is to offer a better insight into the potential and limitations of foundations and grant-makers to achieve social change, and to critically examine the normative dimensions of foundations’ activities. This chapter provides some contextual information about the charitable and community foundation sector, and discuss the extent of social justice grant-making in the UK. We will examine how liberal ideas of social justice and legitimacy can account for the values that underpin foundations’ programmes and goals. Why foundations and grant-makers are often reluctant to use the concept of ‘social justice’ to describe their activities? We critically examined the implicit values of social justice, legitimacy and accountability that underpin charitable and community foundations’ and grant-makers’ programmes and priorities. Liberal ideas of social justice and legitimacy can be pragmatically employed to create a good society that requires a change to basic structures of private property ownership and political power.
There are great expectations of voluntary action in contemporary Britain but limited in-depth insight into the level, distribution and understanding of what constitutes voluntary activity. Drawing on extensive survey data and written accounts of citizen engagement, this book charts change and continuity in voluntary activity since 1981.
How voluntary action has been defined and measured is considered alongside individuals’ accounts of their participation and engagement in volunteering over their lifecourses. Addressing fundamental questions such as whether the public are cynical about or receptive to calls for greater voluntary action, the book considers whether respective government expectations of volunteering can really be fulfilled. Is Britain really a “shared society”, or a “big society”, and what is the scope for expansion of voluntary effort?
This pioneering study combines rich, qualitative material from the Mass Observation Archive between 1981 and 2012, and data from many longitudinal and cross-sectional social surveys.
Part of the Third Sector Research Series, this book is informed by research undertaken at the Third Sector Research Centre, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Barrow Cadbury Trust.
The chapter shows that delivery of public services is an important part of the activities of the third sector, but in the past it has been difficult to gain a granular picture of which organisations, and where, are engaged in it. Building on previous usage of data generated by NCVO, as well as large-scale surveys of third sector organisations undertaken in England in 2008 and 2010 which provide considerable facility for disaggregation, the chapter extends the use of them to consider the numbers and characteristics of organisations which say that they are involved in the delivery of public services. Thus it is possible to explore funding sources, location, scale of operation, and income. It also considers organisations’ perceptions of their relationship with various public sector bodies and also about sections of the operating environment.
The role of charity in the provision of public services is of substantial academic and practitioner interest, and charitable initiative within the English and Welsh National Health Service (NHS) has recently received considerable attention. This study provides rich insights into the role that NHS-linked charities present themselves as playing within the NHS. The dataset analysed is a novel construction of 3,250 detailed expenditure lines from 676 sets of charity accounts. Qualitative content analysis of itemised descriptions of expenditure allows us to explore how these charities portray their activities. We distinguish between expenditures that can be framed as supplementary to government funding (such as amenities and comforts) and items that suggest charitable effort is substituting for government support (such as funding for clinical equipment). We also consider the claims being made through these representations, and suggest that the distinctiveness of the charity and NHS spheres are currently under question. We argue that, through their representational practices, charities are both shaping and blurring the expected roles of government and charity. Acceptance of the benefits that charitable initiative does provide, in terms of innovation, pluralism and participation, must be tempered with the realisation that charitable funds are playing a role in service provision that is not guided by clear policy, and that this has the potential to widen existing inequalities within a key public service.
COVID-19 represents an existential threat to many charitable organisations, while simultaneously spurring new, large-scale forms of voluntary activity. Using comprehensive publicly available data from UK regulators, this chapter examines the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on the registration of new charities and the deregistration of existing organisations. The pandemic is a once-in-a-century event and thus posited to alter the expected or ‘normal’ levels of registrations and deregistrations. Data for this study come from the publicly available charity registers of seven regulatory agencies. The charity registers were collected using a Python web-scraping script that has been running on the 28th of each month since August 2020. The analysis compares the numbers of foundations and dissolutions in 2020 to what we would expect based on the trends from previous years, and examines variation in these trends by key organisational and geographic factors. As well as the level of applications for foundation and dissolution by charities, this chapter considers implications for the capacity of the charity regulators to process these applications.
The financial position of English social policy charities has received much attention, with a particular focus on the difficulties that small- and medium-sized organisations are experiencing. However, in this article we show that the evidence base has a number of limitations. We then demonstrate, analysing data from a survey of more than 1,000 charities, that organisational size, per se, is only one dimension of the problem: perceptions that the operating and financial environment is challenging are related to other organisational characteristics. We then add to the survey data indicators of financial vulnerability to investigate whether there is a relationship between perception (responses to questions about the resources available to charities) and financial reality (the recent financial history of these charities). Somewhat reassuringly, however, we demonstrate that there is a degree of consistency between the perceptions that organisations report and we discuss the implications of the findings.
This chapter explores the relationship between individual and area characteristics and the probability that an individual will become a ‘committed volunteer’. According to the General Household Survey, a ‘committed volunteer’, is someone who is engaged in voluntary activity on at least 11 days in a year. The chapter describes the data source used and the modelling strategy developed. The resultant models allow the assessment of the proportion of total variation occurring at each of the levels and provide some indication of the relative importance of each explanatory variable in accounting for this variation. The chapter discusses the results from a multilevel analysis of the determinants of volunteering. It explains why this approach yields novel insights and discusses the practical implications of the results. The chapter concludes that, on the basis of this analysis, there is some evidence that geography matters to volunteering — but not at the scale of regions, and certainly not as much as individual socioeconomic characteristics.
This chapter assesses the degree of consistency and change in levels of voluntary action, using survey data from 1981 through to 2016; and considers both formal and informal volunteering. The key conclusion is that there has been a relatively stable level of engagement, especially in formal volunteering. In contrast, there is more evidence of fluctuation, especially in the post-2008 recessionary period – in the level of engagement in informal volunteering. Despite the optimism expressed by government ministers, there has been no decisive upward shift in engagement in volunteering. The chapter then uses the Mass Observation Project material to probe further into individual understandings of voluntary action. The material demonstrates that respondents do not always recognise the terminologies used in social surveys, often neglect to report an activity that might be characterised as volunteering, and tend to prioritise their commitments to informal care of family members and neighbours (issues which are largely not included in official survey definitions of voluntary action). Finally, the chapter presents data on the trends in the British voluntary sector since 1979, and shows that, while the level of voluntary action undertaken by individuals has remained unchanged, the scale of the voluntary sector has expanded in significant ways.
