PRESS RELEASE
Embargoed until
29th March 2006
Volunteering shouldn't become just a way of providing public services on the cheap, leading academic and thinker Baroness Julia Neuberger will say in a speech to mark her appointment as Chair of the first independent Commission on the Future of Volunteering, which is being launched today.
The Commission, established by the England Volunteering Development Council, the body that represents the whole of the volunteering sector, will provide a non-political and overarching investigation into all sectors of volunteering at a time of unprecedented interest in the role of volunteers by all sectors of society, including government, business and the voluntary and community sector.
Baroness Julia Neuberger said, "I believe that each and every volunteer, no matter how they describe their involvement, owns volunteering. The Commission will make it clear and take great care - that volunteers themselves should be at the heart of everyone's thinking."
"While volunteering has always played a vital part in the life of our communities, our nation and our world, I cannot remember a time when volunteering has featured so prominently in the thinking of policy makers. Whilst this is encouraging, I do not believe that volunteering should be a way of offering public services on the cheap. Volunteering is a gift of time freely given by individuals. The relationship between this gift and the development and implementation of policy will be an area that the Commission will explore in depth."
Baroness Neuberger continued: "The Commission will be interested in more than quantity, we will also be interested in quality and accessibility - and most importantly we will be interested in the time that people give freely, that has the capacity to change all our lives."
The Commission will also investigate emerging trends in volunteering such as the "growing dichotomy in volunteering" which is seeing an increasing professionalisation of volunteer management, with a growing range of tools for measuring volunteering. The Commission will ask whether such actions encourage volunteering, or marginalise the very people who give their time so freely as volunteers.
The Commission will also look into the growing levels of activism and campaigning, and what this means for volunteering in the future.
The Commission will produce a final report in June 2007 that will describe the state of volunteering as it is now, and as the Commission thinks, hopes and expects it to be ten years on. It will make recommendations about policy changes that are needed in order to get that vision to become a reality, and it will have practical proposals about how to bring those policy changes about.
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Notes to Editors
Baroness Julia Neuberger will be available for interview. For more information and to arrange interviews, call William Little on 020 7520 8932; email William.little@volunteeringengland.org or Sonya Roberts on 020 7520 8965; email Sonya.roberts@volunteeringengland.org For out of office hours, please call: 07952 128057.
Commissioners announced at the launch of the Commission include:
- John Annette Professor in Citizenship & Lifelong Learning at Birkbeck College, University of London
- Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Chair of the Local Government Association
- Professor Justin Davis-Smith, Director of the Institute for Volunteering Research
- Kathleen Duncan
- Stephen Dunmore, Chief Executive of the Big Lottery Fund
- Margaret Harris, Professor of work and organisational psychology, Aston University
- Andrew Hind, Chief Executive of the Charity Commission
- Imam Monawar Hussain, Muslim tutor at Eton College
- Barbara Monroe, Director of St Christopher's Hospice
- Mary Riddell, Columnist for The Observer
- David Robinson, founder of Community Links and co-author of Change the World for a Fiver
- Angela Sarkis, Governor of the BBC
- Georgina Watts, Volunteering England trustee
The Commission is:
An initiative of the England Volunteering Development Council
The England Volunteering Development Council is a high-level representative mechanism for volunteering. The council engages both with government and opposition parties in order to capture the collective intelligence of volunteer-involving organisations, volunteering infrastructure providers and of volunteers to provide a powerful, coordinated lobby to steer government policy and community action.
Sponsored by the Volunteering Hub
The Volunteering Hub has been established and funded as part of the Home Office's ChangeUp programme of activity as the national centre of expertise bringing together key players to provide strategic leadership and act as gateways of good practice
Supported by Volunteering England
Volunteering England, the national volunteer development agency, promotes volunteering as a powerful force for change, both for those who volunteer and for the wider community. It understands the term volunteering to include formal activity undertaken through public, private and voluntary organisations as well as informal community participation.
