Maude and NAVCA on volunteering
“And what volunteering do you do?”
“I do...golly, what do I do? Umm, a whole load of things....Um, gosh, that’s a really unfair question cold...” (Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in an interview with Eddie Mair on the PM Programme yesterday evening to talk about the Big Society). There was more:
“Well, I do various things. It’s a great question to err… drop on me err… and if I had time to think about it…”
It was both hilarious but painful to listen to. You can hear the original interview here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qskw or read more about it here: http://jocote.org/2010/07/walking-the-volunteer-walk/
Maude’s interview made an interesting contrast to this exchange within Kevin Curley’s speech at a Sheffield conference yesterday:
“How many of you are already volunteers in local organisations or trustees of local charities?”
Pretty much 95% of hands in the audience – made up of staff from community development organisations, charities, support and service providers, went up.
Mr. Curley, chief executive of NAVCA, gave a presentation about the new Government and its implications for funding the local voluntary sector at the ‘aspects of finance in the new civil society conference’ organised by Unity Trust Bank and Barber Harrison & Platt yesterday. The transcript is worth a read – you can get a copy here: http://www.navca.org.uk/news/fundinglvs.htm – it’s a concise and helpful address, summarising the impact of the recession and Government cuts on the local voluntary and community sector, and the opportunities and difficulties that the Coalition’s programme for Government will present. How should leaders in the voluntary sector respond? Curley also asked the audience “And how many of you have any spare time to take on more voluntary work?” About 4 or 5 hands in total were raised.
Many of us will agree with the aspiration that power should be pushed from central government to local government and “We should drive it down even further to communities, to neighbourhoods and individuals” (from Cameron’s Big Society speech). But if our elected leaders really are so condescending to think that voluntary work is somehow beneath them (and sadly that’s how Mr Maude came across in his radio interview) and people who are already volunteering are ‘at capacity’ (which most are) then who do they think this new model army of volunteers will be?
Another interesting question came from a delegate at yesterday’s conference: “are we just going to volunteer to do what we used to be paid to do while we roll over and give all the outsourced contracts to Tesco and Serco?” Well – are we? What do you think?
Posted on Friday, 23rd July 2010 | This entry has 2 comments
sue harding | Thursday, 29th July 2010 | 05:47 PM
In response to the final question - let’s confine our volunteering to helping out grassroots community organisations. And, while we’re at it, consider a a serious challenge to the (no, you couldn’t make it up) appointment of McDonalds as the volunteer recruiter of choice for the Olympics ...
Clare McManus | Thursday, 5th August 2010 | 04:01 PM
An approach a friend and I agreed on while juggling part time work in the arts and bringing up small children was to volunteer for everything from playgroup washer -upper to school governor, but never ever to volunteer for anything that we would do as paid work. We felt really strongly that to do so would devalue our work & our skills.
The bit of the Francis Maude interview that had me throwing things at the radio was when he blustered that he did lots of good things ‘because that’s what MPs do’ and was deeply affronted when Eddie Mair pointed out that he was actually paid to do so which didn’t count as volunteering.
And three cheers for Radio 4 for including the whole interview in their Pick of the Week programme!