Recognising that, this month’s TFN magazine provides a real testament to the experience of charities as a major pole of Scottish public life.
We are everywhere, so we experience everything – the good and the bad.
In this month’s magazine we celebrate the very best of us – our multitudes of volunteers who are the lifeblood of everything we do (pages 10-17).
Genuine volunteering is an essential and liberating thing and is beneficial on so many levels, from the personal to the societal.
But it has to come from below, from a real desire to contribute through meeting that most human impulse: the desire to work with others to make the world a better place.
That is why the celebrations around Volunteers’ Week – and I was privileged to attend its launch earlier this month – are in sharp contract to the various attempts at state-sponsored dragooning, which always fail because they are a sham: from David Cameron’s pathetic Big Society, pursued while his government was persecuting the most vulnerable and pulverising our communities through ideologically enforced austerity, to Rishi Sunak’s last days of Rome flailing over incorporating ‘volunteering’ into a bonkers new form of National Service.
True volunteering is not enforced – it could only be in some sort of oxymoronic Tory fantasy land – it is action taken freely for the common good, stemming from a deeply held conviction.
The other absolutely essential part of our sector is, of course, our staff. And here we sometimes have a problem.
I’ve written here before about how there can be a dangerous tendency in the sector, whether through mission blindness or just through the very fact of being an employer, for staff to be treated badly and to expect less than counterparts in other spheres of public life.
I should say that mostly we are very good, progressive employers – and TFN celebrates that, just as much as it reserves the right to hold to account and investigate where the opposite is perhaps the case.
Because the consequences for not getting it right can be disastrous, not just for staff but for service users, who are very often the most vulnerable in society.
In that spirit, I’d urge you to read Niall Christie’s interviews with workers at the now-liquidated Glasgow East Women’s Aid (pages 18-22).
If you read it and think that there’s something that doesn’t add up about this whole mess, and there are still big questions to be answered about what happened, I’d agree.
TFN looked for answers as well, and we were not given them.
We are still waiting.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
