Calum Irving, chief executive of Voluntary Action Scotland,explains why volunteering bodies across Scotland are rejecting the government's Community Work Placement scheme
Keep volunteering voluntary. It’s a simple message and one that Voluntary Action Scotland wholeheartedly supports.
That is why we are speaking out against the Community Work Placement scheme: a scheme that we believe undermines the very ethos of volunteering.
However, this is only part of the picture and is part of a worrying trend relating to volunteering.
The term 'voluntold' is emerging in the third sector and increasingly being used by our members – Scotland’s 32 third-sector interfaces. It describes the situation when a person has been referred to them for volunteering by agencies outwith the third sector (for example JobCentre Plus). They have effectively been told to volunteer in order to fulfil required components of a curriculum, course or a benefits entitlement. It makes life difficult for volunteer-involving organisations and puts an unacceptable strain on the person who has been voluntold.
Volunteering is a public and social good which is highly valued by the volunteer and the wider community. There is a personal and social value that comes from wanting to do something to help
The practice is also damaging to many in the public sector who understand and support volunteering as a free-will activity (our work with schools and the Saltire awards for young people is thriving, for example).
It is our belief that when something is a prescribed mandatory activity, it is not volunteering. It crosses a clear line – that of the free will of the individual.
There’s so much to volunteering that we need to hang on to and make the most of. It is a public and social good which is highly valued by the volunteer and the wider community. There is a personal and social value that comes from wanting to do something to help or to challenge or to make change.
It might be that we need to tighten up as a sector – as a country in fact – to have a more cohesive definition of volunteering that is supported amongst policy makers. It would help us establish clearer boundaries and allow all of us to make the most of Scotland’s volunteering potential. It’s not that we want to limit people’s own choices, rather that we should limit impositions upon a concept that we hold quite dear in Scotland. In fact we want to liberate that desire to do something.
As a sector supporting formal volunteering we are driven by values and must challenge when these come under attack. We have been pleased to see widespread support for our statement on Community Work Placements, with a number of our members adopting and endorsing it at a local level, and are proud to have supported the Keep Volunteering Voluntary campaign. Let’s continue to work as a sector to speak up for volunteering and help protect its ethos as a free will activity for the social good.
Calum Irving is chief executive of Voluntary Action Scotland, the national support body for local third-sector interfaces. @VA_Scotland
