The
recent announcement that the government is considering forcing
young people to volunteer – if continuing in education
or taking an apprenticeship doesn’t appeal to them –
has many in the voluntary sector worried. They should not,
however, be surprised.
Labour has form when it comes to proposals for cajoling greater
numbers to volunteer. Whether it’s funding for gap year
students, getting immigrants to volunteer to earn their citizenship,
or cuts in council tax or tuition fees, the only question
at times seems to have been whether it would be better to
pay people to give up more of their free time or simply to
force them to do so.
Nor are they alone. The Conservatives too have at times seemed
torn between the stick and the carrot. And like Labour, their
recent efforts have focused particularly on young people.
David Cameron recently admitted that he initially favoured
a compulsory scheme for his proposed “citizen service”
volunteering programme for 16 year olds. However, he dropped
this after opposition from the voluntary sector. At the end
of the scheme, participants would receive grants, half of
which would go to the organisation with which they completed
the service, and half to a charity of their choice.
Meanwhile, former leader Iain Duncan Smith’s think tank,
the Centre for Social Justice, has proposed more direct benefits
for volunteers: it wants to introduce a “V Card”
to enable young people to earn credits for the time they give
that can be redeemed for rewards such as free cinema tickets.
In a sense, the attention on incentives is easy to understand.
Over three years ago think tank the Fabian Society, of which
every Labour Prime Minister has been a member, warned then
Chancellor Gordon Brown that he would find it difficult to
get the “What’s in it for me?” generation
on board for a national volunteer initiative. To do so, it
said, he must make the rewards clear. More recently, third
sector think tank nfpSynergy has also highlighted what it
terms the rise of “the selfish volunteer”.
But the question of incentives is not just framed in terms
of self interest. It is also about inclusion, say some charities.
When UK Youth looked at the issue in a report last year
it urged voluntary groups to offer more opportunities with
tangible benefits – principally because that was the
only way to reach those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Echoing
the Fabian’s report, it said: “Our preliminary
research suggest that the key factor for young people from
hard to reach groups is ‘What’s in it for me?’”
As a spokesperson for the charity puts it: “We’ve
found that young people do need to be incentivised to volunteer.”
Of course for many in the sector this isn’t so contentious.
CSV, for instance, offers living allowances above expenses
for their full-time volunteering placements to ensure anyone
can take part and focus fully on the scheme. And even where
the volunteers aren’t full time, its executive director
Dame Elisabeth Hoodless says incentives can be a useful tool
for persuading those who are wavering in their decision to
take part.
“It’s all about getting over the hump many people
feel about engaging in voluntary work,” she argues.
This may be as simple as a concern about what the individual’s
peers may make of their decision. In these circumstances the
offer of free cinema tickets, such as the Conservatives have
proposed, or tickets to a pop concert (an idea CSV recently
looked at) could make a difference. “If that gets people
over the hump, then why not?” asks Hoodless. “Who
could be against it?”
Second opinions
Well, as it turns out, Volunteer England for a start. Its
director of volunteering development Rob Jackson acknowledges
the dangers of being too purist in approaching the question
of incentives; volunteering will continue to evolve, he
notes, regardless of his organisation’s position.
However, a balance has to be struck between that and “standing
up for the values that have underpinned volunteering in
society for decades”, he says.
Consequently, his organisation is nervous of any proposals
for incentives that could be seen to have a financial value
– even something as meagre as cinema tickets –
and when it comes to recent suggestions such as significant
cuts in tuition fees for students that volunteer, it is
dead against them.
“How about we just don’t charge the tuition
fees in the first place,” says Jackson. “That
would remove the pressure for young people to work, which
would give them more time to be able to volunteer.”
Similarly, youth volunteering charity v says it’s
not convinced of the need for financial incentives. “Instead
of irreversibly re-defining what it means to be a volunteer,
more needs to be done to build the link between volunteering
and skills,” says a spokesperson.
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This, of course, makes the point that incentives needn’t
be financial. v points out, for instance, that research
for the Russell Commission showed young people were ambivalent
about incentives. They tend to be against financial rewards
while being more sympathetic to certificates such as the
Millennium Volunteers programme that provide proof of their
efforts for universities or potential employers.
Even here, though, there are disagreements over how effective
such schemes actually are.
According to Nick Neilson at educational charity Envision,
which provided research for the Russell Commission, the
bureaucracy involved in schemes such as Millennium Volunteers
can put people off. “Our experience is that while
a lot of young people are interested in the awards at the
outset, they find proving the amount of time they’ve
put in quite onerous and they can quickly lose interest,”
he says.
Keeping it voluntary
More worryingly for the government, though, is the fact
that while there is some disagreement in the sector over
the value of incentives, there is near uniformity in the
opposition to compulsion: the one area where the government
seems to be intent on pushing ahead. Even Hoodless, who
in the past was reported to have refused to rule out a compulsory
scheme, maintains that volunteering must remain optional.
For an example of the potential problems, she says, just
look at national service, where the quality of management
was sometimes questionable. Those involved sometimes ended
up simply doing repetitive tasks, such as sweeping the yard,
then being asked to do it again and again. “If a programme
is voluntary then managers know not to abuse the participants’
time,” she says.
More to the point, says Jackson, compulsion works two ways:
if young people are forced to volunteer (and speaking of
the moves in the Education and Skills Bill, Ed Balls maintains
there would be a “system of enforcement”) then
someone will be obliged to manage those volunteers. “It’s
all very well saying you are going to force these people
to volunteer, but at the end of it there is someone who
has to provide those volunteering opportunities,”
points out Jackson. “That’s the element that’s
quite often left out of the government’s thinking.”
Ultimately, therefore, if the government really does introduce
a scheme in which young people are seen to have no real
choice about volunteering, it might find that getting the
“What’s in it for me?” generation onside
is the least of its problems.
Learning to incentivise
One group that would probably welcome some cash for volunteering
is students. A survey in 2003 found 80 per cent of them
thought financial incentives were a good idea, and 75 per
cent said they would volunteer for a cut in their fees.
It’s an area the government has repeatedly promised
to look at.
To date, though, more progress has been made in recognising
the skills volunteering can provide. Tony Blair’s
policy review earlier this year recommended that students
should gain credits towards their degrees for volunteering,
and the idea was welcomed by the Russell Group, an association
of the UK’s research-intensive universities.
Many universities are already looking at it. Oxford Brookes
for instance, is examining examples in the US to see how
experience gained in volunteering could be converted into
some form of qualification – if not directly contributing
to students’ degrees, then perhaps helping them to
gain an additional NVQ or similar.
“In the same way as we vouch for our students’
academic credentials, we’re trying to look at how
we can formally recognise their wider engagement,”
explains Brookes’s Susie Baker.
At the University of Manchester, meanwhile, just under 500
students are now enrolled in the Manchester Leadership Programme.
The programme contributes credits to their degree, and participants
have to do a minimum of 60 hours volunteering. However,
while the volunteering must be done to get the certificate,
students can theoretically gain the credits by undertaking
only the academic side of the programme.
“If the volunteering went towards the final degree
mark then in a sense it wouldn’t be volunteering,”
explains Kirsty Hutchison, the university’s community
development manager. “It has to be optional.”
Nevertheless, more than three-quarters do complete the necessary
voluntary work, partly because, Hutchison says, employers
are increasingly interested in hearing about it.
This helps explain why, even where there is no link to the
degree, universities increasingly offer formal recognition
of voluntary efforts. The University of Birmingham, for
instance, offers both Millennium Volunteers Accreditation
and a “Personal Skills Award” in civil leadership
that students can take for additional credits and which
involves volunteering.
And failing that, of course, students can always be enticed
by less business-like attractions; Birmingham’s volunteering
website points out a wide range of benefits, but it concludes
with the fact that two thirds of its volunteers are female.
For all the male “selfish volunteers”, it seems
it could be a great way to meet girls.
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