United Kingdom

The current UK government has often re-iterated that its policy is 'evidence led'. Whether this happens in practice is for others to decide, but a useful spin-off is that research has become more prevalent in areas interesting government.

This Research into Practice focuses on a report reviewing how volunteer-involving organisations attract and involve older volunteers. Between 1999 and 2003, the UK Home Office spread £1.5 million between 26 projects with the aim of looking at how to involve more older people in volunteering.

The report is a summation of the experiences of those projects, highlighting some well-trodden issues: what volunteers have to offer, what volunteers want and the barriers that need to be overcome to involve more older people. It also tries to distil lessons that are transferable.

Earlier this year, Elisha Evans and Joe Saxton of 'NFP Synergy' in the United Kingdom, released a report titled 'Five key trends and their impact on the voluntary sector'. The report looked at five demographic trends and explored their likely impact on the voluntary sector.

The five trends the report examined were:

• The ageing population
• The changing structure of families
• Diversification of households
• Educational levels
• Changes to financial independence

The report offers many valuable insights into possible future trends affecting volunteering, a topic in which e-Volunteerism is clearly interested.

Rather than simply present you with the NFP Synergy document, we decided to invite several international leaders in volunteerism to review the report and add their thoughts, comments and opinions to those expressed in the report.

This Research to Practice article examines how Five Key Trends and Their Impact on the Voluntary Sector (a feature article in this issue) can be a model for interpreting data in a practical, put-it-to-use way.

The "Five Key Trends..." article is itself an example of translating research into material useful to practitioners.  The article includes the original report by Elisha Evans and Joe Saxton, along with special comments on the implications for volunteering by an international panel of responders. 

Here, new Research-to-Practice feature editor Steven Howlett (UK) adds his perspective on how "trends" literature can be applied.

When I conducted my first workshop in England in 1992, I vividly remember discussing the topic of organizational image. I asked participants how long their organizations had been operating in the community. When one response was "since the Crusades," I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore! Even by British standards, St. John Ambulance has a remarkable history. Today it is a modern health care organization with members in over 40 countries worldwide. Its roots are in the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, confirmed in 1113. Over the centuries, through the involvement of clergy, medical practitioners, and legions of volunteers, St. John Ambulance has faced the challenge of balancing progress with tradition, the past and the future.

This article outlines several volunteer-related research projects currently underway in the United Kingdom, initiated and funded by the government. There are as yet no findings to report, but e-Volunteerism feels the article will be useful to our readers as a model for how government research can support volunteer efforts. This is quite connected to the Points of View topic that appears elsewhere in this issue. The questions raised toward the end of the article for "future study" are provocative and we hope they will start other researchers thinking about additional ways to study issues of direct usefulness to practitioners. We will, of course, keep readers informed as the reports promised below become available.

Alec Dickson is a name not enough newcomers to the field of volunteerism know, yet he was an active and outspoken advocate for the importance of volunteering from the 1950s up to his death in 1994. He founded the British organization, Voluntary Service Overseas, which directly influenced the development of the Peace Corps in the United States. Then he began Community Service Volunteers, a domestic program still placing over 3,000 full-time volunteers a year into service throughout the United Kingdom. The ripple effect of his influence was international, if not always attributed, as he was one of the first to articulate many of the principles we now value in this field. On the other hand, many of his opinions continue to be provocative -- reason enough to keep his words circulating and discussed.

Volunteer voices, millions of them, all speaking up and speaking out with passion about what they're doing and what they believe in. Lots of people responding to what they're hearing and giving time to volunteering for whatever they're passionate about. Now that would be something. And that's what Speak Up! Speak Out! is on the way to achieving.

Speak Up! Speak Out! is a unique project that helps volunteers and volunteer managers become compelling ambassadors for volunteering by teaching communications skills. Simple really. It's about helping volunteers speak with strong feeling about what they're doing to audiences of all sorts - at conferences, seminars, in the media, team meetings, interviews, anywhere.

The future of volunteer management as a profession is a hot topic on both sides of the Atlantic, if not in other parts of the world. As evidence, consider the fact that the inaugural issue (Fall 2000) of e-Volunteerism featured several articles dealing with this subject.

If our field is to have a future that managers of volunteers sign up to, then those of us working in these roles must engage in the debates taking place around us. This requires an ability to plainly convey where our field is now to clearly articulate a vision of the future.

Here lies the issue I wish to address.

Until recently there was no agency within the UK focusing specifically on volunteering research and its connection to policy and practice. Volunteering sometimes appeared on the curricula of the various organisational-focused voluntary sector courses. But it was very much a minority subject and minimal attempt was made to relate what little academic study there was to the practical needs of policy makers and practitioners.

The Institute for Volunteering Established to Fill the Research Gap
It was thus most timely that in 1997 The Institute for Volunteering Research was established to fill this gap. The Institute was created by Dr. Justin Davis Smith, who was then Director of Research at the National Centre for Volunteering. Much good research had already been done by the National Centre, but it was felt that a separate agency was required to extend the range of knowledge about volunteering and to integrate practically focused research with academic insights.