Scottish Churches Parliamentary Office, Edinburgh - Briefing Document Eight

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Parliamentary Officer:Rev Graham Blount
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Briefing Document No 8 - Page 3 of 4

Supporting Active Communities - Continued.

3) Linked with this is a failure to address seriously the reasons why people volunteer. Although there is, rightly, a stress on those who might be excluded from volunteering (for all sorts of reasons), little attention is paid to motivation. Again, it would be unrealistic to exclude a faith dimension in this. Whether from faith or other motivation, people rarely just "volunteer" in the open-ended way the report seems to assume; more often, they see a need and decide to help meet it. There is also experience to suggest that people start to get involved in community action in response to a personal experience of "injustice" (like the threat of closure of a local facility); how, then, can this be translated into longer-term positive commitment?

4) There is also concern that the paper takes a very individualistic approach to volunteering. There is hardly any mention, for example, of the role of families, or of other networks of relationships - which play a vital role in active communities.

5) There is a tendency to see all kinds of volunteering as universally "a good thing" without looking more deeply at the impact of different kinds of voluntary work. Does all volunteering serve the community? For example, what about the volunteers recently distributing racist literature directed against asylum seekers? What about competing groups? What criteria might be applied to assessing and/or co-ordinating these?

6) While there is talk about making Executive and other public bodies more aware of the value of volunteers, the proposals are not apparently integrated with other relevant initiatives (such as Social Inclusion Partnerships). Rather than opening up a new dimension of these initiatives, the proposals may be likely to add to the existing sense of "initiative overload", and therefore fail to take root.

In responding to this paper, churches may want to do more than complain that our work is not recognised in it. There may be areas of that work where we have good experiences to share, and examples of good practice to contribute. On the other hand, there may also be areas where we should respond to this challenge to broaden our horizons.

1) How inclusive are we, in the range of people we have as volunteers contributing to the churches' work? Are there people we're excluding, perhaps simply because we haven't thought about them (or have seen them as only on the receiving, rather than the giving, end)?

2) What, in our experience, works - in terms of recruiting volunteers and/or sustaining them once they've started? Do we have any imaginative ideas to contribute? Do we need to think harder about structures that "don't ask enough of most people, and ask too much of a few"?

3) How effective is our training and support of those who serve in the churches' work? What have we found helpful in this area?

4) As well as stressing the role of churches in helping to build and sustain active communities (and, hopefully, giving examples of that), we may also think how that can be further developed, both locally and nationally. How does the activity of the churches relate to the life of our communities? How well do we relate to other agencies and groups?

5) That may take us a bit deeper, into a reflection on what makes an "active community". Are there other characteristics of good community life that we would want to emphasise and nourish?