Cultural Playing Field

On Wednesday afternoon I attended a meeting of the DCMS Voluntary and Community Sector Forum. With the departure of Alan Davey (to Arts Council England), the Forum has a new chair – Graham Turnock, Director or Programmes and DCMS Third Sector Champion. We heard a presentation on funding for youth culture and the interface between DCMS and the Department for Children, Schools and Families – focusing on the ‘Aiming High’, ‘Myplace’ and ‘Find Your Talent’ programmes. We also heard from Sarah Wilkie of the MLA about the ‘Community Libraries Programme’ and from Steve Mannix of LOCOG about the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Finally we discussed how to involve VCS organisations in the project board overseeing DCMS involvement in the new Government target PSA21 (communities).

On Wednesday I was at the Cabinet Office in London to meet John Knights, Policy Manager- Volunteering at the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) to discuss opportunities for volunteering in relation to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. We talked about how to ensure voluntary arts groups take advantage of the opportunities presented by the Cultural Olympiad, how the Olympic volunteering programme is being co-ordinated between LOCOG, OTS, DCMS etc, and how to realise the aim of the Games to leave a legacy of increased participation in the arts. We also discussed how OTS might be able to help us to work across other Government Departments to improve support for the voluntary arts and help to unlock the potential of the sector.

This morning I was at The Goring Hotel, Victoria, London, for the final breakfast meeting of the Volunteering Hub Scrutiny Committee. We reflected on the achievements of the Volunteering Hub and the 104 projects we have funded over the past 3 years. We discussed our successes and failures and tried to identify the areas in which the Hub has had the most significant effect. We also heard how the new Volunteering National Support Service is progressing. This will be a much smaller, more focussed partnership programme which will take forward some aspects of the Hub’s work. To ensure continuity, members of the Volunteering Hub Scrutiny Committee have been invited to join a new advisory committee for the National Support Service but I have decided that, after two years, this feels like the right time to bow out and concentrate on other things. I have very much enjoyed the experience of being part of the Scrutiny Committee. I think the model of bringing in external expertise to scrutinise the work of the Volunteering Hub has proved useful and effective. We have certainly been rigorous in our examination of commissioning proposals and project reports - and I think this has been a healthy process for all involved. I’ve gained much insight and confidence myself from being a scrutineer. But I won’t miss getting up at 5 am for the meetings - despite the wonderful breakfasts!

On Wednesday I was back in London to meet Justin Davis-Smith at Volunteering England. This was my first one-to-one meeting with Justin since he succeeded Christopher Spence. We talked about how to promote best practice in volunteering and volunteer management within voluntary arts groups and how to develop volunteering within VAN – identifying a couple of potential projects in these areas which Volunteering England might help us with. We also discussed the idea of discounted membership of Volunteering England for voluntary arts umbrella bodies. I was particularly pleased to find Justin very amenable to considering arts participation as ‘volunteering’ - opening up the possibility of local volunteer centres playing a role in ’signposting’ people to opportunities to participate in the arts.

On Wednesday morning I was in London for the penultimate meeting of the Volunteering Hub Scrutiny Committee. As well as agreeing the process for the final evaluation of the Volunteering Hub, we heard a presentation on some of the research commissioned by the Hub from the Institute for Volunteering Research. This included two studies of particular relevance to the voluntary arts sector: ‘The impact of public policy on Volunteering in Community-based organisations’ which concluded that small, community-based organisations are increasingly being ‘molded’ by the external forces of legislation, regulation and funding; and ‘Volunteering to lead: a study of leadership within small volunteer-led groups’ which included some interesting observations about succession issues in small organisations. Both these studies also referred to the tendency of small, community-based organisations to link to specific specialist infrastructure organisations (such as artform umbrella bodies) rather than generic voluntary sector support organisations or the volunteering infrastructure. This seems to reinforce my view that, to support the mass of very small community organisations effectively, specialist infrastructure organisations need to be better resourced and the generic support organisations need to work more closely with these specialist bodies. You can read the research summaries at http://www.ivr.org.uk/researchbulletins/

This morning I presented a session on the 2012 Cultural Olympiad at the Volunteering England Convention in Gateshead at which I launched the second VAN ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Briefing – available shortly at: http://www.voluntaryarts.org/2012 – which explains how to develop and submit project ideas for the UK-wide cultural festival. It was good to hear Sarah Benioff (Deputy Director of the Office of the Third Sector at the Cabinet Office) later in the morning referring to the importance of the Cultural Olympiad in helping to develop a sustainable legacy of increased volunteering. Sarah took a fair bit of flak from delegates – particularly about the lack of sustainable funding for local volunteer centres. Someone made the point that, welcome though the Government’s new Access to Volunteering fund to encourage more disabled volunteers is, this £4M investment compares poorly with the £117M recently allocated to youth volunteering. But I think the Office of the Third Sector gains credibility and respect by regularly being willing to put up senior civil servants to listen to the sector at conferences and seminars.

On Monday I was in London for a meeting of the England Volunteering Development Council (EVDC) to consider the recommendations of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering. Baroness Julia Neuberger, the Chair of the Commission, presented the recommendations to us in detail. One of her main concerns was that the public picture of volunteering seems to be “old women sorting old clothes in a charity shop”: most volunteers don’t think of themselves as ‘volunteers’. As a Liberal Democrat peer, recently appointed by Gordon Brown as the Government’s ‘Volunteering Champion’, Baroness Neuberger was keen to stress that volunteering is currently very high on the political agenda of all parties - a point supported by the EVDC Chair, Tory peer Baroness Joan Hanham. The meeting then looked at how EVDC can help to take forward the Commission’s recommendations. I was intrigued to see that the recommendations had been grouped into three themes: Promotion (focussing on individual volunteers), Creating Volunteering Opportunities (focussing on volunteer-involving organisations and the volunteering infrastructure) and Joined-up Government (focussed on national and local government and the public sector) - which bear a remarkable resemblance to the three aim structure of the Voluntary Arts Network’s new strategic plan (demand/supply/environment).