Today we publish the next two reports from our Inquiry into the Future of Voluntary Services.

The impact of contracting and commissioning on volunteers and volunteering in Voluntary Services Groups by Colin Rochester charts the rise of the ‘workplace model’ and the formalisation of volunteer management that “threatens the untamed and often maverick expression of free will that defines the authentic spirit of the volunteering impulse”. This view of volunteering as unpaid labour serves “to separate  and distance the work of VSGs from those volunteers and voluntary groups that occupy the world of activism.”

The second report – ‘More for Less’ looks at the effects of outsourcing and cuts to funding on those who are paid to work in VSGs, and on the role and response of the trades unions. Authors Rosie Walker and Frances Sullivan expose the damage being done to the voluntary sector workforce of the ‘race to the bottom’, including “…lowering pay at the bottom while increasing it significantly at the top, the casualisation of contracts, the exploitation of weaker employment rights and heavy-handed managerialism that frowns upon union activity, political activism of any kind and even, in some cases, on professionalism.”