voluntary sector

Are voluntary organisations complying with or resisting austerity?

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mike_hemmings_profile1Mike Hemmings

I will be presenting a paper at the 2016 Social Policy Association Conference in Belfast in July. The paper looks at the impact of austerity on voluntary sector organisations campaigning and delivery of welfare services. Austerity has had a devastating impact on the most vulnerable people in society.

These are the people that voluntary sector organisations were often set up to represent and serve. Given this the paper asks whether voluntary sector organisations are, in the current period, complying with or resisting austerity. When we take a long historical view we see the repeated failure of the market, state and the voluntary sector to meet welfare need. We have moved from feudal obligations to the poor through the ideal of a universal welfare state to a mixed welfare model and now to austerity and the withdrawal of welfare. Continue reading →

A perspective from practice on capacity building

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by Hament Patel (hament@ocp-ltd.com) www.ocp-ltd.com

This blog post is a response to an article by Gino Netto, Nicolina Kamenou, Sheetal Venugopal and Rabia Asghar called ‘Capacity Building in the minority ethnic voluntary sector: for whom, how and for what purpose?’, published in Policy & Politics in 2012.

I am an adult and community-based education development facilitator, and in the past have been a Capacity Building Officer in London. I would like to offer the following comment on the article from my perspective as a practitioner in the field.

The article provides the reader with a useful discussion about an approach to capacity building in working with minority ethnic led voluntary organisations (MEVOs) in Scotland, and also goes onto explain and draw out some vital arguments and lessons in taking such an approach. The article describes well the policy context Continue reading →