vDaft

So let me get this straight. The government has decided to spend £146m of taxpayers money to launch a new community service programme for 16-19 year olds. This is on top of the £100m plus that has already been spent on the same age group to do practically the same thing, with another £100m already committed to extend this same activity over the next three years, for a demographic that has been proven time and time again to be more likely to volunteer or get involved in the community than any other. Am I the only person that thinks this is nuts?

‘But this is community service not volunteering!’ I hear you cry. Well yes technically that’s true, but the actual work of identifying and creating meaningful opportunities that can demonstrate community impact whilst at the same time hold enough interest for teenagers to stick with them for 50 hours, is pretty similar in my opinion, and the chances are it will be the same organisations, that currently offer volunteering opportunities, that will be most likely to deliver the scheme. And I don’t suppose for a moment that the majority of young ‘community servers’ will be able to distinguish the difference.

So why is the Prime Minister proposing to invest new funding to encourage more community minded teenagers when this country has had in place the largest youth volunteering programme in history for three years? Perhaps it’s because it has not had the impact that he was expecting to see by now.

One of core and, in my opinion, most important challenges set by the Russell Commission was to overturn the perceived negative image that volunteering had for many young people, thereby making them want to volunteer and negating any need to obligate them to. Helping charities to repackage and sell existing opportunities, along with making it easier for young people to find them and addressing perceived market gaps, was considered key to enabling this to happen. Combine this with some juicy enticements through accreditation and some clever and provocative marketing to get young people to pay attention, and there you have it, Bob’s your proverbial uncle, job done.

At least you’d think so. Many of us believed back in 2005 that by now some of the key messages about volunteering and the opportunities and benefits that it offered, would be well and truly out there on the lips of a significant percentage of young people. When the Treasury announced what some thought of an obscenely high budget to set up the new national youth volunteering programme – the biggest investment ever to date for a volunteering project – I personally thought it would be a dead cert; even just spending a couple of million quid on a well thought through national advertising campaign would have a bigger impact than we’d had so far. But has it? I’m not convinced.

I recently facilitated a series of focus groups with young people from around the country to look at the impact of brands on their consumer choices. Part of the process involved running a series of commercial and charity brands past young people from several parts of the country, asking them to identify them and what they meant. v was one of those brands shown. I was, frankly amazed and extremely disappointed at how few had heard of it, let along got involved. Of course this was not a structured brand awareness exercise to ascertain v’s impact on the psyche of young people and the sample of 60 or so 16-25 year old participants may well have not been part of their key market, but I would have expected considerably more than the meagre show of hands.

Personally I’m not convinced that trying to change the word volunteering into ‘favours’ has helped - aside from the fact that we’ve been down this path before (remember TimeGivers?) it just confuses the issue. Orange Rock Corps gets it. Whether you love or loathe their approach, they have managed to attain the sort of brand profile for volunteering that the rest of us used to drool over, in less than a year for considerably less money and without reinventing the ‘v word’ or costing the taxpayer a single penny.

I think it’s crazy that we are going to see yet another expensive national youth programme foisted upon us – at this rate we could be paying every young person in the country to ‘do some good’. Surely we should be looking to build on our massive investment to date to ensure that the national youth volunteering programme delivers the goods that we all expect and want it to. Heck, in another 3 years and for another £100m of public money I would expect almost every young person in the country to know about volunteering and what it can do for them, and more likely than not be actually doing something because they want to and not because they’ve been made to.

Posted by Jamie Thomas, CEO of Red Foundation and former head of the Russell Commission Secretariat; this article reflects his personal opinion and not that of Red Foundation