Do us a Favour…….

September 26th, 2008 by mas | Filed under Participation & Citizenship, Society & Issues.

Picked up from over on Gallomanor - V the volunteering ’super charity’ are rebranding and launching yet another campaign adding to the huge amount of money they must have already spent on glossy campaigns.

Apparently they’ve now decided that young people don’t think volunteering so instead they’re going to call it ‘doing favours’!

um does that sound anything like Millennium Volunteers?

“right volunteering is not cool - so lets say that cool things are volunteering”

“er but some of that stuff isn’t actually volunteering - I mean they’re just playing football or baby sitting their little brother”

“no, no, those things do benefit other people so really we can count it as volunteering can’t we?!”,

“er I suppose so but doesn’t that mean we haven’t really increased volunteering we’re just calling stuff they’re already doing something different?”

“well yes but at least we can write some impressive reports and keep the funding coming in….”

OK I’m maybe being over cynical - but it hard not to over such ridiculous wastes of funding. They may be right that ‘volunteering’ isn’t cool - but rebranding, giving it a new name still isn’t going to suddenly result in surges of young people running out to volunteer. Maybe if more effort had been given to developing more rounded programmes, that funding could have helped support young people to become genuinely more community minded. But instead this simple “get them volunteering and they’ll be good citizens” won’t work - it needs a cultural shift, not fancy films and marketing.

For all the money that has been spent they might have been better just giving every young person in England a holiday job - “here you go I’ll pay you £50 for doing something nice for somebody else each Sunday this month!” At least then young people would have benefited more than all those involved with putting these campaigns together.

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Mark 2 months ago 1 point
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I often think that about charities and money and so forth, they'll spend thousands on branding, or fund-raising or whatever, and you think gosh, if they just gave me that money I could do x, y, or z. Or when you have to claim on insurance, you want to ring up the boss and tell them that if you want, they could just give you the £200 for the new minibus headlights and you won't give them any more work so they don't have to pay for the three legal bods to sort it out.

When the countries economy is based upon people making money for the sake of making money then I guess this is always going to be a problem.

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