Introduction

The archives, records and material culture of voluntary organisations are vital assets. They can play an essential role in helping researchers to understand the roles of voluntary organisations in society, as well as remaining important sources of institutional identity, corporate memory and accountability for charities themselves. Archival research enables greater awareness of the significance of voluntary action to society in the UK and elsewhere. We can't fully understand modern societies, and, in the case of this chapter specifically, modern Britain, without acknowledging the ongoing part played by the charities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that helped to forge the public health, education and social care systems, form cultural, leisure and sporting lives and shape relations with the wider world. Voluntary organisations’ archives are particularly valuable because they often contain the histories of marginalised and vulnerable individuals or communities whose lives may not have been recorded elsewhere or whose voices may go unheard.

The history of voluntary action, humanitarianism and philanthropy is now a flourishing field of scholarship, and there is an encouraging trend for researchers outside the discipline of history to turn to archival evidence when researching voluntary action, including in geography, social policy and sociology, media and cultural studies and international development. Indeed, archives are not solely about ‘things already past’ but will capture stories ‘of the present and the future’ (TNA, 2017: 8). The International Council on Archives (2004: 8) describes the preservation of NGO and charity archives as a ‘public service designed to meet the known and unknown needs’ of people today and in the future. Less scholarly attention has been paid to the source base that underpins this research, although studies have focused on the vulnerability of in-house charity archive services (Newton, 2004; McMurray, 2014); the challenges of records management in charities (Dawson et al, 2004); cataloguing and user engagement (Mills, 2013a); and third-party deposit of archives (Oppenheimer, 2020). This chapter draws on my experience of research using voluntary organisations’ records and material culture across several historical and interdisciplinary research projects (see Brewis, 2014; Gotz et al, 2020; Brewis et al, 2021a).