Introduction: the Year of the Volunteer

The year 2011 has been declared the ‘European Year of Volunteering’ to recognise over 100 million European volunteers active across member states and the contribution they make to society. This initiative of the European Commission marks the 10th anniversary of the UN ‘International Year of the Volunteer 2001’, which aimed to highlight the achievements of volunteers worldwide and to encourage more people to engage in voluntary activity. Such celebratory cross-national events reflect the high profile of volunteering and political imperatives to celebrate and expand it. We have looked throughout this book at volunteering with organisations that provide care in England, in the first decade of the 21st century. In the next section of this final chapter, we review that context and the scope of the book and summarise the organising framework and key concepts we have deployed. Then we turn to the landscape for volunteering, VCSOs and care in the UK in 2011. We highlight elements of change and of continuity and consider what the empirical findings and conceptual lenses from the book can contribute to ongoing analysis. We recall the ways in which we set about research and knowledge exchange (KE) with volunteers and organisations that involve them and comment on some lessons we have learned. Finally, we end with a few comments on the Big Society.

Reflections on the scope and context of the book

In this book, we have reported and reflected on volunteering from research we undertook between 2003 and 2010. Our topic was volunteering through organisations (large and small) involved in care. The mainstreaming of the VCS in delivering public services within England has been an important policy context for our work – but during New Labour's administrations, devolution has seen the devolved governments and parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland increasingly adopting different approaches to the delivery of care and engagement with the VCS (Danson and Whittam, 2011). With more powers and responsibilities, Scotland has been leading the moves to divergence in social and economic policies across the UK (Keating, 2005; Mooney and Scott, 2005; Danson and Whittam, 2011), not least in the role of the VCS.