Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and boxes
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on the authors
- Acknowledgements
- one Fixing Britain's ‘broken’ society: from the Third Way to Big Society
- two Theoretical underpinnings of voluntary work and voluntary organisations: work, care or enterprise?
- three Understanding the journeys of individual volunteers: demanding community concern, or demonstrating job readiness?
- four A professional paradox? ‘Managing’ volunteers in voluntary and community sector organisations
- five Voluntary and community sector organisations as enterprising care providers: keeping organisational values distinctive
- six Volunteering: an articulation of caring communities
- seven Volunteering: caring for people like me
- eight The big issue of the Big Society: mobilising communities alongside fiscal austerity
- Bibliography
- Index
one - Fixing Britain's ‘broken’ society: from the Third Way to Big Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and boxes
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on the authors
- Acknowledgements
- one Fixing Britain's ‘broken’ society: from the Third Way to Big Society
- two Theoretical underpinnings of voluntary work and voluntary organisations: work, care or enterprise?
- three Understanding the journeys of individual volunteers: demanding community concern, or demonstrating job readiness?
- four A professional paradox? ‘Managing’ volunteers in voluntary and community sector organisations
- five Voluntary and community sector organisations as enterprising care providers: keeping organisational values distinctive
- six Volunteering: an articulation of caring communities
- seven Volunteering: caring for people like me
- eight The big issue of the Big Society: mobilising communities alongside fiscal austerity
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The making of a good society depends not on the State but on citizens, acting individually or in free association with one another, acting on motives of various kinds. (Beveridge, 1948, p 320)
Introduction
On 20 January 1961, when President John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States (US), he uttered the famous words, ‘my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country’. Almost five decades later in another liberal democracy, the new British Prime Minister David Cameron launched his Big Society drive to empower communities in Liverpool on 20th July 2010, describing social action as his ‘great passion’.
The Big Society is about a huge culture change … here people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace … feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities. The success of the Big Society will depend on the daily decisions of millions of people – on them giving their time, effort, even money, to causes around them. So government cannot remain neutral on that – it must foster and support a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social action. (Cameron, 2010a)
The words uttered by Prime Minister Cameron about the Big Society are not dissimilar to those of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (1999) who, in a speech at the annual conference of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) on 14 February 1999, said: ‘each day, in communities across the country, people act out their vision of Britain – rejecting selfishness and embracing community’. He went on to express a vision that ‘we mark the Millennium with an explosion in giving, “acts of community”, that touch people's lives’.
Today, high-profile ‘acts of community’ regularly appear in the press. In 2000, for example, Prince William of Wales spent part of his gap year (breaking his studies between school and university) working as a volunteer for the charity Raleigh International, in Chile. During 2009, the then UK New Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown spent part of his summer holiday giving time helping out at a voluntary project in his Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath seat in Fife, Scotland.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Enterprising Care?Unpaid Voluntary Action in the 21st Century, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2011