Down with badly painted youth centres

What good is 3 days of volunteering per year?

David Cameron’s announcement today that the Conservatives would create ‘paid’ volunteering opportunities for 3 days every year for larger employers sounds like it has to be applauded, anything that gives more support to the voluntary sector has to be a good thing, right?
But surely to make a real impact this really needs to be done on the terms of the voluntary organisations they’re supporting, not a top down act of generosity from a head office of a large corporation. And why 3 days? Why not come up with a scheme to encourage regular, on-going volunteering? Isn't that what the vision of the Big Society is?

I’m reminded of a story I heard locally where a local youth centre received a phone call from a very large employer who had decided it would be good for their staff if they could have a day out of the office and paint the youth centre. Unfortunately they phoned right at the moment the youth centre manager was doing that job, and he got paint all over his phone. That wasn't their fault but it illustrates the inconvenience phone calls like this can cause. 

Of course as a charity you are thrilled to receive offers of help but when it's not an open offer of 'how can we best help you?' it just creates more work. Suddenly a neat project has to be dreamed up at the risk of looking ungrateful for the offer.

Being a large international financial organisation it’s not beyond reason that they employ a good deal of highly skilled DIYers but I would hazard a guess that they had a lot more to offer around IT, finance and business planning skills. All things that the youth centre were also crying out for support with.

So instead of looking as corporate responsibility as a way of rewarding staff and getting them out of the office on team building days it would be much better to engage with the local community and find out what it really needs. 

The other point about this announcement is that is ‘3 days’ going to change the world? If we really want to unleash the capacity of out communities to support each other then we have to find ways to enable people to become regular volunteers and make the best use of their skills and interests (like our Gig Buddies scheme).

I don't want to sound grumpy and ungrateful about Mr Cameron's announcement but there's ways of making sure that any extra support is truly effective and is directed by the needs of the local community, and not the ideas of a corporate social responsibility team.

So down with badly painted youth centres and lets enable the accountants and IT people do what they do best. (Of course if it was a big building firm wanting to paint your walls and do over your garden then that kind of help that would be another matter!).

19th April '15 - quick update, here's a nice article from Brandon Trust with a great example of how corporate volunteering can work really well and make best use of assets and resources.