Report transcript in: Michael's Volunteering story

Please Report the Errrors?

so Hello, Michael.

I just wanted to start with asking you

about what is your experience with volunteering?

Yeah. Now that I've been a volunteer centre

manager for five years, I've thought about that quite a lot.

Um,

did a presentation really recent recently, And I was

kind of trying to reflect that in my presentation. And I thought back,

and I concluded that my first volunteering

was helping the local farmer who delivered

eggs to the front door,

Um,

who had

two broken hips.

And

when I was about eight or nine, my mother used to say, Oh, it's so sad that he,

um he has to He has to struggle up the drive, you know,

he has to struggle from to the front gate,

um, to deliver the eggs.

And, uh So I went out one day and I said, Can I do that for you?

And then after a while, he let me follow him around our

street,

delivering

the eggs to the front doors of houses,

and it made me feel really good. I felt like I was doing something useful,

and I was quite shy, child, and I was quite nervous about

going up to the doors of even people who lived on our street,

And I kind of had that process of feeling I was

developing or something like that,

and

I think that

gave me a sort of taste for it.

Volunteering I you know, I feel empowered by helping people, and I feel

instantly rewarded by feeling

helping somebody else, even in a small way.

Um,

years later, I've had

experience of depression and anxiety from

burning out through a job,

and I very much felt in my recovery from that

doing the washing up or

changing nappy or

taking somebody else's child from the school gate for a couple of hours.

Um,

small things

make me feel better, that sort of cycle of achievement.

And

when I came to the volunteer centre here in Kensington, Chelsea in

2017 after the fire,

um, I found that

slightly more formalised here in a way that I recognise. So

those cycles of

setting

achievable modest goals for yourself,

maybe with the help of other people,

and then following through developing yourself so that you can achieve them

having that sense of self efficacy

and then

reflecting and maybe going again for something else.

and in a sense, my experience of volunteering today with,

uh, volunteer Centre.

Whether the goal that the person has when they come through the door to us is

a well-being goal like it would have been when I was recovering

of depression,

whether it's

a desire to get into work,

whether it's a desire to get out of the house and have connection with human beings.

Um,

even if it's just a sort of a desire to give back to your community,

which in Kensington and Chelsea there's a wide range of people who feel that way

or a combination of many of those different goals, which is typical of our clients.

It's that cycle of

achievement,

um,

building achievement and then building your self efficacy.

I feel very strongly that

that

is what makes us

resilient. And,

um, it's a strong base to be able to do all sorts of different things.

And so, in a way, although I think that

giving

care to others,

caring for other people and doing practical things, to show that you care

and to help them

improve their lives

is at the centre of volunteering for me

in a way it doesn't

matter so much

what form that volunteering takes

as long as it's not

purely a transaction.

So I think there has to be that

the centre of volunteering for me is that human

connection.

So even if you're volunteering for a very large organisation

or the type of volunteering you're doing each day is very different.

As long as somewhere in that process you're building a connection. That could be

You're delivering a food parcel at somebody's front door

if you bring eggs at somebody's front door.

Uh, it could be,

um,

you're coaching of sports session. It could be your

overseeing an upcycling project.

All sorts of different things

could be that you're in the laundry and a homeless, uh, V CS organisation.

Um, washing and drying the laundry of people who sleep rough,

which is what we consider to be the hardest volunteering job in all

right,

whatever it is, as long as you have that connection.

So the connection with the people you're working with,

or even better,

the connection with the people you're working

with and the people that you're working

for.

Um,

that's what makes it

powerful. And that's what drives the sense of self efficacy. I think

there has to be.

And, of course,

in a volunteer centre setting or in any

other place where volunteers are mobilised and deployed.

It's about,

um, the the mutual sense of care.

So it's about the sense that not only do you care for others,

but your care for them is valued by them

by people who are helping to deploy you or who are your peer volunteers.

It's that sense of

humanity and action that the mutual care

that's the really,

um, which is the building block of

that self efficacy and that ability, then to meet other challenges in your life. Um,

being overworked or stressed, um, losing somebody that you love, um,

losing your home or whatever it is

that's what

enables you to go again and and and

build and go forward.

And

for me,

that is part of a bigger

project, which is about

making the world a better, fairer, more equitable place.

Collectively,

um,

that collective element that again that mutual care,

um,

non negotiable.

It's bound. It's bound up in

what it means to volunteer.

So in a way, for me

coming to volunteer centre in Kensington, Chelsea and finding a culture,

um, and helping to propagate that culture, which is

collective, um,

based on love and care and

valuing each other,

uh, has been a Yeah, a massively

inspiring,

um,

motivating

find.

I really, um

I guess I'm

my late,

uh, my early fifties now, And it happened at a time in my life where

there were lots of different directions my life could have gone in. And

I'm really grateful that, um

I happened to land here at the right time.

It's really powerful. I love the ideas of connection and that

that humanity being really important

if you want to say something more around around that,

I suppose, um,

I suppose I,

um, come from

background of

having learned about, um,

history and philosophy, formally,

And,

uh, when I was doing that, it was my first year doing philosophy and

history of ideas at Cardiff University.

Um,

which I again kind of stumbled upon accidentally.

Somebody said that I liked an argument, and that philosophy would suit me.

Um, and it turned out they were right.

uh, and

I was exposed to a huge range of different, um,

ideas and theories about how the world works how the world should work.

and I don't really at all subscribe to the idea of

a marketplace of ideas. I don't think such thing exists.

I think we're presented in general in life with,

um,

the ideas that

people with large concentrations of power want us to have

and then that those ideas are sold into us.

But

that time in my life, I

I guess I felt that I had

the opportunity to think and

reflect on lots of different approaches to life.

And, uh,

I very quickly came to the conclusion that,

uh, I was

approaching life through a dynamic of

how power flows through

society and social institutions

and what you can do about that,

how it affects people, how it often

impoverishes or crushes people's,

uh, spirits.

And I came to the conclusion quite early that

I wanted to be involved in

the world in a way which would distribute that power

much more evenly

and that I was quite suspicious of people who wanted

to acquire more of that power.

Um,

without the accountability to the collective, that,

would counterbalance it.

And so I guess I I sort of

found my way to a sort of a narco communist

view of the world where,

um,

the best things that we build, we build between

people.

And

I guess that's the approach that I've taken ever since

is that

I tried to be a person who

connect people

and

thinks about,

um,

interesting ways to combine people's strengths and

goals together to try and take

collective projects forward

and I. I guess I've also been profoundly suspicious of people who,

um,

who do things for money.

Um,

because

everybody needs

a warm, safe place to sleep,

and everybody needs enough to eat.

Um,

everybody needs time to reflect and,

uh, care and love.

But for me, those things, um,

shouldn't be contingent on

one's ability to labour.

They should be the fundamentals of how we organise our lives.

And so, um,

yeah, I guess I

I've tried to avoid

situations in which I'm working

with people or four goals, which has to do with,

um seeing people or situations as profit.

And,

um,

I guess that's how I ended up coming to finding my way to a volunteer centre because,

um, I don't want to judge anybody else and I don't want to,

um,

prevent them from taking their lives in

the direction that they think are appropriate.

But I where I can I want to work with people and encourage people

to do things because they care about them and because they think that they're

they're good.

Um, and the volunteer centre seems like a good place to start with.

Thank you.

As you were speaking, I was thinking about

some of the themes around the vision for volunteering.

I don't know if you want to reflect on whether

anything that you've discussed might tie into any of those.

Well, um,

I suppose thinking very, very much about where I come from,

I've described already that, um,

an analysis of power is very important to me

and thinking about

the opportunities that people do or don't have for giving their

time and their care to others.

Um,

people's choices are massively constrained by how much power they have.

Um,

So for example,

um,

I live, uh, I live in a very affluent part of London in Richmond,

but I work in, uh, the most unequal, uh, borough in the country,

Kensington and Chelsea.

And my experience is that

um,

people from the

poorest parts of the community.

Um, marginalised and racialized.

Um,

people who are disabled people have long term mental health issues.

People released from prison

from psychiatric care

often make, uh,

as good or better volunteers,

uh, than somebody who has the means to

make many more choices about what they do with their time.

But

that first group of people are often, um,

because they have fewer choices.

They either don't think of themselves as volunteers,

their their their carers for their neighbours, for example,

they're contributing to their church or to their mosque or to their temple.

Um, volunteering

in many cases doesn't speak to them as a term,

but also, um,

they're massively constrained by the position

they find themselves in economically.

And

I think the

parts of the vision that talk about

the power to volunteer and the opportunities that go

with that and the constraints that go with that

appeals to me. I'm very interested in,

for example, um,

we talk a lot

about

the protected characteristics and how, for example, race might affect uh,

you know how somebody is racialized might affect

the opportunities they have to give time to others the acceptability of

their offer,

Um,

or, for example, gender and how that might influence their opportunities.

But we're almost not allowed to talk about

how class and economic power,

um,

affect and constrain those choices.

And in a in a very unequal borough like this one,

the impact is stark.

It's, you know, it's It's one of the first things that you see, if not the first,

Um, when

you encounter somebody wanting to make an offer of

of their time and their care.

And I suppose that's the

That's the part that that something like a vision

for volunteering where the rubber really hits the road.

Because that's the part that,

can have a potentially huge impact on

the extent of participation of some parts of the community in civil society,

where other parts of the community might not even reflect on

those choices, that for them that's a it's a personal choice.

It's maybe a moral choice as to whether you give to your community or not,

whereas for a significant proportion of the population in a borough,

um, there are some very, very practical constraints about,

uh,

having to do so many hours of work in order to pay the bills that you you know,

you don't have the time or the energy to to give your time to others.

And yet

many of those people still find time to

to contribute and to give their time as volunteers.

Thank you.

Thank you, Michael. Is there anything else you wanted to add in the time we've got?

I think I've talked enough.

Thank you.

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Author

struthyb

Post date

20/08/2023