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Through the lens of assemblage thinking and “territorialisation,” this article examines the operationalisation of language support by the voluntary sector in the Thorney Island and Sopley camps, which temporarily accommodated Vietnamese refugee arrivals in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on archival sources, the role and agency of interpreters are foregrounded in an analysis of the relationships between the materiality of the camps, camp practices, and their impact on refugee experience. A post-camp initiative to train refugees as parasocial workers (a role that included interpreting) reveals a more person-centred approach, in contrast to what we have termed a solutionist approach to interpreting observed in the camps.

Prison health, prisoner safety and imprisonment rates matter: intrinsically and for health and safety outside. Existing prison regulation apparatuses (e.g. OPCAT) are extensive and hold unrealized potential to shape imprisonment. However, criminologists have not yet engaged much with this potential. In this article, I reconceptualize prison regulation by exploring the work of a broad range of multisectoral regulators who operate across stakeholder groups. I illustrate that voluntary organizations and families bereaved by prison suicide act as regulators, although their substantive actions have been erased from official narratives. Mobilizing (threats of) litigation, these actors have responsibilized the state and brought qualitative changes across the prison estate.

Greenland experienced a 5-week lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis. The lockdown effectively took out all public social support and food supply for people experiencing homelessness in the capital Nuuk. This woke up Greenland’s social conscience in the form of a local NGO’s mobilization of voluntary social helpers. Luckily nobody in the homeless environment got infected and suffered needlessly. From a social policy perspective, we can take three experiences away from the pandemic. Firstly, a clear learning experience from this crisis was the need to redefine the broad societal understanding of Greenland a country with a universal welfare system. The second experience was that social work comes in many shapes and forms. Finally, the experience illustrated what could take place when the political and administrative system are too slow to react in times of crisis. It kickstarted the civil society step up and help fellow citizens. In the end NGO’s need to reports back and inform the public system to ensure better social emergency response in the future.

The voluntary sector is playing an increasing role in responding to UK poverty, but there is a lack of attention in cultural geographies to understanding what motivates people to volunteer in this response. In particular, faith-based organisations – and therefore volunteers with religious faith – have been an active part of the voluntary sector response to poverty. However, little is known about what motivates people who have a religious faith to volunteer. Drawing on participatory and ethnographic research with a UK Christian charity working in the area of children’s holiday hunger, this article seeks to make three contributions. First, it moves beyond static notions of religious motivation which tend to characterise quantitative and more reductive qualitative approaches to volunteering in the social sciences. Secondly, it develops analysis of religious faith which foregrounds its relational, fluid and contested role in motivating people to volunteer, highlighting the importance of ongoing volunteering journeys alongside the initial motivations which led to a person starting to volunteer. Thirdly, by focusing on effort and enthusiasm the article seeks to break down the binary between faith-based and secular motivations and highlight instead the ways volunteers at the holiday hunger project experienced challenges in turning an initial motivation into action, and how ‘faith motivation’ itself is inherently relational and is co-constituted in place.

Mass incarceration and supervision operate through a mixed economy. Using the case study of Samaritans’ emotional support for prisoners in distress in England and Wales, we present an original framework of five normative criteria to facilitate nuanced assessment of voluntary sector criminal justice participation. This is an urgent, significant task for theory and practice: we need to find forms of public input that can deconstruct bloated penal systems. Whilst citizen involvement can be a positive form of ‘people power’, our assessment of Samaritans’ ostensibly welcome humanitarian intervention reveals how it deflects attention from severe shortcomings of the penal system. In the context of mass incarceration, we conclude that voluntary sector and citizen involvement in individualised service delivery alone risks obscuring deep problems and delaying much-needed change. This topic is particularly timely, given increasing non-state involvement in criminal justice and the global problem of prison suicide.

This comparative case study investigates the voluntary sector interface with criminal justice systems for youth and young adults in England/Wales and Finland. Methods included document review and stakeholder interviews. Across cases, key differences were found in the training of corrections and probation officers, funding sources and structures, and use of actuarial models and evidence. The organization of these relationships was also different for youth and young adult services, particularly in England/Wales where clear lines are drawn between age groups. The results contribute to an understanding of how system-level factors can drive relationships between the voluntary and criminal justice sectors.

As literature on the ‘shadow state’ shows, the voluntary sector has long served as a necessary conduit through which states orchestrate the governance of various populations. However, relatively little is known about the active role that voluntary organisations play in shaping and mobilising the capacities of the state to advance their own projects and interests. We draw out aspects of post-structural theories of the state, and particularly assemblage thinking, that provide the conceptual and analytical tools with which to explore how voluntary organisations may exceed their common positioning as co-opted by, and subservient to, the state. Through empirical research on homelessness policy development in Australia, we show how locally embedded voluntary organisations in Australia and the United States acted strategically and engaged transnationally – through material practices and multi-sited labours – to create opportunities to shape formal state agenda at national and sub-national levels. The activities and influence of these voluntary organisations are illustrative of the assembled nature of state capacity.

We examine the relevance of suggestive findings and assumptions about immigrant philanthropy to a diaspora from a high-income country of origin, whose members are generally highly educated and professionally employed: the Lithuanian diaspora. We investigate whether this immigrant group’s voluntary sector participation, despite these differences, may evolve similar to that of other immigrant groups studied. The study casts doubt on the generalizability of the current claims from the literature—which is largely derived from cases of immigrants migrating from the South to the North—to immigrant and diaspora groups who are highly skilled and originating from relatively more industrialized countries (North–North migration). The findings highlight the need to examine the voluntary sector participation of a greater variety of diasporas and to recognize that not all groups will behave similarly. Some of the differentiated behavior may stem from demographic characteristics specific to North–North migration.

The interim briefing presents initial findings from a project exploring the support available to migrants with no recourse to public funds during the COVID-19 pandemic.The research included a survey of local authorities in England, and a call for evidence from migrant support organisations in England, Scotland and Wales. More than 90 percent of local authorities had not shared information about support for people with NRPF during the pandemic, and support organisations reported that service users had struggled to access food, shelter and subsistence support during the pandemic.

This article explores the experience of voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) in the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) experiment. It identifies the motivations, expectations, rationalities and experiences of voluntary sector participants, drawing on interviews conducted with charity directors and community rehabilitation company executives between 2015 and 2017. It concludes by reflecting on the losses and gains that accrued to different parts of the voluntary sector, as well as critically examining the conditions by which ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ were structured within the TR framework.

This paper follows on from earlier work in which I discussed the potential impacts of the local commissioning of victim services by Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales. The introduction of this elected role and the devolution of responsibility to local PCCs was said to raise a range of issues for both victims and the voluntary sector, given that agencies within this sector are major providers of support for those affected by crime. Before 2014 the approach to the funding of victim services was not particularly of concern, save for questions being asked in the ‘audit culture’ of the early 2000s, around the extent to which the government-funded agency Victim Support could be said to be providing ‘value for money’. However, these concerns gained momentum with the incoming Coalition government of 2010, and by 2014 local commissioning by PCCs had been implemented. This meant the previous mixed economy of victim services provision via the largely centrally funded organisation ‘Victim Support’ as a ‘national victims’ service’, and an array of smaller and more financially independent victim agencies who had to bid for pots of funding much more competitively, has given way to the political appeal of a free market for all. In order then to explore the reality of this shift, a piece of empirical research was undertaken with voluntary-sector agencies in the far southwest of England. Essentially the research provides evidence that the issues raised in my earlier work have indeed come to fruition.

SummaryHome visiting is a widely used form of parenting support. The current study focused on the effectiveness of the home visiting volunteer parenting support programme Home-Start in the Netherlands. The Home-Start programme (intervention group) was compared to professional care as usual support (comparison group). The study focused on post-intervention changes of parental wellbeing, parenting behaviour and child problem behaviour within families with children in the age range of 1.5–3.5 years. Data were collected at the start of the interventions, at moment of support termination and at a six-month follow-up.FindingsEighty-six mothers from 24 Home-Start schemes were included in the intervention group (43 available at six-month follow-up) and 103 mothers from 18 care as usual sites in the comparison group (71 available at six-month follow-up). Mixed model analyses showed no or minor changes on the majority of selected outcome measures in both study groups. Significant improvements were only found for a few primary and secondary outcome measures. Additionally, there were indications of an increase in mother-reported behavioural difficulties of the children at post-test measurements, disappearing however at the six-month follow-up.ApplicationsThe current study showed that the volunteer programme Home-Start is an appealing intervention to families that appear to have higher needs. The study generated evidence that the results of the two types of evaluated interventions are comparable with little evidence of lasting changes.

Recent penal policy developments in many jurisdictions suggest an increasing role for voluntary organizations. Voluntary organizations have long worked alongside penal institutions, but the multifaceted ways their programmes affect (ex-)offenders remain insufficiently understood. This article addresses the implications of voluntary organizations’ work with (ex-)offenders, using original empirical data. It adds nuance to netwidening theory, reframing the effects of voluntary organizations’ work as inclusionary and exclusionary. Exclusionary effects sometimes have inclusionary aspects, and inclusionary effects are constrained by a controlling carceral net. We propose the novel concept of inclusionary control. This is not an alibi for punishment but enables rich analysis of the effects of voluntary organizations’ work, and raises possibilities for change in penal practice.

There is growing evidence that in the UK demands for non-profit and voluntary sector organisations to comply with funders’ target driven priorities are often in tension with organisations’ social goals. The implications of this for employees are not yet sufficiently understood. The present article builds on Bateson et al.’s theory of double-bind to develop a socially contextualised model to understand employees’ experiences of workplace contradictions in the sector. Drawing from data provided by 49 individuals working in three case study organisations, our conceptualisation of a ‘non-profit double-bind’ provides a new and novel way of understanding how social meta-communicative processes serve to embed or reframe contradictions within intense employment relationships.

The aim of this article is to recognize the crisis currently experienced by the voluntary and community sector (VCS) and to consider a creative response to this crisis utilizing VCS assets. The article uses a creative assets based response to the VCS crisis, utilizing sustainable livelihoods’ analysis (SLA) as a means of identifying VCS assets. SLA, traditionally used to explore vulnerabilities and assets at a household level, will be expanded and utilized to analyze the effects of austerity on small voluntary organizations. We use SLA as a theoretical lens through which to analyze our data, we propose that small VCS organizations can consider their position using SLA as a tool. The VCS can use SLA to consider its assets and vulnerabilities in the context of austerity; in engaging in this process, the VCS can recognize opportunities. The small VCS organization typically has high-quality community-based social capital, and it has a human capital and community knowledge. This integrated grassroots social capital expertise and strong community-based human capital is unique to the VCS. In mobilizing its assets, the VCS as a sector can seek to overcome the funding crisis that it is experiencing and develop creative solutions to austerity.

We study the relationship between career concerns and shared values empirically using employee–employer matched data for the United Kingdom and overtime hours as a proxy for hard work. In line with standard career-concerns theory, we find that employees work less overtime the longer they have been with their current employer. We also find that employees who agree strongly with the statement ‘I share many of the values of my organisation’ do roughly 20% more overtime than the rest. Our results suggest the existence of a trade-off between career concerns and shared values. We begin to consider some potential implications of this for employee recruitment as well as for the design of career paths across the private, public and voluntary sectors.

Unpaid work has long been used in nonprofit/voluntary social services to extend paid work. Drawing on three case studies of nonprofit social services in Canada, this article argues that due to austerity policies, the conditions for ‘pure’ gift relationships in unpaid social service work are increasingly rare. Instead, employers have found various ways to ‘fill the gaps’ in funding through the extraction of unpaid work in various forms. Precarious workers are highly vulnerable to expectations that they will ‘volunteer’ at their places of employment, while expectations that students will undertake unpaid internships is increasing the norm for degree completion and procurement of employment, and full-time workers often use unpaid work as a form of resistance. This article contributes to theory by advancing a spectrum of unpaid nonprofit social service work as compelled and coerced to varying degrees in the context of austerity policies and funding cutbacks.

Neoliberal austerity measures and welfare state retrenchment have meant that voluntary organizations around the globe are increasingly called upon to perform statutory social services. Despite a large and rising presence in criminal justice service delivery, volunteers and voluntary organizations have scarcely received scholarly analysis. This paper uses interviews, ethnography, and document analysis to explore the penal voluntary sector in Canada. Specifically, how individuals in the penal voluntary sector understand their roles in helping criminalized women and how these perspectives vary across different positions. This paper illuminates how agents occupying different helper positions cultivate divergent understandings of (and justifications for) the help they provide. Bourdieu’s field theory is mobilized to demonstrate how variegated discourses of helping co-exist, conflict, and impact the relational dynamics of the penal voluntary sector and its engagement with criminalized women.

This article will explore the practice of music therapy within the home setting, its characteristics and challenges. It will look at work within the voluntary sector and the task of liaising with staff within statutory organisations. The article focuses around a case study with one particular individual, her family and the varied role of music therapist within the home environment.

This article looks at the shift that has taken place in the funding of victim services in England and Wales, following the decision to appoint Police and Crime Commissioners, and give them the responsibility to commission such services at the local level. Over the past 40 years or so the voluntary sector agency Victim Support was ‘the major victims’ agency’ to which the majority of victims who reported crime to the police were referred. Victim Support therefore enjoyed reliable and consistent funding from the state, whilst its more ‘independent peers’ in the form of specialist services, had to contend with often less generous and less stable sources of funding. The shift to local commissioning chimes with the neo-liberal ideology which has permeated Conservative government policy since 1979, and which the Coalition government of 2010, and the Conservative government of 2015, have continued to champion. Thus the economy and the commissioning of victim services are increasingly subject to ‘the market’, as the best way to achieve efficient, effective and economic service provision. An array of government documents have talked about the importance of introducing competition into victim service provision, both as a political goal but also as a way of meeting the challenges that the current era of austerity poses. This paper then explores the potential implications for victim services in devolving funding to elected Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales.

This is a reflective piece that explores how work to support children and families of prisoners in the North East of England developed from very limited provision 10 years ago to what is now a substantial and multifaceted programme. The success of the work has been driven by the voluntary sector, with one key agency in particular taking a lead, supported by research that has provided the evidence base to identify intervention points and to demonstrate effectiveness and impact. We see that the persistence and commitment of a key voluntary sector agency working in partnership with a research organisation, backed up by strategy and a supportive prison environment, has created strong children and families provision in the North East.

At the request of the Journal Editors and the Publisher, the following article has been retracted: Han, J. (2016). Policy influence of social organizations in China. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/0899764016655889

This article argues that there is potential for equality legislation to be used proactively to contest attempts by public authorities to remove funding from groups who share protected characteristics. This follows on from the first empirical study of the impact of the Equality Act 2010 on charities in the United Kingdom, conducted by the Charity Law and Policy Unit, University of Liverpool (the study). One finding of the study was that charities in the United Kingdom are using the Act to challenge local government funding cuts. Strict austerity measures have led to widespread funding cuts for service provision. As many charities are commissioned by local governments to provide social services, this has had a direct impact on the charities’ funding. However, some charities and service users found a useful sword in the Equality Act and predecessor legislation. They used judicial reviews to challenge whether local governments have properly fulfilled their Public Sector Equality Duty when making the funding cuts. In some cases successful challenges prevented or restored funding cuts, while others simply resulted in the same cuts after a better process. However, cuts to legal aid and judicial review reforms may well blunt this sword. Charities’ motivations and successes, the impact of judicial review and the uncertain future for the strategy are discussed.

This overview of the history of welfare in British merchant seafaring opens by re-assessing a number of basic definitions, the subsequent discussions being based on welfare meaning ‘well-being’. This allows the widest number of initiatives and measures to be included. Further, seafarers must be considered with the population as a whole as potential beneficiaries of prevailing general welfare provision ashore. Hence, the first section offers a summary of state welfare provision from Elizabethan poor law to welfare state. Distinguishing the serving seafarer attached to a ship from the seafarer ashore between voyages, the second section considers selected welfare measures having an impact on seafarers at sea such as life-saving equipment, food, accommodation and health, noting that legislative measures had the main impact. The final section considers the seafarer ashore and the impact of voluntary sector organisations on seafarer well-being, but also notes among other measures the state regulation of the engagement process and of licensing and the role of nautical education.

Electronic palliative care coordination systems (EPaCCS) detail preferred place of death across health and voluntary sector boundaries. Quantitative studies suggest that individuals recorded on EPaCCS are more likely to die at home. This study aimed to explore this relationship between EPaCCS and home deaths. Patient records from EPaCCS were collected from 1 September 2011 to 29 February 2012, linked to death data and analysed using descriptive statistics. We interviewed 101 professionals, including community nurses, and employed framework analysis. Few eligible patients were entered on EPaCCS (9% North Somerset, 13% Somerset). Of those, the majority died in community settings (87%, 81/93 North Somerset; 93% 307/331 Somerset). However, interviews and EPaCCS record analysis suggested that EPaCCS was almost exclusively used by community nurses and GPs, so, unsurprisingly, the relationship between EPaCCS and home deaths was strong. Difficulties included professional reluctance to discuss death, and the burden of data entry falling on daytime staff for out-of-hours colleagues. These results challenge assumptions that EPaCCS facilitates increased home deaths, as qualitative investigation identified selection bias. To avoid misinterpretations, future studies should employ mixed methods. The implementation of an electronic tool is not enough on its own to ensure that advanced care wishes are available, as long-standing organisational and cultural issues, such as professionals working in silos and professional reluctance to have ‘end of life’ discussions, also need to be addressed.

Summary Performing work is regarded as a key factor in the social inclusion of vulnerable persons. However, such social inclusion appears to be problematic in both mainstream and segregated settings. We aimed to examine whether volunteer work in integrated settings could be a suitable alternative. In a case study, we interviewed 13 vulnerable persons who were enabled—through a “Quarter Making” intervention—to perform volunteer work in a community setting. Data were analyzed using concepts from social epidemiology and social sciences. Findings Participation in the community gave respondents structure, and made them feel useful, meaningful, and proud, as well as a useful interconnected part of society. Interpersonal relationships provided them with superficial but meaningful contacts in the community, and helped them to transcend their social group, and—sometimes—build friendships. These experiences of improved social inclusion resulted in respondents reporting better mental health and wellbeing, and speaking in terms of feeling more normal and—sometimes—in terms of recovery. Applications To improve the social inclusion of vulnerable persons, performing volunteer work in integrated settings could be a suitable alternative for mainstream work or work in segregated settings. Interventions aimed at matching vulnerable persons to integrated settings, like Quarter Making, should preferably find a balance between creating bridging capital, to allow vulnerable persons to connect to “the normal world,” and offering bonding capital, to give them a safe place where they can “learn and relearn” to deal with the demands of modern society.

Recruiting participants to qualitative studies is often a challenge—reaching the right people, and the right people choosing to participate, is a primary consideration for researchers. For research on HIV, as a condition which continues to be stigmatized, this can be magnified. However, being part of the HIV voluntary sector and occupying a role of “HIV advocate” can provide routes to overcome this challenge. Using the example of the researcher’s transition from voluntary sector worker to academic PhD researcher, this article explores how recruitment can be facilitated by utilizing personal and professional networks and how, in turn, this can present new challenges in reaching participants who are not “research regulars,” who are experienced in participating in qualitative research. It further explores reflexive methodologies as applied to participatory research on HIV and aging as it affects women in the UK and asks how the roles of “advocate” and “researcher” complement and challenge one another. Reflexive practice and an analysis of the researcher’s motives and how this impacts on recruitment, participation, and dissemination are considered. A three-part approach to reflexively engaging with participants’ questions is put forward. This provides a new perspective on participatory approaches in relation to research recruitment specifically.

Background Therapeutic horticulture is a nature-based method that includes a range of green activities, such as gardening, to promote wellbeing. It is believed that therapeutic horticulture provides a person-centred approach that can reduce social isolation for people with mental health problems. Aims The aim of the project was to evaluate the impact of a mental health recovery programme that used therapeutic horticulture as an intervention to reduce social inclusion and improve engagement for people with mental health problems. Methods A mixed-methods approach was used and data from four semi-structured focus group interviews, 11 exit interviews and 20 ‘recovery star' datasets were collected from September 2015 to October 2017. Qualitative data from the interviews were thematically analysed, and quantitative data based on a recovery star outcomes tool were analysed using descriptive statistics to demonstrate trends and progression. The findings were then triangulated to provide a rich picture of the impact of the mental health recovery programme. Results The recovery star data indicated that participants were working towards self-reliance. Qualitative data from the exit interview and semi-structured focus groups found similar results. The triangulated findings highlight that the mental health recovery programme enabled participant integration into the community through providing a space to grow and build self-confidence while re-engaging with society. The results suggest that using therapeutic horticulture as an intervention within the mental health recovery programme can support people with mental health problems to re-engage socially. Nature-based activities could be used within the ‘social prescribing’ movement to encourage partnership working between the NHS and voluntary sector organisations which can complement existing mental health services. Conclusion The use of therapeutic horticulture as an intervention within a mental health recovery programme can support people with mental health problems to re-engage with the community and is integral to the rehabilitation process. The mental health recovery programme should be promoted within the social prescribing movement as an evidence-based opportunity to support people in the community.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly on diversity, we begin by reviewing management research on diversity in nonprofits. The preponderance of this research focuses on demographic representation. While more contemporary approaches emphasize inclusion in decision making, even this approach falls significantly short because group categorization and identity have become increasingly complex and fluid. We ultimately explore a values approach to diversity, where the fact that people are inherently diverse is recognized and valued in all organizational activities. The final section of this introduction reviews articles included in the special issue. We conclude that the diversity concept must move well beyond a managerial approach to include broader social theories, giving deep consideration to concepts of identity, power dynamics and hidden interest conflicts in diversity efforts, and the ways that societal diversity affects the dynamics of volunteering and the structuring of nonprofit organizations.

This project was funded by a small grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. In a period of fiscal austerity the mobilization of the voluntary and community sector has been pivotal to neoliberal public policy reforms. This is reflected in the emergence of a ‘new localism’, which seeks to encourage place-based communities to take responsibility for their own welfare through the ownership and management of community assets. In the UK these political narratives are encapsulated in the Prime Minister’s Big Society agenda, which has been influential in the housing field, and has underpinned an emergent policy discourse constructing housing associations as community anchor organizations. Drawing on the case study of the community-controlled housing association sector in Scotland, this paper illuminates the centrality of localism to contemporary technologies of neoliberal governance. Through an analytical focus on the agency of front-line housing professionals it also adds to debates on ‘ethnographies of government’, which emphasize the situated messiness of projects of rule and the struggles around subjectivity. Postprint

This article investigates the complex interaction between contracting arrangements and quality of human resources (HR) practices. It draws on quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence for the adult social care sector in England where most services are purchased by local authorities and delivered by private for-profit and voluntary sector organisations. The study finds sufficient evidence among surveyed care providers that higher fees and partnership-oriented contracting have positive influences on pay levels and quality of HR practices to suggest that better local authority contracting may be an enabling condition for the improvement of employment standards. However, the relatively weak statistical associations suggest other factors mediate, or distort, the anticipated relationship between quality of contracting and quality of HR practices. The type of provider is identified as a key mediator: private, for-profit providers and those managed by a national chain are least likely to distribute the benefits of better quality contracting fairly through improved employment standards.

The case is about a non-profit organization named Child In Need Institute (CINI), based at Kolkata, India. CINI is a respected name in the voluntary sector in India and has good credentials in nutrition, health, education and protection of women, children and adolescents. The case raises global concerns of child protection and homeless children. It discusses in detail CINI’s child protection programme at an Indian railway station. The programme was funded largely by a UK-based charity. Following the Indian government’s policy of disbursing funds to non-profits in the broad area of child protection, the funding pattern could substantially change. The case engages learners to comprehend the nature and extent of issues relating to homeless children on railway platforms in India, form a broad idea about the external environment and strategy of a non-profit engaged in child protection and understand the merits and disadvantages associated with governmental funding.

There has been much debate about the impact of recession and austerity on the voluntary and community sector over recent years. Using secondary data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations, Clifford et al. (2013), writing in this journal, have argued that voluntary sector organisations located in more deprived local authorities are likely to suffer most due to the combined effect of cuts in government funding in these areas and their greater dependency on statutory funding. This paper develops this argument by exploring the sector’s changing relationship with the state through an empirical analysis of the differential impact of recession and austerity on voluntary and community organisations involved in public service delivery in the two English core cities of Bristol and Liverpool. This paper highlights how the scale and unevenness of public spending cuts, the levels of voluntary sector dependency on statutory funding and the rising demands for the sector’s services in a period of recession and austerity are being experienced locally. It portrays a sector whose resilience is being severely tested and one that is being forced rapidly to restructure and reposition itself in an increasingly challenging funding environment.

In the United Kingdom, Black and minority ethnic (BME) service users experience adverse pathways into mental health care. Ethnic differences are evident even at first-episode psychosis; therefore, contributory factors must operate prior to first presentation to psychiatric services. This study examines the cultural appropriateness, accessibility, and acceptability of the Early Intervention (EI) for Psychosis Services in Birmingham (the United Kingdom) in improving the experience of care and outcomes for BME patients. Thirteen focus groups were conducted with EI service users ( n = 22), carers ( n = 11), community and voluntary sector organizations ( n = 6), service commissioners ( n = 10), EI professionals ( n = 9), and spiritual care representatives ( n = 8). Data were analyzed using a thematic approach and framework analysis. Findings suggest that service users and carers have multiple, competing, and contrasting explanatory models of illness. For many BME service users, help-seeking involves support from faith/spiritual healers, before seeking medical intervention. EI clinicians perceive that help-seeking from faith institutions in Asian service users might lead to treatment delays. The value of proactively including service user’s religious and spiritual perspectives and experiences in the initial assessment and therapy is recognized. However, clinicians acknowledge that they have limited spiritual/religious or cultural awareness training. There is little collaborative working between mental health services and voluntary and community organizations to meet cultural, spiritual, and individual needs. Mental health services need to develop innovative collaborative models to deliver holistic and person-centered care.

This article details the first year of a collaborative effort between a campus-based university and its local Victim Support scheme. The key innovative component was that student volunteers were trained to provide support to peers who experienced crime. Not a formal evaluation, this article outlines how the work appeared beneficial to the university, its students and Victim Support. The first two benefited through improved on-campus service to victimized students and to those who were trained and worked as volunteers. Victim Support benefited from increased numbers of volunteers and consequently improved services. Some implementation difficulties are also described. This study provides a platform for further efforts and their more formal evaluation.

Having completed a research project with a small group of women offenders for The Griffins Society, I developed a new understanding of the importance of a range of empowerment approaches. The interventions with women who offend must incorporate both pragmatic and structural aspects alongside any confidence building support. Moreover, the limited services that exist for women require sustained funding. In fact, the community based provisions that remain accessible to women beyond their contact with the criminal justice system can make a real difference to their desistance journey.

Summary The movement of men into care work in the predominantly female voluntary sector appears to be an unintended impact of welfare state contracting-out, managerialism and labour market restructuring. While not uniform, our comparative, international data (New Zealand and Scotland) show that some groups of men in nonprofit care work jobs embraced managerialism and used aspects of it to reshape and advance their work, while others undertook practices exemplifying a ‘caring masculinity’ more similar to practices currently associated with femininised ways of undertaking care activities. Findings Drawing on international comparative data collected as part of a larger study of restructuring in the nonprofit social services, this article suggests analytic clusters of masculinities operating in the voluntary sector and explores how the presence of men in care work may be changing it. The article also shows how hegemonic, masculinist-oriented practices in the workplace appear more amenable to managerialism than the expected feminine self-sacrificing, self-exploiting ethos of this highly gendered, female-majority sector. Applications These findings provide insights into the gendered and changing work in the nonprofit social services sector, and suggest ways the gender order is changing with the influx of male workers. The findings will be of interest to social work managers, supervisors, practitioners, policy analysts, students and educators.

This article analyses the way Norwegian authorities facilitate and expect immigrant organisations to serve as schools of democracy – and to what extent there are elements of bureaucratic schooling. Moreover, it examines how immigrant organisations’ adaptation to these expectations can be understood as an adaptation to an administrative culture. The article concludes that adaptation to democratic ideals is emphasised in the political rhetoric, while in practice street-level bureaucrats educate members of immigrant organisations in how to establish and run a formal, hierarchical, rule-based and impersonal organisation in Norway. The emphasis on bureaucratic schooling is especially relevant in a Nordic context, where the voluntary sector functions as a parallel bureaucratic structure to the government administration. Most immigrant organisations formulate written statutes the way the authorities expect of them and in accordance with these statutes they construct their own democratic and bureaucratically structured organisations. By formulating their statutes, the immigrant organisations are socialised into the Norwegian administrative culture.

This article explores the need for a clearer vision of what ‘good’ looks like in the rehabilitation of offenders, whether in prison or in the community. Such a vision is needed to underpin not only innovative, and evidence-based service development but also outcomes led commissioning, and (in the context of England and Wales) the procurement of packages of rehabilitation services most likely to support the desistance process. The need for this is greater than ever, due to the current UK Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation reforms1 that are set to dramatically alter criminal justice policy in England and Wales.

The current debate about the privatisation of probation in the UK has tended to set up a false dichotomy between state and private that diverts attention from the fact that privatisation as part of a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ intends, in fact, to continue the domination of the risk management approach. What is emerging is a public–private combination of increasingly centralised public sector probation and the private ‘security-industrial complex’ of global security corporations. An important consequence of this process is the annihilation of both residual elements of voluntary sector and community work within probation itself and of the smaller private charities and third sector organisations that have long collaborated with probation in traditional desistance work. This complex dynamic is a reflection of some of the key internal inconsistencies of neoliberalism as a political strategy.

Utilising an institutional, inter-organisational and inter-personal framework, longitudinal qualitative data are used to examine the changing nature of state–voluntary sector relationships in the area of social care outsourcing and its implications for the terms and conditions of those employed by Scottish voluntary organisations. Over the period 2002 to 2008/09, against the background of funders seeking to pass on efficiencies to voluntary organisations, these relationships have become increasingly cost-based and ‘arm's-length’. This has been accompanied by downward pressure on staff terms and conditions, which are intensifying because of more draconian public expenditure cuts. Consequently, voluntary sector employers are increasingly converging on an employment model based on low pay and more limited access to sickness, pension and other benefits that is informed strongly by narrow financial logics.

At some time in their careers, all doctors will care for patients who are dying. People in the last year of life access services through health and social care more often, and more frequently, than at any other time of life. Recent Scottish studies confirm that 30% of people in a hospital bed are in the last year of life 1 and that 9% of people in hospital will die during the current period of admission. An even more striking statistic indicates that 50% of all hospital complaints relate to end of life care. 2 People who are dying have a range of physical, emotional, psychological and social needs. The care system which supports them is complex, and currently under intense pressure. People at the end of life may require health and social care co-ordinated across primary care, out-ofhours services, the ambulance and patient care services, acute and community hospitals, care homes and other local authority and voluntary sector services. Communication is of paramount importance and frequently breaks down. Performance frameworks and governance constructs, while necessary and useful, can be construed as cutting across good care. A patient’s trust in the end of life care provided for them or their loved ones can be eroded precipitously, as was seen during the recent demise of the Liverpool Care of the Dying Pathway (LCP).

Research suggests that mentoring may facilitate offender rehabilitation. Less is known about the impact on mentors, especially those who are ex-offenders. This study uses in-depth interviews with eight ex-offender mentors to explore the processes through which such schemes can be effective. Four key categories emerged: self-satisfaction; mutual benefit; mechanisms underlying success; and negative aspects of mentoring. Mentoring was experienced as a rewarding and mutually beneficial career which may reduce the social stigma of being an ex-offender. Challenges for mentors included dealing with failure or frustration and managing risk. Findings suggest that participation in mentoring schemes should be voluntary rather than compulsory and future schemes should consider employing ex-offenders as mentors and role models, to benefit from their lived experience, despite the barriers and challenges involved.

Trade associations are an important topic of investigation for nonprofit and voluntary sector researchers because they serve civic purposes and help to support innovative areas of entrepreneurship. We examine how local trade associations in the emerging gourmet food truck industry help to reduce uncertainty and augment industry legitimacy by (a) representing collective interests when challenged by regulators and incumbents (e.g., restaurants), (b) generating collective identity and creating cultural capital, and (c) providing a regime to manage “tragedies of the commons,” procure club goods, and promote self-regulation. We draw on social media data and narrative accounts by industry activists to explicate the evolution of the field from 2008 to 2012 in 11 cities. Findings suggest that trade associations, as an often-overlooked type of mutual benefit association, are key players in the legitimation of creative industries.

Since 1997, the U.K. Government has sought to expand the provision of public services by supporting the independent nonprofit sector. With policies to build the capacity of the sector, public spending on voluntary organizations has grown from £2 billion in 1996/1997 to £6.88 billion in 2005/2006. Theory suggests that the comparative advantage of nonprofits lies in the mission motivation of workers, and predicts that motivated workers will accept lower wages. We examine sector wage differentials in time series to show that growth in voluntary sector wages for males has outpaced the private and public sectors, while relative female wages have remained static.

In response to policy developments aiming to increase the involvement of penal voluntary organizations in criminal justice, a recent flurry of commentary has provided a marketized understanding of the penal voluntary sector and attempts to privatize it. Although this commentary has contributed significantly to the limited literature on the sector, the centrality of neoliberal policy in analysis is problematic. This article provides a critique of relevant commentary and offers a new exploration of the penal voluntary sector that extends beyond neoliberalism and marketization. A preliminary exploration of an alternative model is made, using political economy to provide a nuanced and politically enabling understanding of the role of voluntary organizations in criminal justice.