We now have millions of "lockdown volunteers". How can they be resourced, supported and developed - for the next wave?
From “Communities vs. Coronavirus”
Very interesting from the Guardian’s excellent and long-standng society correspondent Patrick Butler. What will now happen to the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of “lockdown volunteers” - whether unofficially through Mutual Aid Groups (MAGs), or officially through the NHS Volunteers Service?
Butler’s piece has some intriguing angles - one being there was a trail of disappointed and underused NHS volunteers, partly becaus the MAGs had gotten in on the ground quicker and more effectively.
A COVID report from the insightful NLGN (New Local Government Network) really investigates, with expertise and detail, the way that Mutual Aid Networks emerged during COVID.
Butler summarises its findings:
For all the MAGs’ achievements, however, initial studies have found that they thrived most in areas with high levels of “social capital” – in general, areas that were wealthier and better-educated – and least in poorer or rural communities.
In this it generally mirrors the distribution of traditional charities. A key challenge will be how to “level up” civil society – how to encourage mutualism in places where there is little civic infrastructure, high population churn, low levels of trust, and stark income and ethnic divides.
What is unlikely to succeed is a reiteration of the big society, that ill-fated plan of David Cameron’s to reboot the voluntary sector during the early years of austerity, as public services were being cut back.
A recurring lesson of the pandemic, not to mention the past decade, is that this kind of centralised, PR-driven and top-down policy approach rarely works.
MAGs emerged and thrived not via Whitehall policy directive, but because the lockdown introduction of furloughing – by happy accident – also created a mass cadre of people of working age, who had:
time on their hands
motivation to help in a moment of national crisis
and no immediate pressure to seek paid work.
The lesson for the government is not to try and recreate MAGs but to enable where possible the conditions in which they can grow.
Furlough won’t last, but MAGs also blossomed, another study noted, in places which possessed “abundant community assets where people of different backgrounds can meet and mix” such as community centres, libraries and parks.
Zoom meetings and WhatsApp may be the current default but local recoveries, when they come, will be plotted and celebrated in public spaces.
Proper state funding of shared, democratically owned and accessible public spaces, especially in the most disadvantaged areas, are unlikely to be top of [the government’s] list. Calls to invest in local government are perennially unfashionable, especially to a governing party traditionally so easily distracted by the glitter of private philanthropy.
But it ought to be.
Download “Social connection in the COVID-19 crisis from All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration” (PDF)
Download “Communites vs Coronavirus - The Rise of Mutual Aid [NLGN]” (PDF)