Abstract
When Margaret Thatcher addressed the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS) in January 1981, an organisation that was 100 per cent reliant on central government grants for its core funding, she observed that there was no way that Britain ‘could produce statutory services to meet the needs which as volunteers you now satisfy’. Denying that she wanted to make such organisations the ‘creatures of Government’, she nevertheless saw ‘our role’ as being ‘to help you do the administration and work of mobilising this enormous army of volunteers’. This concern of central government to invoke the skills of the NGO sector in the delivery of services was to have a profound impact on the evolution and landscape of this sector. Previous chapters have shown the complexities of the NGO sector and illustrated its expansion since 1945.
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Further reading
Contemporary reports on the state of the sector can offer useful insights into the nature and condition of the sector at a given point. See particularly John Wolfenden, The Future of Voluntary Organisations: Report of the Wolfenden Committee (London, 1978)
Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector, Meeting the Challenge of Change: Voluntary Action into the 21st Century: The Report of the Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector (London, 1996)
which is commonly referred to as the Deakin Report, and the NCVO and Centre for Civil Society, Next Steps in Voluntary Action (London, 2001).
For a series of case studies concerning the governance of charities, see John Plummer, How Are Charities Accountable? (London, 1996).
Also, for the debates surrounding internal accountability and democracy, see Darren Halpin, ‘NGOs and Democratisation: Assessing Variation in the Internal Democratic Practices of NGOs’, in Nick Crowson, Matthew Hilton and James McKay (eds), NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 261–80.
For a good overview of the development of the relationship between the state and the voluntary sector, see Nicholas Deakin, ‘The Perils of Partnership’, in Justin Davis Smith et al. (eds), An Introduction to the Voluntary Sector (London, 1995), pp. 40–65.
For a study of the impact of membership on organisational and campaign development, see Grant Jordan and William A. Maloney, The Protest Business? Mobilizing Campaign Groups (Manchester, 1997).
This study uses Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth as case studies. For a retrospective sense of the experiences of volunteers and staffers who joined groups that emerged in the 1960s, see Helene Curtis and Mimi Sanderson (eds), The Unsung Sixties: Memoirs of Social Innovation (London, 2004).
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© 2012 Matthew Hilton, Nicholas Crowson, Jean-François Mouhot & James McKay
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Hilton, M., Crowson, N., Mouhot, JF., McKay, J. (2012). Governance and Professionalism. In: A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029027_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029027_9
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