Revisiting the Roots of Voluntary Action

Abstract

People who work in and with voluntary organisations and those who study them are remarkably insouciant about the history of voluntary action. Individual organisations are careless of their archives and only too ready to consign their records to damp cellars or cart them off to landfill in skips. If they do show some interest in their past, this takes the form of ‘cherry-picking’ their history to provide selected images, incidents and personalities with which to add sparkle to their promotional and fund-raising materials rather than a serious attempt to understand the concerns and the external forces that shaped both their founding mission and the ways in which it has been adapted to changing circumstances. From a wider perspective, the debates about social and public policy and the growing role to be played in it by voluntary agencies have been curiously deracinated. As a result, the discussion has been largely uninformed by any understanding of the historical experience which has formed today’s institutions and relationships, while any lessons from the past have been left unlearned. While we do not have to go as far as Marx, who suggested that ‘those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’ (Marx, 1852), there seems ‘to be little doubt that a lack of understanding of past experience represents a serious gap in the armoury of the policy-maker and the social analyst as well as voluntary sector leaders’ (Rochester et al., 2011: 4).