Study title

We obtained the voice of voluntary action from the archives of five national voluntary organisations. Prior to submitting the proposal to ESRC we obtained privileged access to those collection which remained in private hands (including the archives of Children England, Age UK and Ambition). We have digitised selected documents from each. The documents available within these organisational archives are varied, but include items such as: annual reports, annual accounts, board papers and minutes, research report, policy position statements, and consultation responses.Discourses of Voluntary Action was a three-year research project (July 2017 – November 2020) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Discourses of Voluntary Action at two 'Transformational Moments' of the Welfare State, the 1940s and 2010s (ES/N018249/1)) and carried out by researchers at the universities of: Northumbria, Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam, Southampton and UCL. The publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942, and the subsequent establishment of comprehensive welfare services in the UK, has been referred to as ‘a revolutionary moment’. The same term was used to describe the context in which welfare services were dismantled in England in the 2010s. At these two transformational moments, fundamental questions were raised about the respective roles and responsibilities of the state and the voluntary and community sector (VCS) in the provision of welfare services. During the first revolutionary moment, in the 1940s, the Beveridge report proposed a series of measures to address the ‘evils’ of the time. The subsequent restructuring of welfare provision led to significant changes in the structure and focus of many VCS organisations, and a period of intense debate about the nature and extent of voluntary action. In the 2010s, as a result of major national and international events a fundamental renegotiation of the role of the state was initiated and considerable change in the ways in...