YouthNet blog
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Thursday Jun 08, 2006
Happy talk
Is the voluntary sector in general and the volunteering sector in particular just too nice?
Reading through the report on yesterday's 'debate' in Parliament to mark Volunteer's Week is like wading through melted down sweets ("Would the Hon. Gentleman agree with me that volunteers are all absolutely marvellous etc"). Of course praise for volunteers is merited, but doesn't the subject deserve something a little more substantial from our legislators?
A lot of public money is spent on volunteering and the voluntary sector - not always wisely. There are continuous reorganisations of government departments overseeing the sector. There are difficult issues to confront about how far volunteers should encroach on work that might otherwise be done by paid staff.
Yet there seems to be little real debate on any of these issues either within the sector, from the media, or from MPs.
One of the tenets of good volunteering management is that the best way to reward volunteers is to take them and their work seriously – praise only goes so far. Perhaps the same approach should be applied to the sector as a whole.
Posted by Tom Green ( 2:37 PM ) Link to this post Comments[1]Official: David Cameron no longer down with the kids
Oh David, you disappoint me!
Back in April I blogged here that the leader of the Conservatives was showing small signs of dragging his party into the modern era.
How naive I was. Yesterday, Cameron showed his true colours by playing to middle England with an attack on hip-hop music. At a conference of magazine editors, he put the knife in to Radio 1, and implicitly, Tim Westwood's Saturday night rap show.
He said:
'Do you realise that some of the stuff you play on Saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives?' Some people say that's part of the nanny state - I say the opposite."
This is a tough one for some pundits. The people who don't like David Cameron much but really don't like Tim Westwood don't know where to stand on it.
Westwood is usually lampooned (by other white people) as being a wigga; a white, middle class English guy who 'acts' like he's black. I've always found this a little disconcerting. Sure, Westwood is easy to parody, but the underlying message seems to be that black music is for black people and us whities should stick to our Coldplay and Kean records.
Anyway, back to David Cameron. Blaming music and films for crime is simple-minded and lacks any understanding of youth culture. People don't carry knives and guns because 50-Cent told them to; they carry weapons because they live in areas where there is high crime and they're afraid of being attacked.
