YouthNet blog

Friday Jun 27, 2008

Do CRB checks deter volunteers?

Yesterday think-tank Civitas published a report that said adults are afraid to interact with children for fear of being labelled as paedophiles.

The Home Office rebuffed the report saying that there was no evidence that vetting deterred volunteers, and that CRBs had stopped 20,000 unsuitable people from gaining work with vulnerable individuals.

As someone who's been involved in recruiting volunteer youth leaders over a number of years, I think Civitas have a point; and the Home Office is being naïve if it thinks that requiring people to undertake a CRB doesn't deter otherwise suitable individuals.

It's also not exactly true to say there is no evidence – NCH and Chance UK did some research last year and discovered that 1 in 5 people from BME communities are deterred by the CRB.  Children's Commissioner Sir Al Aynsley-Green also told the Home Affairs select committee that potential leaders are being put off by criminal record checks.

Requiring someone to disclose their criminal past is a big ask for any organisation; especially right at the start of the process of joining.  By the age of 35, 1 in 5 adults have been convicted for a crime, and of those 84% will be male. That means that nearly 1 in 3 men in the UK aged 35+ have been prosecuted or cautioned for breaking the law (Source: Hansard: Col 139, 10 Dec 1996).  Most of those offences are minor and insignificant when it comes to checking the suitability of the individual; but they are still declaring something that they may have not told partners, children or even their employers.

My experience of working with volunteers who have previous convictions – albeit for petty theft and benefit fraud – is that they feel highly ashamed of having this information made available.  And this is for the ones who are prepared to undertake a CRB. Others simply decide not to apply, withdraw their application, or most likely simply no longer return calls when they are asked to declare their criminal records.

20,000 unsuitable people being stopped from working with vulnerable individuals is a good thing.  But at the same time there has been a significant drop in the number of adults prepared to volunteer to work with young people. This can lead to young people having less structured out-of-school activities and ultimately to them spending more time on the streets where there are none of the safeguards that a youth group has.

It's difficult to see a solution, because I'm certainly not advocating removing the requirement for CRBs as part of the recruitment of youth leaders.  But continuing to deny it is a problem is not going to solve the problem of a significant lack of volunteer youth leaders in this country.

Wednesday Jun 11, 2008

And now for a bit of shameless plugging

YouthNet's do-it.org.uk is in the running for the Innovation category of the 2008 New Media Awards, run by New Statesman magazine.   It's great to see such an impressive line-up in the nominations – once again, evidence of the real drive to use new media technologies to create positive social change.

Of course, we think do-it.org.uk's pretty special, and judging from the comments we've received so far, it has had an impact on a lot of others as well, making it easy for people throughout the UK to find their perfect volunteering opportunity.

Here's just one of them:

do it.org.uk is a great way of finding volunteering in your own area and helping to find opportunities to help others - its easy, simple, useful and fun to use, there is no better website out there for volunteering xxx 
- Christele

If you'd like to leave your own comment of support, you can visit do-it.org.uk's entry on the New Statesman website. 

And while I'm on the subject of awards, congratulations must go to the YouthNet Development Team who won Gold in the Fundraising Charity of the Year category of the Professional Fundraising Awards last month.  Well done Development!

Tuesday Jun 10, 2008

Raising money from the web

My gut feeling is that really innovative trading schemes for charities are fairly few and far between at the moment – despite the increasingly blurred line between the for-profit and non-profit sectors, which presents huge opportunities (and threats) in this area for charities.

This is YouthNet's take on innovative trading – my colleague James and I gave this presentation at the Professional Fundraising conference at the end of May.

Obviously the slides won't make as much sense as they would accompanied by the scintillating, witty narrative that James and I delivered on the day, but hopefully you'll get the general idea.

Anyone else have any thoughts/comments/other examples of charities trading in innovative ways?

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Monday Jun 02, 2008

Are the Emo kids on to something?

If I’d had nothing better to do on Saturday then I might have wandered down to Marble Arch to see a peculiar sight. Over 100 teenagers, fans of the band My Chemical Romance, turned up to hold a demonstration against the Daily Mail newspaper for what they feel is the unfaith portrayal of them and their “emo” subculture: particularly in relation to a recent suicide by a 13-year-old girl that the paper linked to the band.

Despite some, well, frankly schoolboy errors with the protest (the one day a week daily newspapers don’t work on is a Saturday and Northcliffe House, where the Mail is based, it down a side-street so they had to move the protest over a mile away) I genuinely was excited to see the protest taking place. Because it’s a sign that teenagers are getting restless, and the oft-reported apathy that young people are purported to have, is wearing thin.

I hope the protest galvanises the young people involved, and others, to up the ante when it comes to the fair representation of young people in the media.  That 100 young people can generate a good deal of publicity probably comes down to the novelty of it and Saturday being a slow news day; but even if the Mail says it won’t change its stance protesting has made their readers more aware of the issue.

YouthNet and the BYC run the Respect campaign to try and ensure young people can respond to the negative portrayal of themselves in the media.  Let’s hope this is a summer of fun…