Keele University
Exploring Personal Communities
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Beneficiaries
Stoke-on-Trent is an example of a community in post-industrial decline. The figures for unemployment, economic inactivity and recipients of Job Seeker’s Allowance (JSA) are all above the average for Great Britain, while qualifications and earnings by residence are below the national average[1]. As a recent report suggests, Stoke-on-Trent is a deprived area and the combination of low wages, unemployment, education levels and poor health means that it is particularly vulnerable given the current programme of cuts to city council budgets[2]. The region relies heavily on volunteers to support many of its economic, social and cultural activities, so it makes sense to make the area a specific focus of our impact activities. We are particularly interested in community-based organisations (CBOs), which can be defined as very small, local groups who address specific areas in the community and who do not have a regional or national remit[3]. Our interest in CBOs is explicitly linked to our overall aim of exploring the concept of personal communities as a connector across discourses of individualism and communitarianism. This is abductive in the sense that we will treat the ambiguity built into the rhetoric of community as a positive, generative force and we will be drawing hunches from engaging with volunteers in the local community to pursue certain avenues of investigation but not others. The concept of ‘personal communities’ should therefore be of interest to the groups we are targeting given our existing relations with them and previous participation in activities organised at Keele. Keele University sees volunteering as central to student experience and employability: see Student Volunteering Strategy and Programme.
