Outputs
1. Community and Volunteering Workshop, Keele University, 25 September 2012
The workshop was a one-day event hosted in Keele University by the Culture, Organisation and Markets (COM) research group, as part of the annual series of research events. The full-day workshop featured invited speakers from Essex, Teeside, Keele and Warsaw universities, as well as a presentation from Sue Moffat, Director of New Vic Borderlines. The workshop was attended by over 30 participants from around the UK and included academics, PhD students and volunteers. Following an overview of Exploring Personal Communities, the invited speakers presented research on staging and performance, diversity management and personal communities, the community of co-operatives and the Polish perspective on the volunteering tradition.
2. A Little Act of Kindness, New Vic Theatre, 10 October 2012
Our practitioner workshop took the form of a documentary performance entitled A Little Act of Kindness followed by a forum where the audience and volunteer performers shared their experiences and debated key issues in volunteering. Drawing on the New Vic Theatre’s documentary tradition, A Little Act of Kindness was developed in three phases. Using our own personal communities, initially we drew on personal contacts to find volunteers who were willing to get involved in the project. These volunteers, in turn, introduced us to others in the Stoke-on-Trent region. Our participants came from:
- Ford Green Hall
- Etruria Industrial Museum
- New Vic Volunteers
- Community Payback
- Community Champions
- Staffordshire Buddies
- Victim Support
- New Vic Borderlines Volunteers
Phase 1 involved creating an audio-narrative archive of the volunteers’ stories that captures their activities, motivations, personal and community benefits.
For phase 2, New Vic Borderlines hosted a tea party for the volunteers. Ten of the original participants attended the tea party and agreed to form a new personal community in the form of a volunteer company. During Phase 3 the volunteer company engaged in a series of structured and improvisational activities, which were used to devise the documentary drama entitled A Little Act of Kindness.
Phase 3 culminated in the performance of A Little Act of Kindness, on 10 October 2012, by the volunteers. The audience consisted of community members, friends, local voluntary sector organisations, a representative from NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations), academics and students from Keele University. The performance was followed by an open forum where audience members were invited to reflect on the documentary performance, to discuss some of the themes of the Exploring Personal Communities literature review and to explore what volunteering means in today’s society.
3. Alternative Modes of Organising: Communitarian Dreams and Immediate Realities, APROS 15, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, 15-17 February 2013
Alternative Modes of Organising is a conference stream in the Asia-Pacific Researchers in Organisation Studies (APROS) conference entitled ‘Re-covering Organisations’. The stream is based on the review’s themes and includes 18 papers with a strong emphasis on empirical research, encompassing a wide range of theoretical approaches and views from localised to cross-cultural perspectives. We intend to publish the best papers as a special issue in the International Journal of Organizational Analysis.