2009'S TOP 10: 4

Volunteering and Faith Communities Briefing Day,

Birmingham Centre for Voluntary Action,

Monday 11 May 2009

This event at Birmingham Centre for Voluntary Action was intended for leaders in the faith and volunteering sectors who want to hear firsthand what new research in this area has revealed; faith organisations who want to learn about other faiths and volunteering and find out about the next steps for this project; volunteer development agencies interested in developing faith based volunteering and learning about the potential funding opportunities for innovative pilot projects.

Leicester Council of Faiths was asked to help organise a number of focus groups earlier in 2009 to help provide information for the research project, “Volunteering and Faith Communities”. In recognition of this support for the project, Barbara Regnier at Dare to Change asked me to be the opening speaker at this event, which drew around 60 or so attendees, from all parts of England. This was followed by researchers from De Montfort University’s Centre for Social Action who presented their findings on volunteering and faith communities in England. A free copy of the published report was given to delegates (Leicester Council of Faiths was given 50 copies of this publication, with compliments for our cooperation in the project; there are still some available if anyone would like one).

In the afternoon, we heard from Professor Harris Beider, of the Institute for Community Cohesion, who set up round table discussion where attendees worked together to share experiences and expertise to help shape the outcomes for the remainder of this programme. On a personal level, this day was important for seeing the following text for the first time, entitled “The Helping Grace”. I’d discussed this briefing - and the presentation I was intending to give - with Clare and she sent me this (from a book entitled Helping the Client by John Heron) on the morning of the event:

"People who help people move by the grace within the human spirit. This grace is the primary source of effective helping behaviour. Its presence and expression are entirely independent of professional training: it can inform and be enhanced by the latter, but can also be obscured, suppressed and distorted by it

“This helping grace seems to have five key attributes: warm concern for and acceptance of others; openness and attunement to the other's experiential reality; a grasp of what the other needs for his or her essential flourishing; an ability to facilitate the realisation of such needs in the right manner and at the right time; and an authentic presence. This combination of concern, empathy, prescience, facilitation and genuineness is, I believe, the spiritual heritage of mankind. . . . What makes the effective helper is, then, an interaction between inner grace, character and cultural influence. Inner grace is a spiritual endowment and potential, which everyone has. Character is what persons make of themselves in the light of this endowment and in response to their culture."

I picked this up on my BlackBerry, while on the train on the way to the briefing. Having read it, I decided to ditch the presentation I had prepared, and with hardly an hour to go before my talk, redrafted the whole thing, putting this text onto PowerPoint slides at double-quick time. This passage just seemed so apposite to the theme of the day and particularly the approach I was taking, that would help set the tone for the whole event. I spoke for half an hour, and gave a very different sort of presentation from the one I thought I would; it was also different from the presentations that followed, mine being the only one that presented a perspective from inside the faith communities. Two things struck me in particular, having helped organise the focus groups in Leicester and having taken part in two of them myself. One was how people within the faith communities who routinely offer services that the rest of the world consider to be "volunteering" don't see it that way themselves - it's just how they live and what they do (sometimes it's what is expected of them) individually or collectively. The other was how some belief systems embrace (or even institutionalise) service voluntarily offered and practised as "seva" or something along those lines. I made reference to these two aspects in my presentation. I'd been looking for a way to connect these two approaches that would allow them to be united without flattening out their differences; the notion of the Helping Grace allowed me to do that.