Voluntary Sector

Philanthropy, the use of private assets for public good, has been much criticized in recent years. Rhodri Davies, drawing on his deep knowledge of the past and present landscape of philanthropy, examines pressing questions that philanthropy must tackle if it is to be equal to the challenges of the 21st century.

What Have Charities Ever Done for Us? uses case studies and interviews to illustrate how charities support people and communities, foster heritage and culture and pioneer responses to crucial social, ethical and environmental questions.

Offering a much-needed analysis of the overlooked crisis of food poverty in Ireland, this book brings together the complex picture emerging from interviews with users of food aid, explores the international landscape of food poverty and what action should be taken.

During the consolidation of the Welfare State in the 1940s, and its reshaping in the 2010s, the boundaries between the state, voluntary action, the family and the market were called into question. This book explores the impact of these ‘transformational moments’ on the role, position and contribution of voluntary action to social welfare.

This edited collection explores areas such as social enterprise, capacity building, volunteering and social value, and charts the historical development of the state-third sector relationship, reviewing the major debates and controversies accompanying recent shifts in that relationship.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This interdisciplinary volume explores how English commercial, co-operative and charity retailing were shaped by and in turn influenced their social and political environments, from the local and the global, between the late-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.

Moving beyond theoretical notions of ‘resilience’ this is the first book to offer a conceptual and empirical approach to exploring and comparing the process of resilience across service ‘hubs’ in three complex but different global inner-city regions: London, Los Angeles and Sydney.

With case studies from around the world, this accessible book explores the methodological complexities of research into voluntary action, charitable behaviour and participation in voluntary organisations.

Avoiding both over-simplification and jargon-riddled complexity, this book is an invaluable, straightforward guide to participatory research for you and your fellow practitioners working with community groups and organisations.

This book is a step toward curating our existing knowledge in the emerging field of ‘disaster philanthropy’. It aims to build a robust base for future research, practice and public policy, whilst recognising that philanthropic responses to disasters are complex, conditional and subject to change.

Based on decades of research, this book explores global social change processes through the concepts of social change organisations (SCOs) and social change makers (SCMs) – the individuals working within and alongside SCOs.

This is the first empirically-grounded and theorised account of the identity, characteristics and motivation of fundraisers in the UK. Based on original data collected during a 3-year study of over 1,200 fundraisers, the book argues that it is not possible to understand charitable giving without accounting for the role of fundraising.