Introduction

As we noted in Chapter Five, (formal) voluntary organisations are often established to serve the needs of neighbourhoods and communities (of place as well as interest). The spatially targeted nature of their activities has recently been the focus of attention by geographers and sociologists (such as Milligan and Fyfe, 2004, 2005; Sampson et al, 2005). This is because the community/neighbourhood has re-emerged in both policy and academic circles as an important setting for many of the processes that supposedly shape social identity and life chances, including local social relations, social cohesion and social capital (Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Galster, 2001). But ‘community’ – in common with volunteering – is not a simple descriptive word but one with a shifting and disputed meaning (Byrne, 1999; Galster, 2001; Sprigings and Allen, 2005). Subjectively, areas, neighbourhood and community mean different things to different people at different times; each individual's activities, networks and travel patterns shape their concept of neighbourhood and community (Massey, 1994).

Since the 1990s, policy measures in the UK (as elsewhere) have sought to address the contextual effects of neighbourhood; principally, the social consequences of an increasing concentration of disadvantaged people (Amin, 2005; Bauld et al, 2005) and ‘the part that place and space play in exclusion’ (Lee, 1999, p 483). Voluntary work is seen as contributing to community/neighbourhood regeneration through developing social capital (Putnam, 2000; Forrest and Kearns, 2001). In this chapter, we explore the role that volunteering plays as an articulation of caring communities – looking at the work of volunteers and voluntary organisations by presenting a case study of volunteering in a place-based community – Brightville. The case study community of Brightville has been beset by economic deprivation, but has retained a strong sense of community. After this brief introduction, the chapter is divided into four further sections.