Welcome to our first newsletter. Every quarter this newsletter will bring you all the latest news about the Pathways through Participation project. In this first edition, we introduce the project and the team, and let you know what we have been up to since the project began in April 2009.

Project overview
The project is designed to explore how and why people get involved and stay involved in different forms of participation in their communities. All too often, studies on participation look at a particular form of participation at a particular time and in a particular place. This project seeks to develop a more holistic understanding of participation and address a gap in knowledge on how people’s motivations and patterns of participation emerge and develop over time. It also aims to influence policy and practice to improve people's experience of participation.

It will look at participation in a very broad sense and consider the act of taking part in a wide range of social or civic activities, including:

fundraising                                 boycotting a product
voting                                         being a school governor
campaigning                               volunteering for a charity
signing a petition                        responding to a local council consultation
helping out in a local fete           joining a community group

The project is a qualitative research project that will involve a series of in-depth interviews with individuals in three localities (one rural area; one suburban and one inner city). Participatory workshops in each area will then explore what research findings mean in practice for voluntary and community organisations, public service providers and policy-makers and how they might translate into action.

Key research questions
The research aims to examine the following questions:

• How and why does participation begin and continue?
• Can trends and patterns of participation (in terms of activity and intensity) be identified over time?
• What connection if any is there between participation in different forms of activism and what triggers movement between these categories?
• How can public service providers, policy-makers and voluntary and community organisations enable and encourage a wide range of individuals and communities to participate?

At Involve

• Simon Burall is Director of Involve as well as the Chair of Democratic Audit and an Ambassador for WWF UK. Before moving to Involve he was a Research Fellow at ODI. Prior to this he was the Executive Director of the One World Trust.
• Eddie Cowling is the full-time Involve researcher for the project. He previously worked as an Assistant Researcher for the Centre for Sustainable Communities at Kingston University. His personal research interests are the privatisation of public space, education for sustainable development and the barriers to citizen governance.
• Diane Warburton is a founder and board member of Involve. She is an independent researcher, writer and evaluator of public, stakeholder and community participation, working through Shared Practice and as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Brighton.

At IVR

• Angela Ellis Paine is Director of IVR. With over ten years of experience in researching volunteering and participation, Angela has undertaken numerous research projects on different aspects of volunteering. She has also been involved in evaluations of national and international volunteering initiatives.
• Nina Nissen is the full-time IVR researcher for the project. She has both national and international research experience. Her research interests focus on qualitative research methods, gender issues and research ethics, and on the interplay between ways of knowing about the social world and the re/production of personal and social change.

At NCVO

• Ellie Brodie is the full-time NCVO researcher for the project. She has an MA in Research Methods and International Politics and, before taking up her current role at NCVO, was an Associate Fellow for the Office for Public Management (OPM), a not-for-profit research consultancy.
• Véronique Jochum is Research Manager at NCVO and manages the project. She leads the NCVO research team’s work in the area of citizen engagement and voluntary action. Her most recent publications include: Faith and voluntary action (2007) and The Voluntary Sector Strategic Analysis (2008).
• Karl Wilding leads NCVO’s research function. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Charity Effectiveness, City University, where he helped set up the Centre for Giving and Philanthropy, and is a trustee of St Albans CVS.

Research approach
Literature review
Fieldwork area selection

Research approach
The team has been working initially to refine the project's research approach, including making it more participatory. We have decided to carry out a series of activity mapping sessions in each area drawing on the local knowledge, understanding and interpretation of the research participants, and are also considering the use of photos and timelines to best capture people’s experiences of participation.

Literature review
The research officers are now completing a literature review for the project to help us develop an analytical framework of participation. The full literature review will be available to download on our website in November. The review examines four main issues:

• What is participation?
• How has participation developed over that last 10-20 years?
• Who participates, and why do some people participate and others do not?
• How do some people get involved in and move through different episodes of and forms of participation?

Fieldwork area selection
Each research officer will be working in a different location. They are currently in the process of putting together a long list of nine potential areas, based on considerations such as extent of participation in the area already and practical concerns such as accessibility by public transport. The final selection of areas will be completed by end of September and a local stakeholder group will be recruited to support and strengthen the research in each locality.

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Forthcoming website
NCVO/VSSN conference
Advisory group meeting

Forthcoming website
The project is soon to have its own website. It is still under construction at the moment, but it will be available later in September. In the meantime, do have a look at our holding page: http://pathwaysthroughparticipation.org.uk/

NCVO/VSSN Research Conference
The project team attended the NCVO/VSSN research conference on 7-8 September 2009 at Warwick University. Eddie presented a paper on participatory mapping at the New Researchers' session and Véronique chaired a panel discussion on the benefits and limits of participatory research methods.

Advisory group meeting
Our next advisory group meeting will take place at NCVO on 15 September 2009. The full list of advisory group members will be available on the website later in September.

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The research officers have been busy writing the literature review. These are some of the articles, books and reports they found particularly enlightening and wanted to share with you:

• Beetham, D. et al (2008) Power and participation in modern Britain. A literature review by Democratic Audit. Building on the work of the Power Inquiry by bringing together theories of power with practices of participation, this review identifies ‘handles of power’ that citizens can make use of and offers some useful recommendations to the government about their current policies on participation.

• Cornwall, A. (2008) Democratising engagement - what the UK can learn from international experience. Demos. This pamphlet is a real gem. It shines with rich content, deep engagement and profound commitment to the subject.

• Keaney, E. and Rogers, B. (2006) A Citizen’s Duty: Voter inequality and the case for compulsory turnout. Institute for Public Policy Research. A fascinating report looking at electoral inequality and turnout decline in the UK. The authors offer an accessible and compelling case for compulsory turnout as a way of stimulating wider political engagement.

• Rochester, R. (2006) Making sense of volunteering: a literature review. The Commission on the Future of Volunteering .This overview of both informal and formal volunteering from the guru of volunteering research is not only comprehensive but really accessible. It is broken down into lots of sub-sections making it easy to navigate, and is a pleasure to read. It really does ‘make sense of volunteering’!

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If you would like more information on the project, please contact:
Ellie Brodie - ellie.brodie@ncvo-vol.org.uk or 020 7520 2548
Eddie Cowling - eddie@involve.org.uk or 020 7920 6480
Nina Nissen - nina.nissen@volunteeringengland.org.uk or 020 7520 8926

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