“ ... others were seeing it, ‘Why are you giving all this to the community and not
being paid?’ So I must be the middle-class do-gooder because I didn’t have to
work and I was old and I’ve got the grey hair and so it was the perception.
What I’ve then turned around is people’s perception that I did it because I
cared for the community and I’m in a very lucky position that I had the time to
do it. But what’s really good is there’s a lot more people now that are thinking,
well yes, volunteering is fantastic. It’s a learning opportunity, the skills are
recognised, the value, and now they’re doing a lot more and they’re moving
on. ”
Juliet’s personal development has brought about increased self-confidence and the
ability to make choices. These manifest themselves in her enhanced autonomy and the
confidence to fashion her own combination of domestic, paid and voluntary activity.
But the interrelationships go further. She speaks of being able to think through her
own values and goals. These are quintessentially personal outcomes, but ones that are
also enabling her to plan a career. She exemplifies the way in which volunteering is
both a learning process itself and enables people to move on to other recognised
activities. Moreover her commitment to the community has combined with her
learning on the community regeneration course to enable her to offer constructive
critiques of the policies of the local council (although we cannot independently check
on the quality or efficacy of these):
Juliet: “ Well, it was just the fact that you could solve people’s problems. We
really got ourselves so geared up that we could go off for an hour and sort out
the Borough Council and it was a real good learning curve to say that we’d got
those skills and hadn’t realised. To actually have a problem there and with all
the experience we’ve had through the voluntary sector is to say yes, we know,
because it wasn’t a blank sheet. If we’d sat there and thought ‘how do we know
that?’ But it’s because we’re working in a community and we could relate to it.
You then thought, yes, we can sort it out. ”
Interviewer: “And is it important to get a certificate at the end of it? ”
Juliet: “ I think it is for work purposes . ”
The learning has its costs. She recalls leaving the counselling course every week
crying internally because of the intensity of the personal challenge that it posed to her
values. In her social world she has had to cope with the perceived criticism - however
this may or may not have been articulated - of self-indulgence, of her relatively
privileged position of not having to do paid work. On the other hand, meeting both
these kinds of challenge has been a major factor in her growth.
Juliet offers some trenchant criticism of the pressure to achieve formal academic
qualifications. This was already the case in her initial education, where she was put in
to do ‘A’ levels which she feels were beyond her capabilities at the time. And she
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