I spend much of my available time involved with voluntary organisations, mainly concerned with disability and service user issues. I've even had the good luck to have been involved in setting up groups.
We have always started with the best of intentions: to change things or to influence change for disabled and vulnerable people. Why should we allow politicians and professionals to make decisions about our lives without listening to our points of view? Why shouldn't we campaign to reduce our exclusion from what is our society too? Why, after all, should we rely on other people to look out for our human rights?
When a group of people share this kind of passion and feel that they can make a difference to the existing order there is a sense of power, a sense of optimism that is hard to match. You could say that this energy comes from reactions to injustice, even oppression.
The challenges start as soon as the group forms. How does it channel all that energy, all that passion, into effective action? If the group is to be something more than a talking shop, we need structured debate, a plan of action, resources, communication with decision-makers, ways of publicising our cause, division of responsibility - in short, organisation.
All this takes time and energy. To be able to raise funds we have to show that we can use money responsibly and effectively. To do this, whether it is funding from the National Lottery or service level agreements with local authorities and primary care trusts, the organisation needs a constitution, policies about formal decision-making, discrimination and financial administration.
And this becomes a problem: when people have little time or energy to spare, precisely because of their conditions or their age, it's difficult to remain motivated. When you seem to spend much of their scarce resources on administration, it's easy to think "this is not what I joined up for".
I'm aware that many readers of this magazine are involved with voluntary organisations: does anybody out there know how to work them?
