News Insight: Joint working - Volunteer helpers under dire threat

But the co-ordinators that recruit, train and help these volunteers to support struggling families are now at the mercy of local authority spending cuts. Ross Watson investigates.

Home-Start Blackburn with Darwen has been running for almost 20 years, providing volunteer support to struggling families with pre-school-age children. Annie Akhtar, one of the co-ordinators who oversees the scheme, says managing the programme efficiently is essential in order to keep the volunteers free to focus on those families in need: "We recruit volunteers, deliver their training and attend child protection meetings with other agencies," she says. "We don't want volunteers to concentrate on anything other than supporting families."

Maintaining the charity's existing levels of funding has proved difficult. Three quarters of its money comes from the local authority, but this will disappear from October. The group may have access to new local authority funding streams in April 2011, but must survive until then. Akhtar and her colleagues have already agreed to take a cut in pay and hours, but the charity only has enough money to last another three months.

Big society vision

"We have four co-ordinators and manage 60 volunteers among us," she says. "Since April we have supported around 100 families. If Home-Start goes there will be no one to manage that support."

Small, community-based charities are facing a similar predicament up and down the country as local authorities withdraw funding. Prime Minister David Cameron has heralded his vision for a big society, where community members are empowered to deliver public services themselves. Now though, there is a growing concern that this vision will be undermined as the capacity of local charities - which often recruit, train and support volunteering community members - is wiped out.

Kay Bews, chief executive of Home-Start UK, the national body representing all local Home-Start charities, says at least seven other local Home-Start centres face closure. "Getting volunteers in, preparing them and managing them is essential to the safety and security of our volunteers and the families they support," she says. "We require every local Home-Start volunteer to go on a 40-hour preparation course. We need to understand their motivation, test out their boundaries and their attitudes. Careful matching of a volunteer's skills to a family's needs is essential."

Bews argues that Cameron's big society will not be free, but it can be cost-effective. A local Home-Start organisation has basic running costs of around £70,000 a year. This pays for a co-ordinator and administrative support. With one co-ordinator the charity will recruit and train around 30 volunteers, who between them support around 37 families, helping 74 children on average in the process (see chart).

As well as developing its own volunteering projects, the charity Timebank has supported a number of other charities, including Home-Start UK, with national recruitment drives. "We started off as a campaign group, but what we realised quite quickly is you can tell people volunteering is great but making it happen is not as easy," says chief executive Helen Walker. "There are a lot of people who want to volunteer but they need help. They don't know where to start or who to talk to."

Help for volunteers needed

Marc Hornby, executive director of development at School Home Support (SHS), another nationally run network of small local charities, is also worried that organisations delivering valuable early intervention in their areas are suffering.

Charity workers from SHS are based in schools, helping disengaged parents to access adult education with a view to volunteering in their school or community. But many of those local schemes receive funding from the government's Working Neighbourhoods Fund, which will be cut by £50m later this year. Hornby claims a number of SHS workers are now anxious over the future of their valued service.

"Big society is about empowering people to help themselves but how can they if they face domestic violence each day or if they're scraping by on benefits and only just managing to feed and clothe their children," he says. "We need organisations like ourselves with experience of building relationships and helping people to volunteer."

Responding to the concerns, a Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: "The voluntary sector is not immune from the need for government to find savings, however painful some of those choices, and we have asked for the help of the sector in identifying how this is best done".