A journey from A to B - Aston to Bloomsbury - March 2010

A journey from A to B – Aston to Bloomsbury

 
Like the organisations it studies and supports, IVAR is itself a part of the ‘voluntary sector’ and shares many of the sector’s distinctive features.  Amongst those features is a foundation story which goes along the lines: a couple of people with complementary skills and experience identified an unmet need and developed together a vision about how they could meet that need. 
 
In the IVAR case, one of the founders was me. In 2000 I was Professor of Voluntary Sector Organisation at Aston University in Birmingham. The other founder was Ben Cairns. In 2000 he was an experienced third sector practitioner who had also developed a taste for practically-applicable theory and participatory forms of research while studying voluntary sector management with me at the LSE. The need we identified was for voluntary sector practitioners to have access to ‘usable theory’ and to research findings which could help them respond to the challenges they faced. Our proposed response was to establish a university-based unit with the explicit aim of bridging the traditional theory/practice divide.
 
Aston Business School provided us with a supportive intellectual and institutional environment in which to implement our vision. We called our fledgling unit the Aston Centre for Voluntary Action Research (ACVAR) to emphasise our twin interests in responding to challenges of voluntary sector practice and in using action research approaches. An empathetic charitable foundation offered pump-priming funding. 
 
Third sector organisations quickly found us. In those early days we were asked to help with a range of front-line and emergent practice areas issues including strategic reviews; mergers and collaborations; developing a Regional Faith Forum; volunteering in minority ethnic communities; church-sponsored regeneration projects; the development of local compacts; performance assessment; and the implementation of governmental policies to ‘build the capacity’ of third sector organisations. Our approach, of working collaboratively with our research partners, and our ability to apply academic theory to help resolve problems of third sector practice was what drew voluntary organisations to our door.
 
Again reflecting a common pattern in the voluntary sector, we grew rapidly by taking on associates and staff to help us. These welcome additions to our team had to be trained and managed and, at the same time, we needed to pay attention to our relationship with the university. It provided our institutional framework and welcomed our innovations but did not always quite understand our efforts to be simultaneously academically excellent and practice-relevant. 
 
With the help of some external practitioner and academic advisers, we came to realise that we ourselves needed to engage in a strategic review; to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of our fledgling Centre and to consider the opportunities and threats in its organisational environment. A period of reflection and exploration led us to begin a gradual process of ‘floating off’ from the university that had supported our early years.
 
So IVAR (the Institute for Voluntary Action Research) was established as an independent educational charity. Ben Cairns became the Director of IVAR and I became its Academic Adviser. A group of academic and practitioner colleagues quickly formed themselves into a formidable governing body – supportive but also firm about the need for us to pay explicit attention to issues of quality control, accountability, succession, funding and ethics, now that we were a truly free-standing voluntary organisation. At the same time, we entered into a partnership with Birkbeck, University of London; a relationship which has proved to be mutually beneficial, with our jointly run seminars being well attended by practitioners, policy-makers and academics alike.
 
Ben and I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the many people and organisations who have given us advice and support over the last ten years.   Those who encounter IVAR for the first time now and see its active board, its wide range of funders and research partners and its expanding group of enthusiastic staff and associates, could be forgiven for seeing it as just another well-established charitable organisation. Yet we know that IVAR’s reputation and strengths have been built on the support of many people who have provided funding, volunteer time, advice and collegiate debate over the last ten years.
 
There are big challenges ahead of course. Again we have in common with others in the voluntary sector a constant preoccupation with funding. And there is an ongoing struggle to find ways of combining both academic excellence and practitioner relevance within a single organisation. But with the continued involvement of our colleagues, we can look forward with confidence to the next ten years of development.
 
Margaret Harris
March 2010