By Matthew Lipson
As a researcher in a multinational technology company it is not obvious how I ended up cold calling politicians to discuss the informal economy.
My motivation for volunteering was to balance my corporate day job by contributing towards a worthwhile cause in my spare time. Ideally, I was looking for a place with a pioneering spirit that was using research to make tangible improvements to peoples’ everyday lives and the government policies that affect them.
Following the recommendations of inspirational friends at Fair Finance and London Councils I looked at Community Links‘ work addressing the causes and consequences of social exclusion and sent the volunteer coordinator, Trishna Shah a rather hopeful email.
Of course most charities are unable to respond quickly to off-beat offers of intangible help as they are very focused on achieving their core goal. However, as I discovered Community Links is no normal charity. It has a volunteering team which, amongst other things, can utilise just such random opportunities. They put me in touch with linksUK which is the national team of Community Links; they harnesses local knowledge to enhance public service delivery and influence national policy.
Soon enough Aaron Barbour, the linksUK Research and Policy Manager was outlining four fascinating projects to which I could contribute.
This summary report explains what was learnt in just one of them.
Download the summary report here.
If you’d like to volunteer or be an intern with linksUK please do get in touch
