For the Friends Voices project, Steve Moreton has had two key roles. His first role was to attend interviews and organise their recording and other logistics. Following the interviews, Steves other role was to review their key themes so that they could be organised on the Friends Voices website.
Steve’s main role at Attend involves creating training and development programmes tailored towards the voluntary sector and undertaking research to create frameworks to evaluate the impact of Attend’s work and support project development. Steve said because his role at Attend and work on the Friends Voices project are similar, helping with the project has also affected his other work. He said capturing the Friends stories and identifying key themes throughout the histories of the groups has helped him to think more insightfully about current volunteering initiatives.
A unique aspect of the Friends Voices project is that interviews have been held in all sorts of settings. Whether it was a hospital, a pub, a lounge or somebody’s home could sometimes make a difference in the interview itself.
When conducting interviews in Friends’ homes, Steve said it seemed that the interviewees often felt more responsibility as a host than they may have felt had they been in a hospital. Steve said it is also definitely important to think about how the context of an interview may change its contents. For example, in their own homes the interviewees may have spent more time talking about their friends in the group rather than the volunteering activities themselves because they are outside of the volunteering setting. In comparison, in a hospital the focus may be more on the experience of volunteering because the interviewees are in the place where they do these activities.
Steve said the Friends Voices project is an essential initiative to highlight how volunteering in the health sector has existed throughout the history of the NHS and before. He said during interviews, in addition to recording, he spent a lot of time listening to interviewees and considering how the histories of Friends groups are tied together and what elements have allowed them to persist since the NHS was started in 1948.
“We’re helping fit the pieces of the jigsaw together because the Friends groups touch on so many different things: fundraising, volunteering, the things they raise money for, the different aspects of clinical practice they support.”
Despite their long history, Steve said it’s also important to consider that in 1948 there were 1500 Friends and now there are 500, a number that decreases each year. He said his hope with this project is to evaluate the journey of the Friends groups so that they do not disappear without a passing thought in the coming decades. Historically, Steve said Friends groups have been undervalued, so it is important that the project combats this.
“If we don’t learn, we will have lost something. We’ve got some years now to make sure we capture what the important ingredient is among this journey, and it may be in 2050 the answer is Friends groups are not the answer, but at least we’ll know because we made good decisions not because we’ve accidentally lost them because we didn’t look after them,” Steve said.
As healthcare continues to evolve and change, Steve said it is likely Friends groups will as well and will remain as important as they’ve ever been in 2050 and beyond.
“Volunteering in health precedes the NHS, by hundreds of years. It goes to the heart of the best of human motivations and a healthy functioning society. We must shine the light on these early days of the NHS and identify what made this work then, and how best to make this work in a 21st century NHS,” Steve said.
One of the most important threads Steve picked up on through this process is that healthcare has been and should be for the people. In its original Constitution, Steve said the NHS was defined as belonging to the people and it is so important not to forget that. “When the NHS finishes, the people will still be there doing healthcare,” he said.
Although he has worked with volunteers for 25 years, Steve said through this project he was able to see a different side of their work. He said he was once again reminded how impressive the Friends can be.
Steve described the Friends as “capable and well-networked” and said he was particularly struck by the fact that “a genuine volunteering contribution can start at the age of 80.” For Steve, the difference between interacting with the Friends in the context of this project, is that he was able to see how the thread of all of the Friends groups’ individual projects and actions tie together and the intentionality behind where they focus their efforts.
“What you get from the thread of the story is that these are not people just doing things, they’re people working out what is the right thing to do,” Steve said.
One thing that sets Friends groups apart from other kinds of volunteering is that they integrate their volunteering work into every aspect of their lives. In many ways, it becomes who they are rather than just something that they do.
“They generate an opportunity for people to live their volunteering rather than do their volunteering. The social networks and volunteering become intertwined,” Steve said.