In the sixtieth anniversary year of the publication of William Beveridge’s Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance, a symposium was held in November at the Australian High Commission to re-evaluate the ideas contained in the report and reassess its impact on the UK and other countries in the British World. The symposium was co-convened Georgina Brewis and Pat Starkey of the Voluntary Action History Society in partnership with Frank Bongiorno at the Menzies Centre at King’s College London and Melanie Oppenheimer from the University of Western Sydney.
Jose Harris and Nicholas Deakin began the two-day event with papers on William Beveridge and the state. Baroness Julia Neuberger talked to the symposium about her role as the UK Prime Minister’s Champion on Volunteering as part of the ongoing legacy of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering. Dan Weinbren then considered Beveridge and the friendly societies. Two PhD students – Georgina Brewis and Cynthnia Messeleka-Boyer – spoke on their new research in a session chaired by Angela Ellis Paine. Frank Prochaska and Pat Thane presented rather different takes on voluntary action in Britain since the Second World War.
On day two Margaret Tennant, Jill Roe, Peter Elson, Melanie Oppenheimer and Paul Smyth addressed Beveridge’s legacy and post-war voluntary action in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Karl Wilding and Ann Blackmore from NCVO ended the conference with a look at government-voluntary sector relations in contemporary Britain.
An edited collection of papers from the symposium Beveridge and Voluntary Action in Britain and the wider British World, edited by Melanie Oppenheimer and Nicholas Deakin was published by Manchester University Press in 2011.
