The Voluntary Sector: The ‘Traditional’—And the New

The government’s declared ‘vision’ for the voluntary youth sector was to locate it within its August 2018 civil society policy strategy. Though this was not fully realised, two relatively new youth-focused programmes—the National Citizens Service and OnSide—did attract significant state funding. However, the former was still available only to 16- and 17-year-olds, while the latter posed some significant questions from an open youth work perspective. One, for example, was how far its Youth Zones across the country were delivering open youth work to their ‘thousands’ of users; another was whether small neighbourhood-based facilities focused on this practice would be able to compete for the still limited state resources available with high profile online funding bids promising large state-of-the-art buildings.