Voluntary Sector Studies Network

The annual  NCVO/VSSN Researching the Voluntary Sector Conference will be held 10-11th September 2012 at the University of Birmingham.  This call for papers is an open invitation to all researchers working on or with the sector.

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An Annual Report detailing VSSN's activities and finances to the year to 31st July 2011 is now available here.  This was presented to the VSSN AGM held during the December Day Conference.  You can find the agenda and papers here.  The new Steering Group was also announced at the meeting.  Information about the group and their roles can be found here.

The latest issue of Voluntary Sector Review, volume 2 number 3, has just been published. The table of contents is available here. Links to the abstracts will shortly be available here.

A print copy of VSR is a membership benefit of VSSN (information about joining can be found here).

For information about submitting an article to VSR and about book reviews see our journal pages.

VSSN is grateful to The Policy Press for the enthusiasm and expertise they have brought to this venture, and the resources they are devoting to making it a success.

The next day conference will be held on Wednesday May 23rd 2012 at the University of Birmingham.  A call for abstracts is now open and will close on January 24th 2012.  More details here.

A report of our day conference held on 1st December 2011 in Southampton is available here.  The report also contains links to the presentations (just click on the relevant title).  Thanks to the presenters, our hosts and all those who attended for making this an interesting and enjoyable day.

WCVA reports back on the last VSSN Day Conference held in Milton Keynes and looks at the relevance of the presentations for the Welsh context.

The WCVA article focuses more specifically on two of the papers presented at the event: Martha Caddell and Rosemarie Mcilhwan's paper on internships and Nick Ockenden, Joanna Stuart and Matthew Hill's paper on volunteer management. The full text of the article can be viewed on WCVA's website.

Additional information on this event is available here.

VSSN has today finally switched off its old website that has relied on last century's technology for a whole seven years.

We've been working on a new site for a while and this has now gone live. This follows an alpha testing phase conducted on an internal basis recently. Though we have some known issues with the current version, we have now done a "soft launch" and released the site to the public and members for beta testing.

We hope you like the new site!

More information is as follows:-

• Site status including known issues
• Form for you to submit your feedback/comments/observations/bug notifications... please!
• About our site - more details on our "VSSN 2" web project

The About our site page also offers some history: by coincidence, it's exactly seven years to the day that we launched our first generation website, ie 19/07/04...

Julie Charlesworth who organised the last Day Conference with Chris Cornforth at the Open University Business School briefly reports back. Julie's report and the paper abstracts are available here.