VSO is cutting admin costs by a third, swallowing a 12 per cent drop in its core DfID grant over the next three years, yet still aiming for expansion. Tania Mason explains how.

Ask the average man in the street what VSO does, and you’ll probably get the response that it “sends people overseas to volunteer in developing countries” or something similar. While this is true, the explanation doesn’t really capture the point of VSO’s work, its charitable aim: to improve people’s lives by alleviating poverty.

Marg Mayne, VSO’s chief executive, who joined in April 2009, admits there is something of a disjoint between VSO’s mission and what the public perceives it to be.  

“Our mission is to fight poverty,” she says. “We do it through people but our mission is not to send people overseas or find volunteering opportunities for people, it’s to fight poverty through the best person being there.”

So the charity’s four-year strategy, People First, aims to effect a “very distinctive organisational shift” to focus on the end result of tackling poverty.  Mayne explains:  “VSO is famous for sending British people overseas but actually what we’ve done in our strategy is broaden our approach.

“For the last few years we’ve been trialling a number of different kinds of volunteering and now we are mainstreaming these and bringing them up to be part of our overall approach to development and fighting poverty.

“That includes national volunteering, for instance encouraging Ghanaians to volunteer in Ghana, but also diaspora, people who live and work in the UK but want to contribute something back to their heritage.” Other recent innovations include the Polvol programme, where MPs volunteer abroad for a few days at a time; short-term placements which last three months rather than the traditional two years, and knowledge-sharing exchanges that often lead to ongoing mentoring relationships.

“So you don’t always have to pack a suitcase, get in a plane and leave your life behind for two years,” says Mayne. “There are different ways you can help. What that means is, we are moving away from saying ‘our target is to send x number of volunteers each year’ to saying ‘our target is to improve the quality of lives of millions of people’. And we are making a very distinctive organisational shift towards that impact and outcome.”