Pathways through participation

Pathways through participation: what creates and sustains active citizenship?

 This is a joint research project led by NCVO in partnership with the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR) and Involve. It is funded by the Big Lottery Fund through its research programme and started 2.5 year project at the beginning of April 2009.

The final report was launched on 13 September. The report explores how and why people get involved and stay involved in different forms of participation in their communities. It looks at the following questions:

• How and why does participation begin, and continue?
• Can trends and patterns of participation be identified over people's lifetime?
• What connections, if any, are there between different forms of participation and what triggers movement between them? 

Read the final report or the summary report.

More information

For more information have a look at the Pathways through participation website or email Veronique Jochum, NCVO Research Manager or Ellie Brodie, NCVO Research Development Officer.

The Pathways through Participation project has published a number of other outputs, including:

• Understanding participation: a literature review
• Briefing paper 1: What is participation
• Briefing paper 2: What are the drivers of participation?
• Briefing paper 3: Who participates?
• Briefing paper 4: Why participate?
• Situated practice: Initial reflections on the organisation of participation
• Using participatory mapping to explore participation in three communities
• Strengthening participation: Learning from participants 

All these documents can be found here. 

Learning events briefing papers

The Pathways through Participation project looks at participation in a very broad sense and considers the act of taking part in a wide range of social, public and individual activities including volunteering, giving money, voting or signing a petition. Following the launch of the project’s final report, three learning events took place in Autumn 2011 to highlight the implications of the research findings from the report for volunteering, local engagement and policy. At these learning events the following briefing papers were launched:

• Informing and influencing policy (PDF 441KB)
• Local engagement in democracy (PDF 436KB)
• Volunteering as a participation pathway (PDF 359KB)

For more information about Pathways through Participation, visit their website.