I felt fortunate at the end of last month to join a group of VSO volunteers who were at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) to learn about systemic action research, and how they will be able to apply this methodology to VSO’s Valuing Volunteering project.

You may remember Violeta Vajda blogging about this training in February when the first volunteers (Lizzie Hacker and Jody Aked) were trained in systemic action research. Since then the final volunteers have been recruited, and now Simon Lewis, Sandy Pickens, Val Clamonte and Lisa Mok have received the same detailed training.  They'll be spending two years as volunteer researchers, looking into the impact of volunteering on poverty.

The course provided the researchers with the theoretical, ethical and practical framework for systemic action research. Using homelessness in Brighton as a practice research topic, the volunteers had the chance to see how this methodology works. The information gathered was then mapped out, which enabled key underlying issues to surface.

Three of the volunteers will be in Asia (Nepal,the Philippines, China) and three will be in Africa (Kenya, Mozambique, Ghana), which will give a real breadth and validity to the research. Spending the week together ensured the volunteers came together as a team and will be able to support each other virtually in their placements.

The project feels really essential for VSO and for other volunteering organisations – in fact it feels amazing that it hasn’t already happened! The research will tackle our assumptions about volunteering. It's exciting that VSO is being brave and undertaking a piece of research that is not wholly about monitoring and evaluation or advocacy or marketing, but is about truly trying to understand the nature of our main intervention – volunteering.

Magnus Slingsby, VSO's federation support officer, is showing his solidarity this week with the world’s poorest, by living on £1 a day for five days. In this week’s blog, Magnus tells us why he and thousands of others around the world are living below the poverty line.

It’s now day 3 of my Live Below the Line challenge (£1 per day on food and drink for five days) and the lack of caffeine is really starting to kick in - I found myself dreaming about coffee last night (nice big steamy Americano  in case you were wondering). Delicious as baked beans and spaghetti are, there’s a limit to how much of it you can eat, before you get profoundly sick of it.

But the point of the challenge is not to starve yourself for a week. In the days of bags of pasta for 30p, feeding yourself on £1 a day isn’t as crazy as it might seem. It’s about making you think about everything you’re eating. It's about worrying how much everything costs and if you can afford it. And it's about knowing how it feels to have to plan every meal to make the most of what you have.

According to www.livebelowtheline.com the World Bank defines the international extreme poverty line as the equivalent of $1.25 per day. It estimates that 1.4 billion people around the world have to live on that amount.  And that’s not just for food – that’s for everything.

So while I sit there dreaming of flat whites and macchiatos, I ought to remember that my £1 a day is not also paying for the electricity powering the lights and computer I’m writing this on. I should also remember that my government isn’t riddled with corruption, that I can expect fair treatment from the police, and there’s a hospital two miles down the road where I can go if  I'm ill.

£1 a day for food and drink? I don’t know how lucky I am.

Magnus Slingsby
Federation Support Officer, VSO International

You can sponsor Magnus by visiting his donation page https://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/magnus

Steve Lewis was recently visiting the VSO programme in India. For this week’s blog we have invited one or our partners, Vedika Jiandani,  from the national volunteering programme in India to write for us.

I work for Sweccha, which is a youth-run and youth-focused organisation that provides a platform for people to ‘be the change’ themselves. We strive to inspire action by using awareness, communication and advocacy as primary tools. We focus on three areas – environment and education, youth and civil society, and active citizenship.

In 2004, the Indian government promised to allocate 6% of the GDP to education and 3% to health by 2009, but is yet to fulfil its promise. Sweccha is a part of the Nine is Mine children’s advocacy campaign that attempts to provide children with opportunities to engage with all levels of governance and keep elected representatives accountable to their promises of ending poverty and social exclusion in India. It wishes to see the fulfilment of the UN Millennium Declaration, which attempts to make poverty history by 2015. The campaign is led by the Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (‘Don’t break your promise’) campaign and is supported by several NGOs.

Nine is Mine allows unprivileged children to stand up and speak for themselves in front of the entire nation. Nine is Mine is not a sensatisationalist or a sentimental outreach programme. It’s an advocacy campaign that puts children at the heart of endeavours to realise a more equal and inclusive India.

In November 2011 as part of the Nau Kadam (Nine Steps) Express, over 300 children from different states travelled to meet children and government representatives all over the country before they gathered in Delhi. In February this year, over 600 children took part in a public day rally in Delhi to pressurise the government before the presentation of its annual budget. VSO volunteers placed with Sweccha supported this event and helped to organise it. While the 2012 budget did bring an increase in allocation for education, the target of 9% is yet to be achieved.

Sweccha and Nine is Mine will continue to campaign for change. While children may not be able to vote they have voices that can be stronger than adults’ votes.

Show your support by visiting the Nine is Mine page on Facebook.

Vedika Jiandani
Youth Action Supervisor at Swecchass