Assessing the intrinsic value, and health and well-being benefits, for individual and community, of The Reader Organisation's Volunteer Reader Scheme.

This project will investigate the value to individual and community of the BIG Lottery-funded Volunteer Reader Scheme, which has been developed by award-winning charitable social enterprise, The Reader Organisation (TRO), as part of its pioneering outreach project, Get into Reading (GIR).
TRO's mission is to create environments where personal responses to books are freely shared in reading communities in every area of life. The GIR model is based on small groups (2-12 people), reading aloud together short stories, novels and poetry. GIR is distinguished from conventional reading groups by its shared-reading method: the literature exists live and performatively in the room; regular breaks in the reading encourage participants to reflect on what is being read, and weigh its language and meaning, often in implicit or explicit relation to their own life-experience, while readers always control their own involvement, contributing as much or as little as they choose. GIR currently delivers over 360 groups, in health and social care settings (community centres, libraries, homeless shelters, schools, hospitals, offices, doctors' surgeries, prisons, drug rehab units and care homes) across the UK. The related Volunteer Reader Scheme engages 70 people at risk of, or suffering from, mental health difficulties, isolation or unemployment in a range of volunteering opportunities at all levels of TRO. Volunteer roles operate at the heart of organisation's reading mission and whilst often still being members of reading groups, volunteers are further involved as: Office Assistants, preparing reading resources for reading groups; Reading Group Assistants, working alongside reading group facilitators: Reading Friends, reading weekly, one-to-one, with isolated older people; Reading Group Facilitators, running weekly reading groups in Residential Care Homes or with the elderly. Volunteers are fully trained and supported by TRO staff, receiving regular feedback and recognition of their achievements and are offered potential for role development: reading-group members may become volunteers; volunteers may become interns or apprentices; apprentices may become employees.
This study will build on the existing collaboration between The Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool, and its third sector partner, TRO, to develop innovative, interdisciplinary literary and social scientific methodologies for capturing multi-dimensional components of the reading experience. In two separate yet related and concurrent studies, the research will seek (1) to identify the unique value of shared reading as it is actually experienced by the volunteers, as a representative section of vulnerable and needy individuals, as well as examining the relationship of this intrinsic value to collateral benefits. Through comparison of a GIR group with a built environment discussion group, via analysis of transcribed audio-recordings, this study will test the hypothesis that serious literature has power to create both individual meaningfulness and a strongly interactive small community; (2) to test the efficacy of the movement from, and inter-relation between, reading group-membership and future facilitation of reading groups, by comparing the experience of volunteers as continuing group-members and as developing group-helpers, gaining increased master. Dynamic and diverse volunteer case studies will be compiled, via interviews, observations, questionnaires, and these will be cross-referenced with routine audit data, to establish the connection between intrinsic literary affect and individual mental health and community well-being. This study will also consider how TRO's recent acquisition of an International Reading and Wellbeing centre, Calderstones Park Mansion House, may serve as a future Merseyside hub to create a larger community of volunteers engaged in reader and other-related activities.

1.The immediate primary beneficiaries of this project will be the participants in the Volunteer Reader Scheme. Those directly involved in the research process - through co-construction of questionnaires and collaborative compilation of individual case studies - will thereby be encouraged to engage in deepened and enriched reflection on their volunteer experience as well as develop and contribute in new ways and at new levels of self and community. The production of high quality research also has potential to benefit reader volunteers in the longer term, by providing evaluative evidence for future funding of the volunteer scheme.
2.The project will benefit The Reader Organisation by:
a.Assessing the vital and intrinsic value components of TRO's core cultural activity - shared reading, specifically TRO's pioneering 'Get into Reading' model.
b.Identifying the relationship between the intrinsic value of shared reading and the known and unknown outcomes of TRO in terms of health and well-being, at both individual and community levels.
c.Delivering robust evaluation of a volunteer model which TRO seeks to embed across the organisation's activity, structurally and regionally, thereby influencing TRO's future volunteer strategy.
d.Contributing to the evidence base for securing future commissions of both Get into Reading and the Volunteer Reader Scheme, particularly through the emphasis on recovery and resilience.
3.The benefits to TRO can potentially be extended to TRO's associates in the volunteer venture and beyond:
a.Mersey Care NHS Mental Health Trust is one of TRO's partners in the initiative to transform the Calderstones Park Mansion House into an International Centre for Reading and Wellbeing (preferred leaseholder status for which purpose has recently been granted to TRO by Liverpool City Council). Mersey Care regards the Calderstones Project as an opportunity to redevelop volunteering at all levels of its own service. As one of only three trusts of its kind in the country providing the entire range of specialist mental health services, Mersey Care's volunteering model is likely to influence mental services elsewhere in the UK.
b.Wirral Metropolitan Council have implemented TRO's volunteering programme at Leasowe Library as a pilot project for developing a new model library which, if successful, will be replicated across the borough with the active support of Wirral MBC. This model has potential to shape future national policy re Volunteering and Libraries.
3.The contribution to public services of voluntary organisations and those that support volunteering has never been higher on the national agenda, or more keenly scrutinised and celebrated. Following the recent passing of the Social Value Act (Jan 2013), which legally requires commissioners to take into account social value when taking decisions about how to deliver public services, Sir Stuart Etherington, Chief Executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, described third sector enterprises which involve volunteers as 'frequently the most expert organisations in their fields, with the skills and the drive to create genuinely better services'. As a BIG-Lottery-funded volunteer scheme, TRO's example has the potential to become a flagship model for volunteering schemes in a range of cultural and health sectors. Robust research in respect of TRO's model will allow examples of best practice to influence existing arts in health and arts in the community initiatives as well laying the foundations for the development of future schemes. This research will also potentially encourage public-funded cultural institutions - art galleries, museums, orchestras - to look beyond conventional social groupings for volunteer recruitment, to include, for example, at-risk teenagers and care-leavers.