Colin Rochester
Colin’s special interests are:
- Small organisations and community groups
- Leadership and governance
- Infrastructure and second tier bodies
- Volunteering
- Inter-agency collaboration and mergers
- Relationships between voluntary organisations and central and local government.
Colin has worked in and with the voluntary and community sector for more than forty years as a practitioner, consultant and academic. He spent ten years as tutor-organiser for Hertfordshire (responsible for fifteen volunteer-led local branches) and national development officer for the Workers Educational Association and ten years as head of Cambridge House and Talbot Settlement (responsible for everything from strategy to plumbing). In the mid-1980s he was one of the first postgraduate students to specialise in the study of the voluntary sector at Brunel University, where he received an MA in Public and Social Administration. This led to a second career as lecturer, researcher and consultant, first at the LSE’s Centre for Voluntary Organisation, then at Roehampton University’s Centre for the Study of Voluntary and Community Activity, which he founded; and now at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Colin has carried out a wide range of work as a consultant for organisations as diverse as the AIDS Alliance/Terrence Higgins Trust, Carol Goldstone Associates, Commission for the Compact, Community Sector Coalition, Home Office, Institute for Volunteering Research/Volunteering England, Institute of Jewish Policy Research, Lloyds TSB Foundation for England and Wales, London Development Agency, London Voluntary Service Council, National Association of Crossroads Care Attendant Schemes, National Housing Federation, NCVO and Surrey County Council.
Colin is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Education at Birkbeck College; academic adviser to the Institute for Volunteering Research; board member (co-founder and original chair) of the Voluntary Action History Society; vice-chair of the Voluntary Sector Studies Network; and practice article editor of the Voluntary Sector Review.
Colin has made important contributions to the knowledge base on the voluntary and community sector and volunteering. These include as editor (with George Campbell Gosling, Alison Penn and Meta Zimmeck) Understanding the Roots of Voluntary Action: Historical Perspectives on Current Social Policy (Sussex Academic Press, 2011); as lead author (with Angela Ellis Paine and Steven Howlett) Volunteering and Society in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); as author Making sense of volunteering: A literature review (Commission on the Future of Volunteering, 2007); and as editor (with Margaret Harris) Voluntary Organisations and Social Policy: Perspectives on Change and Choice (Palgrave, 2001). He has written numerous articles, chapters, monographs and reports.
Colin’s experience is extensive and eclectic, theoretical and hands-on, but his aim has always been to support learning and the sharing of information about the broad voluntary and community sector and volunteering and, in particular, to concentrate on what works.