Unseen but essential: what is the voluntary sector microbiome?
January 22, 2025
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The voluntary and community sector is large and diverse. It includes the big household name charities, as well as the smallest, often unregistered, voluntary and community groups. These groups could be described as the ‘microbiome’ of the sector – they are essential to community health and wellbeing, just as the human microbiome is essential to our individual health. However, the voluntary sector microbiome often goes unseen and unrecognised, despite playing an essential role in communities.
The voluntary sector microbiome is the small-scale voluntary organisations delivering community activities such as hobby groups, local gardening clubs or coffee mornings – and there are lots of them. In partnership with the University of Exeter, we have estimated that in England there could be 335,000 unregistered voluntary and community groups, in addition to 132,000 registered charities and 30,000 social enterprises. So, why is this important?
Integration and localisation of service delivery, particularly within health and care services, depends on collaboration between health and social care providers, local authorities and the voluntary sector. Increasingly, policy makers, health and care commissioners, and integrated care boards try to use systems thinking: an approach which avoids isolating a problem to just one factor, and instead understands it as the outcome of many factors. If we’re going to embrace systems thinking, we need to be as attentive to the smallest parts of the system – the microbiome (hard to see but essential) – as we are to the largest.
As health problems and inequalities are often the outcome of many factors, the entire system must work together to address them. Policy makers, commissioners, and system leaders must explicitly recognise, support, and amplify the role of small, local, often unregistered community groups.
Our latest publication, ‘The Value of the Voluntary Sector Microbiome in Integrated Care Systems’, explores this topic further. Download it here, and keep an eye on our website for more publications on this topic.