A WISERD research team comprising Professor Paul Chaney, Dr Christala Sophocleous and Professor Daniel Wincott has worked with Wales Council for Voluntary Organisations (WCVA) and The National Library of Wales to create a historically significant digital archive of the Annual Reports of WCVA and its predecessor organisations. We are delighted to make this resource publicly and freely available to social historians, researchers and the generally curious.
WCVA has had a long and varied history, from supporting ‘unemployed miners and their wives’ in the 1930s, to developing training in rural communities in the post war years, establishing issue specific committees that grew into the independent organisations known today as Disability Wales and Age Cymru; and more recently, formally representing the voluntary sector in partnership with government. Today, WCVA will be familiar to most civil society organisations in Wales, as both a provider of direct support services to the voluntary sector and as a representative organisation working with government. However, it has played a number of different roles over the years, shifting its focus and direction as needs, policies and politics have changed. This rich resource traces not only the history of WCVA but offers an invaluable insight into civil society in Wales, and the issues and debates that have shaped it.
The archive offers primary source materials to those interested in a range of issues, including the changing conception of volunteering, understandings and purpose of ‘voluntary work’ and the relationship between the sector, variously understood as ‘voluntary social services’, ‘voluntary organisations’ or ‘the third sector’ and government and the welfare state.
The archive contains the Annual Reports of WCVA from 1934/35 – 1939/40 when it operated as the Council for Social Services South Wales and Monmouthshire, and each Annual Report continuously for the years 1947 to 2018/19, through three name changes and amendments in focus. Each Annual Report is available as a downloadable, single, searchable pdf.
For further information, contact Dr Christala Sophocleous.
This work is part of our civil society research and the project ‘Trust, human rights and civil society within mixed economies of welfare‘.
Terms of Use
This digital archive comprises annual reports of the Council for Social Services for South Wales and Monmouth, the Council for Social Services for Wales and Monmouth, the Council for Social Services for Wales, and the Wales Council of Voluntary Action 1934 – 2019 (excluding the years 1941-46).
These files have been digitised by the National Library of Wales and made available as an open-access and free of charge resource by the Wales Council of Voluntary Action (WCVA) Any queries about the archive and materials contained within it should be directed to the WCVA via telephone (0300 111 0124) or the contact form on their website (www.wcva.cymru).
Any potential commercial use of this digital archive should be discussed directly with the copyright holders, WCVA. Contact can be made via their website at www.wcva.cymru.
Non-Commercial use of the digital archive, for example quotations or use of photographs should be acknowledged as given by the copyright holder (WCVA) and must include the following details: name of the organisation, year of annual report, and page number(s). Referencing styles will vary, however, Harvard Referencing for example would take the following format:
Council for Social Services For Wales and Monmouthshire (1952), Annual Report, Cardiff, CSSWM, 1952:3-5
