INTERNATIONAL volunteers who have returned to Marlborough met to discuss their work with MP Danny Kruger this week.

But the MP was given short shrift for leaving international aid work off his new report in to the future of volunteering in the UK.

Kruger has just published his social manifesto ‘Levelling Up Communities' for the future of volunteering in the UK (report on pages x and y).

The group, including a former UK ambassador and Marlborough-based charity leaders, heard Danny speak about the value he sees in human relationships within charitable and voluntary work, and how in his view this work cannot and should not be carried out just by state actors.

The participants, meeting online and at Marlborough Town Hall, made the point that there was no reference to the role of international volunteering within the report.

The MP agreed there should be a reference to this, and supported the role of the international voluntary sector. So the group decided to keep lobbying him on the issue once he left the meeting.

The great and the good of the international charity sector were on the roll call.

Dr Nick Maurice, 77, volunteered in Togo and Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s, and founded the Marlborough-Brandt Group, a development charity based in Marlborough.

More than 50 years later, Beth (surname not published as she works in the prison system), 27, who volunteered in Togo in 2017.

Other people present were Leela Shanti, an education volunteer with Voluntary Services Overseas in Ghana in 2012, who now works for Action Enterprise Ghana, a development charity based in Rambsury. And Rachel Rosedale who volunteered in Ghana in the 1970s, and now involved in the Marlborough Poverty Action Group

David and Gwendolyn Fall volunteered with VSO in the 1970s in Papua New Guinea. David is a former UK Ambassador, including to Thailand.

He spoke about his support for VSO programmes and volunteers when he worked with the British Diplomatic Service, saying he used some of the funding he was able to disburse as an Ambassador to support programmes in the countries he worked in.

Lobbying the MP further by email, he said:

“VSO has the legacy, networks, organization and reputation to play an expanded and important role in a reformed British overseas development programme, which can tie in with your proposed domestic programme. Volunteering with VSO benefits not only the host community but also the UK (‘soft power’) and – importantly in the context of your report - individual volunteers, the vast majority of whom feel enriched by their experience, which can be life changing