A fine new year's resolution is to go out and do good

After the season of excess come the resolutions - thinner/fitter/nicer. There may also be a nagging sense that it would be good to do something for the community. But what? Most people have a hazy idea of what volunteering might be and may shudder at the thought. Be a Brown Owl? Work in a charity shop sifting old clothes? Wheel a trolley of library books and Lucozade round a hospital? Clean out a canal? What if there is no escape from the blind old man waiting for your visit, a burden of guilt too far?

The immediate manifestations of volunteering may not be 100% enticing to everyone and it is all too easy to alienate tentative would-be volunteers. Finding the right slot for each individual requires experience and sensitivity - and then it may last for life. Done badly, it may put people off for ever. As it is, half the population already does something: another 25% - 11m people - say they would "if only they were asked" but no one has.

The government has waxed lyrical about the importance of volunteering, but their record so far is mixed. Millennium Volunteers, for 16 to 25-year-olds has gone well, using mostly experienced organisations such as the Prince's Trust and others. But elsewhere they have failed to use the experience of people who know how to entice volunteers and use them. Politicians always want to reinvent the wheel, eager to badge their own gleaming new organisations, often wasting money and good will.

Volunteering was always fraught. Is it to produce a cheap workforce for things the state can't afford? Or is it to foster community? Should the outcome be the effectiveness of what volunteers do, or the satisfaction and community spirit engendered? In the end it has to be both, yet if matched badly the two functions can conflict.

Community Service Volunteers (CSV), which places more than 150,000 volunteers a year for its £1m grant, looks with anxiety at some government spending. The government has just founded a new organisation, Experience Corps, to attract older volunteers for a walloping great £19m. It funded the new TimeBank for £27m.

Many others in the same field, such as Reach, are asking the same question: why use complete beginners to start Experience Corps from scratch, employing expensive outside PR firms, the Saatchis and a host of those consultants who now increasingly descend upon large government grants? Allowing for all the usual charity rivalries, there is a storm brewing over what government can and can't do well in the voluntary field.

Government does have a crucial role to play but not down at community level. Elizabeth Hoodless of CSV wants them to concentrate on opening up the institutions they run - prisons, hospitals, schools and social services - by setting targets for the number of volunteers each must use. She points to programmes in America where hard-pressed social services have a team of volunteers calling on the family of a child at risk. But here professional opposition to using volunteers is hardening. Half the hospitals use some, the other half use none at all, yet every ward has people who need company, feeding, reading to or taking outside.

GPs who use volunteers for extra home visits have cut prescribing by 30%. Prisons are filled with illiterates needing tutors. Amateur eyes and ears, extra pairs of hands, befrienders, mentors, tutors and helpers would hugely improve most state services - but the professionals need to be forced to make it happen. This is not just to improve the service but to improve the local bond and the sense that these services belong to the community and not just to professionals.

From next September, every 11 to 16-year-old will have to do community service as part of the national curriculum. Many schools will struggle to organise it, with hard-pressed teachers expected to devise and create suitable schemes. It will need seasoned senior volunteers to help schools set up plans, liaise with local government or hospitals. CSV says it and others can do it, using models from the best schools without each school learning from scratch. But the connection between the government and the people who have the experience on the ground often seems to be weak.

The relationship between government and the voluntary sector is undergoing several reviews at once. With large sums of government money now pouring into community schemes, the voluntary sector complains it does not get a fair share and bidding for contracts can be a nightmare. Yet at the same time voluntary organisations fear becoming surrogate government agencies: many large housing associations are now hardly recognisable from housing departments. The problem is how charities can keep their freshness, originality and independence while taking on large slabs of heavily regulated state work.

Figures for volunteers only emerge every three years, so we do not know yet whether government exhortations have helped slow the decline. Most people are drawn into volunteering by a friend or colleague inviting them to join in, not by M & C Saatchi. However, perusing the internet the huge array of opportunities is encouraging. It can include one-off short efforts and brief episodes: it does not have to be a long commitment. It might involve just keeping in telephone contact with a lonely person.

Of the many sites, a good one to start at is do-it.org.uk where you can fill in your postcode and access an array of activities. In my patch I found this mixed bunch: painting frescos in a local day centre, being a business mentor, playing with children in Brixton prison visitors' centre, campaigning for fair trade, working in a Citizens Advice Bureau, mentoring young offenders or refugees, helping in a night shelter, mending electric buggies or knitting tiny clothes for premature babies. Local volunteering bureaux can offer more personalised ideas. Try csv.org.uk
volwork.org.uk
experiencecorps.co.uk, and timebank.org.uk