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This chapter talks about the triggers that generate citizen involvement and community self-help activity. It considers why some people go out of their way to take local action, and tries to determine what motivates community volunteers. The chapter examines their altruistic concerns, and decides if it is fair to expect those with the least advantages to do the most to compensate for others' failures.

This chapter discusses a new theory of civic virtue and of paying debts to society, showing that citizens can exercise civic virtue and pay debts to society not only without voting but often without engaging in politics at all. It defends the extrapolitical conception of civic virtue. According to the extrapolitical conception, political participation is not necessary for the exercise of civic virtue. Indeed, citizens can have exceptional civic virtue despite disengagement with politics. Most ways to exercise civic virtue in contemporary liberal democracies do not involve politics, or even activities on the periphery of politics, such as community-based volunteering or military service.

This chapter reflects on the plurality of opportunities presently being developed in the United Kingdom and other parts of the world for deliberative democratic participation of citizens to revitalise local communities. It examines the limitations of the theory of social capital which views community volunteering as the model for promoting civic renewal, without recognising the importance of the political aspect of civic engagement. It explores New Labour's social policies on neighbourhood renewal and civic engagement in terms of creating a new relationship between state and civil society, replacing government by governance. This, the chapter argues, looks to a new democratic politics which might include ‘referendums, consultative activities, and deliberative participation’. The chapter focuses on a particular initiative in adult learning introduced by the UK Home Office's Civil Renewal Unit, namely the Active Learning for Active Citizenship (ALAC) programme. It provides a community-based ‘learning framework’ which recognises difference while enabling ‘a shared political identity of citizenship’. It views experiential learning as a means to advance the programme of active citizenship.

Chapter 2 describes the limitations of attempting to learn about prisons and engage with incarcerated persons as a researcher. The norms that govern prison research force researchers to defer to the punitive, restrictive, custody-and-control mission of prisons—a mission intrinsically at odds with the open inquiry needed for research. This chapter brings the reader into the author’s struggles for research access. It reveals how the volunteer role enhanced the understanding of the prison space, leading to a combination of research with personal narrative throughout the book. It also reflects on questions of author positionality relative to the prison system and its inhabitants: how one comes to be doing such work, how to navigate its multiple, often contradictory demands, and the ethical obligations to different communities within which one is embedded.