Despite the significant influence of localism on policy discourses in the UK in recent decades, there has been limited evidence of any fundamental changes in state-civil society relationships. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 created a new context for cross-sectoral collaboration, as the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and local communities moved to the forefront of the crisis response. This paper draws upon 49 semi-structured interviews with local authorities (LAs) and VCS organisations across England, Scotland and Wales, to explore how the pandemic has reshaped LA-VCS collaboration. Examining the evolution of a range of local collaborative frameworks during the Covid-19 crisis, the article examines what enabled these collaborations to develop, how they operated and what insights can be derived regarding both the conditions for collaboration to flourish and the capacity to sustain this going forward. The findings offer insights into what more progressive forms of collaboration might look like during the transition from crisis and into recovery. It contributes to broader debates about whether the models deployed during Covid-19 represent a pathway to more consensus-based collaboration after a decade of antagonism between civil society and the state.

This article contributes to research on employee volunteering (EV) by focusing on the experiences of individuals to address the current overemphasis upon collective organizational outcomes. Drawing on qualitative research with employees and corporate social responsibility managers across seven companies, it demonstrates why employees’ experiences are central to understanding the complex mechanisms that link EV with organizational outcomes. The article reveals how both positive and negative organizational outcomes are influenced by the complex relationship between personal motivations and employees’ volunteering experiences—within their organization and within their community—combined with their broader reflexive interpretation of their employing organization and its values.