ABSTRACT
Peoples first experience of counselling will be with a voluntary organization. The Wolfenden Committee defined voluntary organizations as falling into four main categories: those offering mutual aid where everyone is unpaid; those providing a service through volunteer helpers; those with a mixture of paid and voluntary workers; and, the private non-profit-making organizations which employ professional staff backed by voluntary helpers. The Marriage Guidance Council, the Family Welfare Association and the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council recognized the need for personal help and support for those facing marital problems had developed systems of training volunteers to offer counselling in this area. Although individual face-to-face counselling is now perceived as the norm in Britain, as counselling increasingly seeks to define itself in the mode set by psychotherapy, the emerging larger voluntary organizations, faced with the task of offering support on a national scale to a wide-ranging group of needy individuals, responded by developing services whose primary purpose was to meet need.
