My friend L, for years a magazine editor of sharp tailoring and formidable repute, has been helping out her local hoodies. When introduced to these huge, surly, baseball-capped lunks, her first instinct was to flee. They were Neets — that growing pariah group of kids not in education, employment or training — with barely a GCSE between them. Nonetheless L had volunteered to help them to draw up CVs, so she rolled up her sleeves, as she put it, “to try to make s*** shine”.

But in the process, the kids talked about their lives — their flaky parents, indifferent teachers, simple misfortunes — and her respect for their charm and quick humour soared. One lad was raising his younger siblings while his mother awaited a liver transplant. So that went on his CV and he got an interview for a work placement. When he was taken on, the lad was delighted, but not half as much as L: “I skipped up the street!” she says. “I felt a joy I never experienced in all those years making rich men richer.”

This might sound a bit homilistic. But quite unexpectedly, the most louche and ambitious people are falling into voluntary work. Something has shifted. A decade of high consumerism has made them queasy about shopping — besides who’s spending wildly now no job is safe? — and even the biggest careerists are wondering if, after all, work truly feeds their souls. They are not hugely motivated by altruism or even rage against poverty and injustice. They just seek personal satisfaction, engagement, meaning.

I was thinking about this selfish selflessness at the Conservative Party’s conference on social action this week. It is easy to be cynical about David Cameron’s insistence three years ago that every Tory MP and candidate set up a constituency project where local people can bring about improvements in their own lives. What better way to remove his party’s greedy, scary, judgmental and uncaring branding than make his footsoldiers dredge canals or coach football teams? And how clever, given opposition is intrinsically reactive, to find a way to look both autonomous and noble.

But here were these Tories, all glistening-eyed about their job clubs or battery-recycling projects or a groovy plan to teach ballroom dancing to tough teens and old-timers alike. Like my friend, they too seemed rather surprised by joy. And there was Matthew Taylor, Blair’s former director of policy, saying that for years he’d begged the Labour Government to champion this type of community action in vain.

Since the welfare state was born, the Left has always disdained charity. Nye Bevan described the voluntary sector “as a patchwork of local paternalisms”. Although the Labour movement was grounded in self-help and resourcefulness, with its Co-operative Societies and Workers’ Educational Assocations, there is a lingering suspicion that a volunteer steals an honest man’s wage packet, that a bunch of woolly do-gooders are a frail substitute for the collective muscle of the State.

But has this tilted too far? At the social action conference a leader of a voluntary body described canvassing a council estate for the Labour Party. A voter demanded: “When are you going to send someone to paint my front door?” So he suggested that, if the council bring the Dulux, perhaps the woman could paint her own front door. Maybe she would, said the voter. Later the Labour candidate who had heard the exchange remarked: “I’ve always suspected, Nick, that at heart you are a Tory.”

Shifting the levers of the economy, channelling the money rivers into the driest places, has transformed untold lives. But it has left others merely as clients of the State, miserable, disempowered, lacking the confidence to make the smallest improvements. Moreover, it ignores the huge wellspring of desire to be useful, to connect with those around us, to do good. It is evident from the 15 British people who last year endured fear and pain to donate a kidney to a total stranger to the millions of teenagers shoving on a plastic bracelet to Make Poverty History.

Barack Obama, who earned his political stripes in the community projects of Chicago, is trying to reroute the local networks that got him elected into grassroots projects. By pitching up to do a shift at a Washington soup kitchen he has not just made volunteering deeply cool, but ensured that community service is the central trope of his presidency. Already accountants and Wall Street bankers have rallied to his call, aiding the homeless or helping Chinese businesses fill in their tax returns.

What Mr Obama understands is that volunteering has a two-way benefit. “I wasn’t just helping other people,” he has said. “Through service, I found a community that embraced me; citizenship that was meaningful . . . how my own improbable story fit into the larger story of America.” Compare his words with Mr Cameron’s at the social action conference banging on about “getting up off your backside, rolling up your sleeves, and doing something positive”, so bossy and prescriptive it makes me want to smoke behind the bike shed.

Rather I would sell social action to the young, experience-hungry and self-centred, by explaining what volunteering can do for them — as much as what they can do for society. That it relieves stress, depression, even improves wellbeing. A young woman who works in the cosmetics industry told me why she spends her weekends mentoring three neglected children. The kids are difficult, naughty and often ungrateful and yet this girl never lets them down. “The world I work in is so shallow,” she reflects. “This is something tangible. Their lives put my problems in perspective.” And, she adds, since she spends money on them rather than on getting wasted every night, she feels healthier.

Another mentor, a City banker, ranted furiously about the tough 15-year-olds he takes to football matches. When I ask what he gets out of it he says, angrily: “Nothing!” Then he stops to reflect. Actually, he says, he gets a kick from taking them to PizzaExpress. When he first met them, they couldn’t eat with cutlery, let alone order from a menu or politely clink glasses. “Maybe,” he says. “I’ve made the chasm between their world and mainstream society a little narrower.”

The Tories are on to something that is already in the ether. The affluent majority desperately wants to help, the underclass desperately needs it. Isn’t it time they got together?

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