Transcript
MATTHEW SLOCOMBE:
The SPAB is a charity, which means we’re constantly in need of sources of funding to maintain our existing operations, or even to survive. So fundraising is really vital to the society’s activities. We rely on our members primarily, who pay a subscription, but beyond that, very generously sometimes leave donations or legacies and legacies can be particularly vital to our long-term sustainability.
In addition to that, we’re fortunate in receiving a limited amount still from public sources. So organisations like Historic England, Historic Scotland and Cadw, the national agencies for building conservation, are assisting with some of our special programmes and we also have assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund for a number of projects.
But even these things require some match funding, and for that, commonly we’re going to Trusts and funding bodies from the charitable sector who assist us with the additional funds that are needed to make these things happen.
Seeking funding from public sources or charities is increasingly hard. There’s enormous competition out there, but also, as we all know, the public sector is contracting, which means the funds available to assist other bodies, like ours, are diminishing. So all the time we feel we have to fight ever more strongly for the justification to assist our work. And luckily, we’re able to do this at the moment, although for the longer-term we will have to look to other sources, we anticipate, in order to make up for the loss of public funds that is likely to occur.
The society’s biggest project of recent times has been maintenance cooperatives. And for that, we’ve been extremely fortunate in getting a high percentage of support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, which we now know well and has assisted us on other occasions. The great thing about the HLF is that it enables us to take on a really big project that wouldn’t be possible under other terms so that maintenance cooperatives is there to support those looking voluntarily after historic places of worship of all kinds. We provide the basic training which allows these groups to help themselves and to remain in existence and to do good work for the long term.