Far too much is being asked of community development trusts

It’s a thankless job. You don’t know for a couple of years whether your choice was the right one. You are certainly not doing it for the money. In fact, you’re not entirely sure why you are doing it at all.

You feel like you are spending more time on paperwork and reporting than you do undertaking the real work. The ground changes under your feet on a nearly weekly basis. Policy changes and new initiatives let you dare to hope, before dashing your tentative optimism. When planning expenses, you need to add a zero to the first number you thought of, and just when you think you might have won the war, something comes from left of field and gives you a hefty kick.

Which one am I describing? I’m not sure either.

It’s not just hard to tell them apart; they are both getting increasingly difficult, and their respective landscapes are equally challenging.

Traditionally, crofters can turn their hand to most things. You’re working in an environment without huge resources. The baler twine jokes are funny because they are true. My father describes pallets as “croft lego”. From light mechanics in the morning, to 12v electrics at lunchtime, and a rodeo with a calving cow at tea time, most crofting days are nothing but varied. It calls for a range of skills, some officially learned, but most developed through trial, error and bitter experience. I started writing a list of skills I had developed in the past 13 years in Tiree and was well past 50 within a few minutes. For the vast majority of people, all of that is done at less than part-time, in the hope that they will get a decent payday at the sale twice a year. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

In crofting, succeeding, or at least not giving up, relies on a willingness to learn, an eclectic range of skills and interests, and the grit to keep going even when it feels like everything is going wrong.

For my colleagues in community development, that might all sound horribly familiar.

And for those in community development trusts across the Highlands and islands, the challenge is magnified further. This is not community development carried out within a specific population in a city. You’re doing it where you live. Where you can’t avoid people in The

Co-op. You are actively involved in trying to keep the microcosm of society you exist in going and growing.

You live it and breathe it because you can’t escape it. It permeates every single aspect of life, every relationship. Ten well-planned moves and positive steps forward can be eclipsed by one ill-timed,

frustrated remark which, once it has travelled round the island, results in a grudge that will take two generations to shift. And that might just be Wednesday.

As crofters are increasingly having to become biodiversity specialists, stand-in vets and experts in carbon audits, community development trusts are also being asked to become specialists in an increasingly diverse and critical range of topics. In both cases, there is little funding, limited training and very little support. You learn the hard way.

When I look at Tiree, the community trust owns and runs a fuel station, two harbours, four business units, a wind turbine and a broadband network. We have four subsidiary companies to manage the governance for. We are at the design stage for a housing development, and have been instrumental in trying to resolve the lack of a vet. We have been negotiating with the council over 0–2 childcare provision for the past three years, and still manage to produce a bonfire, fireworks display and a Christmas lights switch-on. We run the tourist information website.

We own an award-winning architectural installation at the pier because no one else wanted the responsibility, and, for good measure, the campervan waste disposal site, for the same reason. We have a youth worker who maintains a full and varied programme, and a ranger who supports an innovative croft camping scheme. We make sure the majority of the island’s defibrillators are in working order at all times.

We are running a project looking at practical mitigations for coastal erosion, installing our first solar array, trying to stem the decline in the Gaelic language, and providing financial support to crofters navigating the CAGS funding scheme. We trained a staff member to do EPCs because there was no one else. We were taken by surprise to discover that we technically owned the engraving machine for coffin nameplates, and when the person who had done that work for years stepped back, we had to decide what to do. In October, we found ourselves undertaking a significant lobbying exercise to ensure that a fibre break was dealt with in a timely fashion.

NONE of us doing this work were trained for it. That training does not exist. No-one offers a course in developing a community development plan, delivering it, and then being grilled in the chilled aisle three years later as to why it was done at all. No one prepares you for sitting in a room with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, or writing letters to the chief executive of the BT Group at 10pm on a Saturday night.

No one prepares you for having to root cause a leak, clean a fuel station filter or troubleshoot a sewage plant pump before launching into a Lottery funding application.

Asking any one organisation to manage a portfolio that broad would be considered unreasonable almost anywhere else. And yet, up and down the country, particularly in island contexts where market failure is routine and statutory services are thin, trusts are being asked to do exactly that.

In Tiree, we are fortunate that enough people with broad and overlapping skill sets exist to guide and support a staff team stretched so thin they are nearly invisible. It takes an island to manage a development trust. It cannot function without community support, but often that support sits alongside frustration and complaint. That is not a problem in itself. Development trusts should be questioned. They should explain decisions, account for the use of community funds and give reasons for the choices they make.

But at the same time, we are asking far too much of organisations like ours. We should not be having to do all of this. But if we don’t, who does? If we leave things long enough, does the Government or council step in or, like a croft left untended, does the whole thing simply grow thistles and increasing mounds of dead grass?

I look at Stòras Uibhist, the community trust that owns most of South Uist currently facing a governance crisis and near-collapse, and feel heartsore. Not because of any single decision, but because their situation illustrates how exposed development trusts are. Like us, they too carry a huge portfolio of responsibility in a fragile funding environment, and when things begin to unravel, few of us have any slack in the system to absorb it.

Tiree is only ever an uncontested election, a handful of key resignations or one badly timed crisis away from the same position. We are relying on that basket of odd, hard-won skills being refilled as people burn out and step back. We are doing it with short-term contracts, budget deficits and growing frustration.

It is hard to see how this ends well.