CONTEXT 182 : DECEMBER 2024 45 Director’s cut Celebrating the IHBC’s CREATIVE Conservation Fund Since our formal constitution in 1997, the IHBC has had two corporate objectives: to serve as a charity, focusing on delivering public benefit, and as a professional body, supporting built and historic environment conservation practice and practitioners. When we secured charitable status in tandem with our professional duties, details of precisely how that duality of duties might be managed were left fairly loose. Perhaps that was inevitable given the more immediate challenges. In 1997 we also went from being an ‘association’ of likeminded colleagues in, mostly, public service roles, to become a regulated company and servant of the public good supporting practitioners from all sectors engaged in what was to become the IHBC’s own specification of a new discipline: ‘interdisciplinary’ conservation practice. With our first modern Corporate Plan in 2007 – adopted after long and often lingering consultation – we pinned down the essence of our collective strategy. Members endorsed the principle that our charitable duties could work best alongside our professional support provided we observed three simple, tiered and tied objectives: to ‘help people’, to ‘help conservation’ and, underpinning these, to ‘help conservation professionals’. That corporate model has stood us in good stead since then. We have refined our support for members’ conservation practice and the diverse public benefits it, and we, can bring. We have opened new access to and routes for career progress in the discipline we regulate and, as highlighted below, we have extended our built and historic environment conservation advocacy, including its celebration, far beyond the confines of a small, skilled and select membership. Indeed, celebrating the practice of conservation was the most straightforward way to deliver on our holistic suite of corporate objectives to provide ‘help’. As early as my first meetings as IHBC director, in the mid-2000s the collective benefits of ‘celebrating’ became clear in discussions around the application of funds gathered in memory of our late membership secretary Gus Astley. Eventually this took the form of the IHBC Gus Astley Annual Student Award, our now celebrated celebration of heritage-related submissions by students to taught courses in the UK (see page 47w). It took time to get details agreed and systems going – not as long as it took to agree our first membership flier, but long enough – and the first Gus Astley Student Award winner was congratulated at our 2007 School in Liverpool: David Hills, for his ‘Barbican: MODern CONServation?’, a submission on the Architectural Association’s conservation course. Building on that initial success, and the associated challenges it raised, we streamlined procedure to focus digital submissions, with their benefits of low cost and easy access; we chose high profile, practice-focused ‘guest’ judges, and offered free School places to the award winner, as well as others commended and cited, alongside the chance for guidance on opportunities for publication. Perhaps most critical, given our need to engage across sectors and disciplines, we developed a distinctly ‘low-effort’ submissions process for participants, so formal administrative checks happen only after submission. You can read more on the fascinating history – including the key role of Gus and other colleagues in our evolution, alongside the impressive list of topics, winners and judges – on our dedicated awards website. With our annual Gus Astley Student Award ticking over successfully by 2010, we extended our mission to celebrate. First this was through new partnerships, as we built on an approach by what is now the Marsh Charitable Trust – the brainchild of Brian Marsh OBE, chairman of the trust. After the trust sought our guidance on a new award, we took the opportunity to extend our reach and ‘help conservation’ in its broadest sense. A new IHBC Marsh Award for ‘successful learners’ encompassed the full breadth of those starting out on a conservation-related role or career, including craft and trade: not just students, but apprentices, interns and career changers too. A parallel award, devised for ‘retired IHBC’ members, could highlight the mountain of capacity, skills, knowledge and advice contributed to their communities by IHBC members who no longer undertook paid service and practice. Balancing the trust’s £500 cash award to winners, the
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