46 CONTEXT 182 : DECEMBER 2024 IHBC charity offered free places at our Annual Schools, and the rest became a history best explored on the Marsh Trust’s website. But all is never rosy for the IHBC, or rosy enough, anyway. On our student awards website you can find signposts to initiatives that, as our own capacity has been stretched by other priorities, sadly have gone no further than the proof-of concept stage. Most obvious, first, was the huge learning demonstrated by earlystage students on conservation courses as they tackled one of the most fundamental exercises of the conservation profession: the conservation management plan (CMP) and its equivalent exercises. ‘Management’ is of course central to the IHBC’s assessment and accreditation of conservation practice: from the IHBC’s origins in heritage management under the ‘planning’ system, to the pivotal place ‘management’ holds in the IHBC’s Conservation Cycle and our linked accreditation of competence in practice. Yet the products of that essential exercise were subsumed in the original student award programme, competing as they were with the high-end drama of postgraduate research. In response, the IHBC added a new award thread within the main Student Award process, to pull out the most exemplary management plans for formal recognition under a new prize, the Booth-Bird award. This simple strategy allowed the administration of the newly focused award to stay affordable to us but obviously it suffers through reduced profile and prominence. Similarly underexploited is a longstanding plan to make some student submissions more accessible online, a plan no more than ‘tested’ on the Student Award website, as users can see. These partial trials represent just some of the IHBC’s initiatives that demanded new resources to move forward and radical new plans. From around 2015, those plans included early thoughts on an updated, Charter-compliant constitution and other bigthinking ideas, as we started to address historic constraints of limited resources and paltry sector investment, as well as limited impact outside core networks. The Charter and associated governance explorations under the IHBC+ programme represented one facet, while for the awards plans we looked to develop a more substantial funding programme. After a wide-ranging investigation of our options, we concluded that a focus on existing expenditures on charitable works was the best starting point. These budget lines, from education and Schools to research and innovation, could be gathered together under an internal ‘restricted fund’ that consolidated all the ‘help’ the IHBC offers people, conservation and conservation specialists. Those budget lines and their targets became the foundation what we titled our CREATIVE Conservation Fund, branded and formally launched in 2020 in tandem with our members’ adoption of new Charter-compliant Articles. Today the IHBC’s CREATIVE Conservation Fund lets us allocate, manage and distribute funding exclusively to deserving causes in conservation areas most relevant to the IHBC’s duality of roles and duties, both people and conservation. It can receive donations from any entity, and in any form, while specific personal or professional interests can be targeted too, across specific activities in our CREATIVE conservation acronym: celebration, research, education, apprenticeship, training, innovation, visioning and experimentation. If that is primarily a recast of how the IHBC allocates its own charity funds, where does that ‘help’ the wider world? Not far, at least until we take it to the next stage, with a sound development strategy that includes raising awareness and securing wider contributions, as well as planning and investment. With that, it could even mark an entirely new stage in our corporate evolution. This is an especially important time for the IHBC, as our Charter discussions help focus on those same dual charitable and professional obligations that we articulated in 1997. Now, Charter or not, we need to advance our still-burgeoning profession and our new fund can play a central role here. So, if you or someone you know might have an interest in volunteering skills, knowledge and experience to help us develop our CREATIVE Fund, and help our members, discipline and wider communities, please let me know, as I would be delighted to explore all and any options and roles. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk
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