44 CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 Director’s cut Valuing and celebrating our volunteers Our charter investigations and explorations might well bring the IHBC a Royal regard and later, perhaps, even charter options for interested conservation professionals. Whatever the outcomes, the very process of putting together a case for chartering has opened entirely new opportunities, while reminding us just how much we have achieved to date. Collating a structured ‘history’ of the IHBC, and stating the case for our ‘pre-eminence’ in supporting and regulating the individual’s interdisciplinary practice of built and historic conservation, have both been part of that work. Whatever we hear about our case for a charter from the Privy Council Office in the coming weeks or even years, this work has unearthed a new trove of knowledge and understanding of our history that we can unpick well into the next decade and use to improve our services and support. But it is the IHBC’s charitable work that remains central to any case for a charter. The work of our volunteers is pivotal in that. One of the ongoing challenges – indeed, a never-ending one for a body with such a legacy of volunteering as ours – is how we support those volunteers and celebrate their efforts and achievements. Our volunteering resources are broad. They encompass those volunteers who are legal trustees for the UK charity and guide the National Office executive in a way for which I, as the responsible professional, am especially grateful. They include our many and varied volunteering colleagues, mostly working regionally or locally, who help us all do right by our conservation ambitions through participation in branches, committees, publications, panels and otherwise. We know that throughout the IHBC’s history our volunteers have underpinned the critical services that helped shape our standing across the built and historic environment sector. However, our charter work has made it that our volunteers add the essential skills and the critical mass to the public services the IHBC delivers, and that the charter most values. The charter explorations have emphasized how our volunteer support, recognition, distinction and impact have all enhanced the public benefit. My own charterlinked explorations have served as a reminder of that history. The IHBC offers a sobering testament to its ability to bring out the best in many professional bodies. This is not primarily due to our significant dependence on volunteers, but rather to the vast diversity and deep well of expertise, learning, goodwill, and skills they offer. Through their contributions, we achieve our shared aim: conservation, IHBC-style. We must remember that our volunteers contribute their efforts not simply because of the IHBC’s own objectives, but because we are seen as the best conduit to deliver the good outcomes those volunteers seek. Annual schools are where we can best learn about just how productive and challenged our volunteers can be. While investigating our history for the charter, I came a across a paper to the board where I tried, after only some four schools, to bring some structure to our volunteer support. That paper, entitled ‘CapacityBuild: building capacity for volunteering in historic environment conservation’, went to our board in 2008. It was an early attempt to develop IHBC-customised support and infrastructure for our volunteer networks. The big plan itself ultimately failed. This was partly due to its overly ambitious nature. However, it did establish some key threads. These threads, nurtured over the years through board and committee input and oversight, as well as executive efforts, have ultimately delivered real benefits. It also highlighted the same point that our charter work successfully reaffirmed, that our volunteering resource is central to our mission precisely because it has always been critical to the charitable and public-facing impacts and aspirations of our members, their service and the benefits we offer. The CapacityBuild paper tried to address ‘the institute’s combination of high aspiration and limited capacity’, an ambition also well signposted across our legacy of corporate plans. Since the first of those corporate plans, adopted soon before the paper, we have worked to an integrated approach centred on helping people, conservation and conservation professionals in turn. We have benefitted from the synergies this targeting could bring. CapacityBuild tried to play its part by easing pressures on volunteers by improving direct access to the IHBC’s UK capacity
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