Rebuild

Devolve HQ (and its presence certainly as your central office) and create a couple of decent buildings (one at a time to learn about how they get used) to complement your currently existing headquarters; maybe even work collaboratively with other similar organisations and charities throughout the UK to create, build and maybe even share them to help bring these few regional and multi-purposes hubs to life and give more of their outdoor space to gardening and the like rather than to car parks.

These hubs could be spread across the country’s north, midlands and south-east (as the south-west could always use your existing HQ as a fourth regional hub, adapting its point in a matching style) and they could all have: suitable staff facilities and meeting rooms with good video setup etc.; restaurant and/or café like facilities; a few hotel-like rooms to allow overnight stay; a separate space for workshops (somewhat like the BBC’s Repair Shop) for all sorts of heritage repairs and even the odd day-to-day requirement; even sections that could be opened to the public and be easily modified (moving walls to allow different spaces to be made, for instance) to allow events¹ and exhibitions² and community-led happenings.

Reimagine

Have one of these regional headquarters (or all of them) could be set up (and a bit bigger) so it becomes a certified school of sorts, a university-like entity for many trades, in teaching and training hands-on skills, like textiles, weaving, pottery, woodworking and metalwork so as to help contribute and establish a respected entity of trades and tradespeople in and around the world of heritage; open up the existing skills and talents of some places and break barriers down by welcoming and accommodating more open and egalitarian processes and showing heritage isn’t just old, dusty and dormant buildings; even using the space(s) to host exhibitions and events.

Lead

Start adding solar, hydro or wind turbines (and batteries even) to properties and land you care for (and even many of those holiday cottages you have) to increase self-sufficiency and even contribute back to the grid; ground-situated solar panels can be had that track the sun; start small but invest, lead, learn, and share findings and developments to and from others, like councils, government and other charities; maybe the combination of old and new will increase positive perception to not always be hanging on to the past and that being receptive and showing a willingness to adapt, invest in the long-term (despite the initial short-term cost) and deal and manage proactively is good and that not worrying about ‘how it looks’ and any PR repercussion and/or legal shenanigans, or Trustees kicking up a fuss because the paperwork (or past) doesn’t allow it, is no excuse to helping the planet and the Trust’s cause in a rather precarious environment.

Demolish

Action, or at least consider and look to, engaging collaboratively and collectively where pertinent and helpful to just pulling down and getting rid of some physical properties. Then building useful community facilities in their place, if suitable and sensibly feasible to do so (and regardless of the deeds and all that).

Converse

Get (a bit, or even more publically) political (and talk about it on your website, prominently) and sit safely and sensibly in the centre ground and aim and try to lead for and have a point of view of organisationally and worldly relevant things that mean hanging on to just fusty old buildings doesn’t continue to be an excuse for elegant TV shows and documentaries and other forms of hanging onto things, pointing the finger at others and inaction. Collaborate, involve and be some kind of beacon for progress, despite the heritage.

Open-source

Consider decentralising IT and choosing more open-source (like WordPress, for instance) and scalable approaches (but obviously with a fixed and uniform look-and-feel on the front-end and tech association under-the-hood) that require (surely) less spend with certain providers and live by an open way that does less to support big tech and a lot more to support the (internet) basics that invariably seem often forgotten so as to justify even more spend with external ‘whizz-bang’ agencies, apps and inaccessible, even unnecessary, features and apparent improvements.

Espouse the principles you bring to and guide the organisation by of attitudes and approaches that break the (corporate) barrier of following the crowd, whether that’s IT, marketing, trends even assumed social (and class) expectations and dare to be standing for (and proving that) less generally is more and well worth investing in for the long-term.

Breaking

Make membership cheaper (and break some class barriers!) and see how it’s received and taken up over a few years at a lower rate. As it isn’t civically obligatory to have membership with a heritage organisation and so people choose not to bother in times of difficulty, maybe lower its price and see what happens as to how important people think it is to save old buildings and the like; fewer Heads (being invented and justified and) required within and around departments and potentially, over the years, better oversight of issues rather than expecting your offering to always be relevant and worthwhile. Don’t just create departments with ‘exciting’ and ‘relevant’ names as a means to justify the self and intentions. Many things should be naturally integral to the day-to-day running of the show and behaviour inside and outside an organisation, not methods to show efficacy and productivity that invariably only make an internal crowd feel relevant and that they are ticking arbitrary boxes of success, probably defined by themselves to show ability anyway.

Modify

Build, own it and host separately with an eco-friendly, green hosting provider a living website for the organisation’s brand and visual identity. (No need to wrap it up in existing corporate/tech-specific platforms and providers and should be treated as a working experiment to see its ups and downs and learn from the tech approach.) Maybe even allowing part of it to be public-facing to help share and elevate perceptions of the brand (partly like being a bit more political and honest in views rather than ‘selling’ a visitor experience all the time). Its contents – rules and regs etc. – would be editable but managed and monitored by a core team internally but always receptive and open to writing and showing developments, good work – a brand and visual identity blog, for instance; providing good and effective print CSS (not just CSS for screen) for the content so logged in users to the site can print suitably set and arranged pages of it, if and when they require the info in a physical format.