Fundraising: ‘our strongest point’
“The first thing on all of our agendas is money. Money, money, money, money… what’s that great phrase? ‘A vision without resources is a hallucination.’”
A1 Trust chairman Steve Davies is echoing there something that’s been a constant throughout the last 30 years – this organisation has always needed to raise significant chunks of cash on an ongoing basis (see also last issue’s interview with former chairman David Champion). Otherwise, there’s no way it could ever have built an ‘A1’, let alone now have moved on to new schemes.
“The approach to funding is our strongest point, without a shadow of doubt”, argues Steve. “But it does require work and we have a core of very loyal subscribers, and a very large number of covenantors…”
One challenge is keeping interest up in engines once they’ve been finished, and so avoiding the temptation for people to say ‘that’s done, it’s sorted, what’s next?’ However, he muses, “if you worried about the operational sustainability of an engine you’d frighten yourself to death and you’d never build it in the first place. So that’s point number one. And there is a case of ‘we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
“On the other hand, the trust’s fundraising capability and capacity has achieved quite a high degree of sophistication.”
Steve is very clear, too, that the trust’s ‘output’ is only achieved not only through the generosity of donors and supporters, but also because volunteers managing and steering it “are willing to virtually sacrifice their domestic priorities to make it work.”
This particular year has of course been especially tough for the steam movement – and Tornado has spent much of the season under a tarpaulin at York, before running to Carnforth for a repaint into BR green livery (SR508) prior to a move north for the ‘Aberdonians’ from Edinburgh in September.
Inevitably, then, much short-term conversation has taken place against that background. There are, however, some more general points about how the trust uses its Peppercorn ‘Pacific’. One is that, in devising its programmes for the ‘A1’, the trust is conscious that its supporters “are spread far and wide across UK plc”, and “we have to balance the need to run trains where they make money with the occasional requirement to get the trains, get the loco, to parts of the country that otherwise wouldn’t see it.”
Steve says there’s also a symbiotic relationship between the ‘A1’ and the ‘P2’. “There’s no doubt that the ‘A1’ is the best possible marketing tool we’ve got for our overall group”, he admits.
More generally, he says the trust is conscious of the need to find money to underpin that operation.
“I would love us to be able to report in a few years time the halcyon situation that our locos are now completely self-supporting from operation, but it ain’t going to happen, is it?”