Amina Shah highlights why building a relationship with a corporate partner is something your charity should be investigating
Back in 1998, Scottish Book Trust was a fairly small charity seeking financial support to develop all of our wild and wonderful ideas. In particular we were looking for a long-term CSR funder to bring our dreams of a Scotland-wide children’s book tour to life.
But when a charity is always having to look ahead to the next funding opportunity just to keep a programme going, this sort of growth and added value is simply not possible without help.
Scottish Friendly, a Glasgow-based friendly society with roots going back to 1862, rose to the challenge to help us by sponsoring the tour and 18 years later the partnership is still going strong.
The Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour, as the tour has been named, takes the very best UK and international authors directly into schools across Scotland and the UK to inspire a love of reading, writing and illustration and we reach an average of 6,000 children every year.
This enduring dedication to the funding of the tour has had myriad benefits for Scottish Book Trust
Amina Shah
The tour is focussed on engaging with communities, driven forward by a central aim of inspiring a love of reading, writing and illustration in children the length and breadth of Scotland (and beyond!), with particular emphasis on deprived and remote areas.
With thousands of children leaving primary school unable to read well enough to enjoy a book, and the recently launched Fair Education Alliance highlighting the gap in literacy and numeracy by the age of 11 as one of the most critical challenges for the UK, literacy standards among young people are an ongoing issue which charities like Scottish Book Trust can only address through long-term solutions and a steadfast commitment, such as Scottish Friendly provide for the tour.
One of the main reasons that the partnership with Scottish Friendly works so well is the close alignment of its objectives with the outcomes of the tour. It is also important that both of us benefit.
Serving the community had always been at the heart of what Scottish Friendly does and, in response to the distancing nature of technological changes over the past few decades, it wanted to ensure that it was still engaged with its communities and still giving something back in keeping with its roots as a friendly society.
This enduring dedication to the funding of the tour has had myriad benefits for Scottish Book Trust and schools across the UK – it has allowed us to grow what was a fairly small community tour into a fully-fledged, multi-staffed programme which attracts world-class authors such as Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen, Patrick Ness and Malorie Blackman.
Every year we go on six tours; four in Scotland and two in England visiting a vast range of different communities, from rural schools with an eight pupil roll in Mouswald to 400 seat theatres in Glasgow.
It has also allowed us to create dedicated teaching resources for each tour.
The legacy of this longstanding partnership is that generations of Scottish children have been given an experience that will positively impact on the way they relate to and view books – a significant contribution to tackling the UK’s literacy problems.
Amina Shah is director of programme at the Scottish Book Trust.
