The Scarman Trust

I will always feel a little awkward about the degree to which I was a fully functioning entity during my period at the Scarman Trust. My husband left me in my final week at South Beds District Council and I started this new position with a mind-set of total confidence annihilation which initially manifested itself in full physical uselessness – panic attacks, trembling, complete mental block. I was predominantly working from home thank goodness because I was not able to go out and sell myself at all. Until this point I had been very successful at bid writing and bringing in external funding. Scarman needed that ability.

The Scarman Trust was set up post the Scarman Report in to the Brixton riots of 1981. ‘The Scarman report a shift from a concern about ‘race relations’ to ‘community relations’’. (Wikipedia) The Trust aimed to bring about changes in communities ‘in the way people wanted’.

It was an entrepreneurial organisation in its truest sense, surviving totally on the local credibility of its staff who were all great characters and the two men at its helm who had influence in the highest government circles and were able to bring in thousands of pound of funding. We were the lead intermediary for the New Millennium Volunteers grants. They were called Ray and Matthew, Matthew Pike. He is a man of great intelligence and breeding. I have a lasting memory at a Christmas event of him pulling out his cello and playing exquisitely in the foyer of a London hotel.

There are lots of Matthew Pikes on the web. He is the one that gets all the articles in the Guardian and looks about ten years younger than he really is.

We were a team of Directors covering England and Wales. I was East Anglia. We met every month around the country and I remember these team meetings as intellectually stimulating and energising. Matthew was an inspiration, though long term his management was a bit shaky and he and Ray fell out.

My saving grace was I managed to create a team around me who were fully functioning and immensely loyal to me. With the ultimate collapse of Scarman 3 years or so later two of them took over the area and set up their own company, Can Do Communities, http://candocommunities.co.uk/, which is still going. Another guy I took on secondment from HM Customs remains a close friend. Matthew continues his entrepreneurial endeavours.

What did I learn from this time? It was the closest I ever came to starting a business. I wanted to combine my interest in travel and set up a small group travel company in developing countries. One of the team had been a financial director in a travel company. We went and did a recky of El Salvador. I had some of the skills necessary, but was unable to pull together the right team that might have made it a possibility. Now organisations like Intrepid run these types of trips all over the world. My only reservation about them is that as their success builds they are moving away from locally run hotels and building their own accommodation. I think this is mainly because so many travellers are so fussy about things like en suites, but of course they make more profits that way.

I owe The Scarman Trust a lot. For 3 years I worked the equivalent of one day a week managing two staff as well as my full time job with North Herts. This proved essential to my economic survival as my teenage children were at the expensive stage and for two years I had two of them at university at the same time.