Support for local networking: Garelochhead Station Trust's experience during Covid-19

One of the most effective ways of supporting community-led activity is to create the conditions for community and voluntary organisations to work, learn and grow together. Garelochhead Station Trust benefitted from this kind of support provided by Argyll & Bute Council.

Supporting the community-led response

Some voluntary and community organisations who have been delivering emergency support during the pandemic have benefited from networking support provided by their local authority. One local voluntary organisation in Argyll & Bute, Garelochhead Station Trust was very positive about the support provided to community organisations by Argyll & Bute Council during the covid-19 pandemic.

Garelochhead Station Trust is part of the local Caring for People team facilitated by Argyll & Bute Council bringing together voluntary and statutory groups.  The local teams sit under the local authority area-wide Caring for People partnership, comprising of Argyll and Bute HSCP Public Health, Argyll and Bute Council and the Third Sector Interface which was set up to provide guidance, community support, and ensure no one was left behind during the pandemic.

The Trust described the council’s support as follows:

“We were very lucky in Argyll & Bute in that the council’s community development team basically split the local authority area into little areas, and they identified a voluntary organisation in that area that could then talk to other voluntary organisations in that area.

“One of the things it did was to make sure our volunteers weren’t furloughed. Their service delivery changed, because then started delivering food parcels, subscriptions etc, but they still felt engaged with wider community and with the members.

(Morevain Martin, Garelochhead Station Trust in Argyll & Bute, April 2021)

A wealth of information

As one of the named organisations, the Trust was then able to feed back into the bigger picture. For instance, if one particular family in an area required support this could be fed back to Caring for People and the famility could be given appropriate support. Morevain explains that this works because small local organisations know their client groups, their communities, who is likely to be struggling and who will volunteer.

“All that wealth of information was centralised, and it meant that if we as an organisation had got the responsibility for Garelochhead and the Rosneath Peninsula and another organisation had got the responsibility for Rhu and Lower Helensburgh, if there was something that was needed in Garelochhead but I knew it was being delivered in Helensburgh I could contact that organisation and say “can you deliver over here?”.

“The amount of networking that has increased through this will have a long-term impact. And it also means that we, as an organisation, our profile’s higher amongst other voluntary organisations, and other voluntary organisations’ profiles are higher with us.

“Again, if we’ve got a member who requires a service which we can’t deliver, but I know there’s another organisation locally, I can refer them onto there. And very often, because of the age of our members, we will support them to access that service.

“An example would be – you’re talking about IT – a lot of our members don’t engage with IT, but we would be able to bring them into the office or give them access to a laptop or the internet so that they can engage in that and access another service they wouldn’t normally access.

“So, that is one of the big positive impacts that covid has had as a third sector organisation.”

(Morevain Martin, Garelochhead Station Trust in Argyll & Bute, April 2021)

Person in the local community being supported by Garelochhead Station Trust

Other local authority support

Argyll and Bute Council offered support to community organisations to access the funding required to help deliver a local response.  This included signposting to Scottish Government emergency funding streams and assistance through Argyll and Bute Council’s Supporting Communities Fund.

In addition, Argyll & Bute Council covered the insurance costs for any new groups who required it and for established groups who might have had to pay any additional costs to cover their change of activities. This included community councils and volunteers carrying out food parcel delivery, who were both insured under the council’s insurance.  New groups set up for the pandemic response were also supported with information around policies and processes, including confidentiality, safe transportation of medicines and lone-volunteering.

Community engagement

Argyll & Bute Council was also keen to engage with community organisations in order to ensure their support was effective. In late 2020 the council held online discussions with some of the Covid Recovery Groups. The discussions were facilitated by Scottish Community Development Centre, and the resulting recommendations then went out for wider consultation with the community. They were eventually fed into the Building Back Better (Strengthening Communities) workstream of the council’s overall Recovery Framework.

More information

• Find out more about Garelochhead Station Trust on their website.

• See Argyll & Bute Council’s website for more on their support for community and voluntary organisations responding to Covid-19.

• Argyll and Bute Community Planning Partnership has written a summary of the work of the Caring for People partnership up until November 2020. Download as Word document from Argyll and Bute Council’s website.

• View more case studies and stories from community organisations across Scotland, inlcuding those responding to Covid-19, on our Spotlight section.

People in the local community being supported by Garelochhead Station Trust