2009 Yearbook

16 Y e a r b o o k 2 0 0 9 BUILDING · CONSERVATION INSTITUTE · OF · HISTORIC · South East branch events • on climate change Wales branch events in Cardiff and • Llandudno on strategic policy. Clearly, given our small teams of officers and local and national volunteers, such wide-ranging achievements depend on effective partnership. In an organisation like the IHBC, partnering involves not only external interests, but also underpins our internal team- working. Indeed partnering is a core value both for our members (including your director) and for the IHBC as a corporate body. It is an essential instrument in the toolkit of conservation, and our 2008 Annual School in Guildford provided a good practical example of its breadth and potential. The IHBC’s Annual School is the main training event in the calendar of any serious historic environment professional, addressing CPD needs, updating delegates on topical issues and providing practical and applied lessons in the current tools of the trade. As such, it is the central educational platform for the IHBC, as we help professionals to maintain currency in their own specialist areas and to shape standards across their conservation activities. In Guildford in 2008 we explored the conservation and enhancement of areas. New legislation and place- assessment tools helped members explore the feel of a place and how it might be managed under rapidly evolving legislation. This theoretical exploration was balanced by the sharp focus of ‘classes’ and site visits. That combination of vision, practice and example will remain at the heart of future schools, not least our 2009 Annual School in Buxton, Derbyshire. Against that background, our partnering at Guildford exemplified how the IHBC’s volunteers and national office can work together to raise awareness of our work. We submitted our joint response to the draft Heritage Bill during the school, posted it on our website for all our members to scrutinise, and provided a timely platform for Baroness Andrews to cover the government’s perspective in her keynote speech to the Day School. Here she could speak directly not only to our own members, but to senior officers of numerous other bodies with conservation interests, many helping directly with the school’s activities. We created this enhanced outreach through our school’s partnering strategy. We encouraged attendance from a substantial range of senior political, professional and voluntary organisations, some as speakers, some as delegates, and some as exhibitors. That representation spanned the spectrum of interests that shape conservation: Rob Cowan, urban designer and Context editor; Rynd Smith of the Royal Town Planning Institute speaking about planning issues; Ian Lush of the Architectural Heritage Fund guiding seminar delegates on funding; and Ros Kerslake of the Prince’s Regeneration Trust. As ever, integrating historic environment conservation interests remains the order of the day for the IHBC. The knock-on effects of such partnership are no less significant. Baroness Andrews attended the launch of the IHBC’s Historic Environment Service Providers Register (HESPR), our new trade listing, making her the first member of government to hear about it. Indeed we have developed HESPR to encourage more formal links between our own conservation standards and those bodies that provide dedicated historic environment services. HESPR uses IHBC members’ professional roles to secure quality assurance in the service standards of their employers. Promotion then comes through the IHBC’s communications network, in particular our website, which currently receives about 19,000 hits per day, or some 7 million per year. Already we have reports of specialists seeking to join the IHBC precisely because of the commercial benefits of the HESPR service, so as a partnering strategy it is already reaping benefits. The IHBC website is fast becoming our most important tool in other ways too, underpinning our partnership with our members. Through the communications from the NewsBlog on our homepage, our website is available as a source of knowledge transfer to the entire global network of IHBC members, as well as to any person interested in our work. Members can enrol in the update service easily from the homepage. Of course partnership isn’t just about supporting, but being supported, and English Heritage’s financial investment has been invaluable in helping the IHBC focus our training at the annual schools. We are hugely grateful for that support, and to the other sponsors and partners, our ‘school-friends’, again including English Heritage, who made the event such a success. Ultimately, however, the school was most important for showing how, working together, branch volunteers and the national office could unite behind a consolidated agenda of education and advocacy. The heroes of the school, without a doubt, were the volunteers who took such trouble and time to organise, promote and inform the event. The institute’s gratitude, though substantial and vociferous, can reflect only a small part of our debt. The school’s success marked the potential of that partnership and the way forward for the future. And so it will be again in Buxton in 2009, as the dramatic video promotion from our East Midlands branch shows (the video is available on the IHBC website and on YouTube). Buxton will be another memorable partnership between the branches and the national office, and it will provide further confirmation of the power of partnering in packs. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk Baroness Andrews addresses the IHBC Annual School (Photo: Fiona Newton)