00:12
Sarah Stone
Hello and welcome to let's talk Social value, a podcast where we explore what creating value for society means and the practical ways you can go about creating it. My name's Sarah and my guests work in different areas of social value across public, private and third sector organisations, from public sector procurement to ESG and sustainability, social enterprise and impact measurement. I'll be asking them about their work and what they've learned, and they will be sharing their tips and experience to help us all make our organisations better. Today, we're going to be talking about community benefit funds, the benefits they bring to communities, as well as some of the challenges around them and what you need to do to get them right. My guest is Rachel Searle, head of communities at Foundation Scotland. Her role is absolutely fascinating. So, without further ado, let's dive into it.

00:58
Sarah Stone
Rachel, great to have you on the show. Can I start by asking you about Foundation Scotland? Who are you and what do you do?

01:05
Rachel Searle
So, Foundation Scotland is a scottish charity, and our charitable work is distributing other people's money. So those other people, they might be families or individuals or companies, sometimes other charitable trusts and foundations who want to distribute money in Scotland, and maybe they don't have a scottish base to do that from. Basically, we will then run grant making programmes, sometimes loans as well, to support Scotland's kind of voluntary and community sector. Sometimes those funding programmes are targeted to specific themes. If the donor has a particular desire or ambition to support certain themes, sometimes the programmes are located or specific to places and certain geographies. So that's what we do. And we have a communities team, which I lead, that is working specifically with place based money. And our philanthropy team tend to support thematic programmes that we run, which tend to be more national.

02:14
Sarah Stone
I'd like to ask you a bit about the kinds of funds that you've got, the sort of the different types. But just before I do, how did you get into this? I mean, what's your background? What have you been doing?

02:24
Rachel Searle
So, for better or worse, I've been with foundation Scotland quite a long time. I'm embarrassed to say how long? But it is more than ten years. But it's less than 15. It's not that long. It's not. But when I applied and got the job with Foundation Scotland originally as a grants officer, I was trying to break what I call my two year rut. So if you looked at my cv, I tended to have been with places for two years and then got a bit bored and wanted to move on. And I was determined to break the. That cycle and so I did that. I clearly have.

02:59
Sarah Stone
Is that a reflection of how much you've enjoyed and the variety of the job and the work and how it's grown?

03:04
Rachel Searle
Absolutely. And also the fact that I've been working with an organisation that I think had faith in the kind of practises and work that I've tried to develop, and the kind of opportunity that myself and other colleagues spotted a few years ago with, particularly funds from renewables, which were starting around that time and seeing them as a real opportunity to support community development in Scotland. So my background is in teaching, training and community development, both in the UK and overseas. And when I started working with Foundation Scotland in the role of a grants officer, the organisation was structured differently then, and I was involved in running some philanthropic funds from individual donors.

03:51
Rachel Searle
But I also had the opportunity to work with some place based funds, a few of which at that time were connected with, or the source of them were the owners of some wind farms. And those were quite different funds because the way they were run was without any intervention or kind of involvement of local authorities or councils or councillors or traditional powerful people. And the arrangement seemed to be, as I learned, that communities themselves could make decisions. And I was like, whoa, this is amazing. The agreements were saying, this money is coming into communities for the operating lifetime of the asset of the wind farm. And those at that time were kind of at least 2025 years. And I was like, whoa, this is really exciting.

04:42
Rachel Searle
You know, I mean, don't get me wrong, the work with philanthropists was exciting, but actually it was the philanthropists that were making the decisions, unless they had mandated decision making somewhere else.

04:54
Sarah Stone
You know, when someone says something and you kind of go, light bulb moment, you're so right. Philanthropists, they treat it like their. Well, it is their money, it's their.

05:03
Rachel Searle
Money, but, you know, it's their money.

05:05
Sarah Stone
And they choose how to spend it.

05:06
Rachel Searle
Yeah. And, you know, I get that and I respect that. And often those philanthropists will have done a lot of good homework or have a lot of their own lived experience or whatever about why they want to give to that issue or that cause. But for me, it was very radical to, from having been a community development practitioner, where often you work with communities to help them envisage better and envision better futures, and then the question is always, and who's going to pay for this? Whereas here there was an opportunity to work with relatively unrestricted money for the long term. My question was, well, how are these communities being supported and enabled to do this kind of well? And wisely. So that's the kind of practise that the team has built over the last kind of 1015 years.

06:00
Rachel Searle
And we now support over 100 of these community benefit funds across Scotland, which is about a third of community benefit money coming into Scotland's communities from renewables projects supported by you.

06:15
Sarah Stone
That's amazing. Are you allowed to tell me how much that is in pounds?

06:18
Rachel Searle
Yeah, yeah. That's around 8 million a year. The community benefit register for Scotland currently shows, I think it's about 26 and 30. We're kind of between eight and 9 million at the moment. We hover between a kind of quarter and a third over the last 1015 years. As our work has increased and as community benefit generally has become more available to more communities in Scotland, we are kind of, dare I say, kind of market share. It hovers around the kind of between a quarter and a third.

06:52
Sarah Stone
Yeah. And so the foundation, Scotland, obviously administers funding on behalf of, as you've talked about, philanthropists and grant makers and the renewable bit, the bit that we're talking about is just what you're saying, that 89 million is just one part of the.

07:07
Rachel Searle
I think our last annual accounts we distributed last year, about 23, 24, 25 million. I should know that.

07:13
Sarah Stone
So is it only onshore wind where community benefit funds occur? No.

07:19
Rachel Searle
Great question, Sarah. So I would say the renewables industry has been pioneering and has really blazed a trail on making community benefit funds available. We have just started a process of developing our first community benefit fund related to a port in north of Scotland that is going to be a hub for the offshore industry and the growing offshore wind industry. But they, as a port, want to provide a community benefit fund of 100,000 pounds a year for the next ten years in the first instance. So it's great that a port is, as it were, jumping on the bandwagon for very good reasons.

07:57
Rachel Searle
Community benefit is also being provided by battery storage projects that are cropping up increasingly as part of the upgrade of the whole transmission infrastructure that needs to happen to cope with all the new electricity being generated from renewables and then the transmission network itself, new pylons, etcetera, will also have community benefits linked to it. And actually, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, operating out of Westminster, is currently completing its guidance on provision of community benefit from transmission infrastructure. So, you know, I know that most communities have some form of pylon or such like sitting in their midst, so in the event of those being upgraded, they would be eligible for community benefit.

08:58
Sarah Stone
I don't think I'd realise that I was aware. I was tracking the fact that transmission networks were going beyond community benefit. I hadn't really appreciated how wide reaching that was going to because that's UK wide. Right?

09:10
Rachel Searle
It is. And the sums coming from that will be significant. The guidance is proposing a particular rate. There will also, separately, the payment going to individual households, particularly affected by this new transmission infrastructure to offset against their electricity bills. That is not community benefit, but it is being developed at the same time.

09:42
Sarah Stone
Amazing. And do you know what the timescale for that is? Do you know when that's likely to be brought in?

09:47
Rachel Searle
The guidance is going to be published imminently.

09:50
Sarah Stone
Really quite exciting for communities. I hadn't realised that.

09:53
Rachel Searle
So we just need to be confident that those unprecedented opportunities, as onshore wind, was originally for Scotland some years ago. But these unprecedented opportunities convert to being well considered, well structured, well managed, well designed funds that really work well for communities and that communities themselves can have jurisdiction. Overdose.

10:17
Sarah Stone
That's absolutely amazing.

10:19
Rachel Searle
There is, certainly in Scotland, calls for a kind of national wealth fund on the back of all this increased community benefit money coming into the country. So, like I said earlier, I think if that can be protected as a community led asset for Scotland's communities, then I think that could be shaped in quite an exciting way.

10:42
Sarah Stone
You know, you think grant distribution is easy, don't you? You think it's fairly straightforward, but it isn't, is it? It's quite complicated.

10:49
Rachel Searle
It is. And certainly one of the challenges with community benefit is that there's a lot of conversation around community benefit before the money lands. And that might be to do with the community's views on the project in the first place, or it might be to do with how the money is going to be managed or administered and. Or how it might be actually used and spent when the money lands is actually when the work really starts.

11:19
Rachel Searle
Because administering money for public and community good is really messy, and when the decision making is in the hands of, you know, local people, you and I, yeah, it can get really messy, because there'll be conflicts of interest and there'll be the fact that your family and my family have a long standing feud about a bit of common land, or a bit about the colour of my fence or something, you know, or our ex second cousins, once removed, there will be lots of kind of community history, for better or worse, that will then get played out in how the money is used or deployed.

12:02
Rachel Searle
Because even if we have a wonderful opportunity to maybe, I don't know, purchase an asset, like a shop, might be closing down and we might be losing the post office or even if we might have the opportunity to open a community cafe. The organisations behind these initiatives will require committees or boards that will be populated by all types of human beings, you know, all of humanity. Yes. For better or worse, as wonderful and.

12:32
Sarah Stone
Flawed as we all are, you know.

12:34
Rachel Searle
We'Re gearing up to an election and most probably venting a lot of energy on politicians, most probably doing their level best to do their job well. But we'll have our views about that in the same way that, you know, the folk running the village hall in my village will be doing their level best, but likely I'll be disagreeing from the sidelines about decisions they're making because, you know, they're closing the hall at half six and I want to open till eight, blah. So.

12:59
Sarah Stone
And what's foundation Scotland's role in? How do you help with that?

13:05
Rachel Searle
So one thing we try and do, if we're involved in supporting the setup of a fund and then potentially the running of that fund, we will try and work with the community to design some kind of strategy for that fund. So in the same way that a good, functioning business doesn't just happen by chance, you know, a good, functioning business will have a business plan and it will have a purpose, it will have aims, it will have objectives, it will have targets. I mean, we don't quite necessarily use that language, but we will work with the community, so with the community organisations to develop a strategy for their fund. Ideally, that strategy is informed by the community having some kind of action plan for the community.

13:54
Rachel Searle
And it's great that community action plans, certainly in Scotland, have got more and more currency and are quite commonplace.

14:03
Sarah Stone
So I think that's one of the big differences between Scotland and England, is that the community action plans, I mean, if I'm wrong, but in my experience, community action plans are much more developed in Scotland. They're much more established. It would make such a difference if we had them in England, it really would.

14:16
Rachel Searle
We've had a real kind of pro policy in Scotland over the last 1015 years, has been very pro community and very pro place. And that's helped, I think, civil servants, local authorities, the state, recognise the power of place and integrate place and the value of place into its own planning. So community action plans are seen to have value, whether a community has a wind farm or a renewables community benefit fund in the pipeline or not. So if a community doesn't have a community action plan, we will encourage them to commission one and support them to find ways to fund that when they have their community action plan, we will use that to influence the fund strategy, because the community benefit fund, it might provide a million pounds a year into that community, it might provide 500,000 pounds, it might provide 20,000.

15:12
Rachel Searle
Whatever scale it might be, which is determined by the size of the project and how much, what we call installed capacity the project has, that money will be very precious to the community. So even if it's a relatively small sum, we would still say it's of value to think through, how you can maximise the impact of that. So we will have some kind of strategy that we develop with the community.

15:39
Sarah Stone
So you move it away from the conversation about, well, Bob thinks we should do this to that field, and Pam wants whatever it is, and you move it away from the personal and you move it about. And that's that role that foundation Scotland plays. It's just occurred to me that perhaps we should, just. For anybody who's listening and isn't as familiar as us with community benefit funds, can you just tell people, what is a community benefit fund? How much is it worth? And you talked just a minute ago about installed capacity. What do we mean by that? Because I think if you're in Scotland and you've been operating Scotland, lots of people are very familiar with them. But in England, when we don't have a lot of onshore wind, hopefully that's about to change. I think people just aren't really that.

16:15
Sarah Stone
The concept is quite novel.

16:17
Rachel Searle
Yeah. So the renewables industry has been really pioneering and it has provided, as well as economic benefits to a local area in terms of various forms of taxes to the local authority, business rates, for example, and obviously, you know, the land on which a wind farm is built, they will be paying a rent for that. Effectively, the owner of the project, whether it's a hydro project, so whether it's generating electricity through a hydro project, whether it's a solar project, whether it's onshore wind or offshore wind, these renewable technologies will provide annual payment for community benefit. The payment in terms of. For onshore wind is determined by what's called the installed capacity of that project. And the installed capacity is how much electricity that project can generate were it to be generated, rating 100% all the time, which they don't.

17:17
Rachel Searle
In 2012, around 2012 13, the scottish government produced some good practise principles, which were then revised in 2019. But both of those have endorsed a kind of advised rate of community benefit of 5000 pounds perennial installed megawatt. So translated a 50 megawatt project will provide 250,000 pounds a year to a local community.

17:57
Sarah Stone
Index. Linked as well, aren't they? 250,000 will grow, yeah.

18:01
Rachel Searle
So, ironically, in the last couple of years, while a lot of communities across the UK have been hit hard by the cost of living crisis and increased costs to everything and anything, actually, communities with community benefit funds have actually been gaining funds. They've really done quite well. So the community benefit fund is annual payment into a community for the operating lifetime of that wind farm, and with increased technology, et cetera. Now, those wind farms are 35 years plus. Quite transformational, the money, absolutely transformational. But, you know, then the challenge is, okay, 250, quarter of a million coming into the community of wherever, Dumfries or, you know, so who looks after that money? Who decides?

18:51
Sarah Stone
What do we mean by community? How big is it?

18:53
Rachel Searle
What do we mean by community?

18:54
Sarah Stone
Yeah, the boundaries.

18:55
Rachel Searle
Yeah, all that. So we will work with developers and communities to try and resolve some of those challenges, because there is no textbook, there is no scientific way to do this. Sometimes a developer might have a specific approach or a specific policy of saying, okay, the area of benefit will be where the wind farm is located and the surrounding communities. Some will use a radius of 10 miles or 12 miles, whatever, but there is no one way to do this. And having discussions with communities about what they understand by community and how they relate with other communities in terms of service centres, or where people go to school or, you know, where they go to work is all part of the mix of trying to understand what an optimum area of benefit might be.

19:44
Sarah Stone
Am I right in saying this is all part of the skill in doing community benefits? Right. Because actually, it would be very easy to get it wrong and just come in and, you know, if you're a developer, you just look at a map and you go, oh, well, the community is this. And not speaking to people and not having that on the ground knowledge, you can probably cause more harm than good.

20:01
Rachel Searle
So I'll give you an example. We do quite a lot of work up in the far north of Scotland in a region called Caithness. It's a very windy area. There's quite a lot of wind farm activity up there, Sarah, and there are two main towns, there's Wick and Thurzo. But a lot of the wind farm money is in the rural communities between Wick and Thurzo. And we work with a community in John O groats, which is up in the, you know, the northeast of Caithness. And they were really excited to be having the opportunity of some wind farm money.

20:34
Rachel Searle
But they were also saying, you know, we rely on the rest of Caithness, where our kids go to school and where we go to the doctors and where we shop, you know, we don't just live our life around the signpost that says John O'Groats, you know, and so they set themselves with the wind farm owners consent, didn't have a problem with it at all. They said, look, we've got our action plan and we've got things we very much want to do in John O groats to, you know, although it's a kind of bit of a go to destination and has always been. It had also been significantly under invested in the. And they developed a community action plan and had some very big projects they wanted to deliver, but equally, they wanted to make their funding available to Caithness more widely.

21:19
Rachel Searle
And they set themselves a target of spending at least 25% of their annual income, benefiting wider Caithness, and they exceed that.

21:27
Sarah Stone
That's amazing. So the community themselves said, don't just give the money to us, that's fantastic.

21:32
Rachel Searle
So I think the other great thing.

21:34
Sarah Stone
About this community developer would never have thought about that.

21:37
Rachel Searle
Yeah. But I think if one asks the right questions and listens to the responses, you can create some different kind of opportunities. Sarah, you asked as well what really foundation Scotland does in this kind of what can sometimes appear quite a chaotic world of community benefit. So, as well as helping communities design strategies for their fund to maximise the impact, and ideally, use some of the money to attract more money in, we'll also work with them on what are kind of democratic and accountable ways to make decisions. Because what we find often is, before the windfarm money arrives, a community is often just wanting to have the money, literally to have the money and see it in the Sarah Stone Community association bank account or something. Actually, when you get under the bonnet, actually what they really want is control over the decision making.

22:34
Rachel Searle
So it's the power of making decisions that I think communities have long felt stripped of, and that's what's so powerful with community benefit. So although we look, after, I said, about eight, 9 million pounds of community benefit money flowing into Scotland's communities, that only flows somewhere. When a community's made a decision on it and instructed us to make a payment to such and such an organisation, we have no control over and no power over where that money is spent. Now, sometimes we will play quite a close role with the community supporting them with the grant making, because they don't want to do it themselves. And we will assess proposals and we will provide the decision making group with those assessments. Sometimes they ask us to make recommendations and sometimes they prefer not to have our recommendation.

23:29
Rachel Searle
When we make recommendations, that's for them to disagree with. That's for them. You know, those recommendations aren't there because we think they should really fund it. Those recommendations are there because, on balance, it stacks up as a project. They can choose because they might have additional local knowledge or views, they can, of course, choose to do something else with that.

23:50
Sarah Stone
So here's their money. And they're really in the driving seat of.

23:52
Rachel Searle
Absolutely. So the other thing I just wanted to add about the kind of value we add is we try and connect communities with each other that are going through, that are on this journey, because some are just at the start and others have been doing it for 15 plus years. And so across Scotland, we try and connect communities with each other so they can learn and share. Because I think peer to peer learning is more powerful than someone like Rachel coming to talk for hours on end about community benefits.

24:21
Sarah Stone
Yeah, I've seen you do that. And that was so powerful when you did it. I wanted to ask you about the kinds of things that the money gets spent on. So, you know, what kinds of things are communities? You know, what do they choose to spend it on? What do they want funding. And also thinking about this kind of idea of it being no strings attached money, because it isn't it?

24:39
Rachel Searle
Right.

24:39
Sarah Stone
It's totally. It's not public money, it's the communities to spend. And, you know that point that you made to me about. Well, it's up to them what they want to spend it on. Do you remember you told me about the bowling club, Darrellington's bowling club? Yeah. I thought that was a really good example. Perhaps if you can just talk about that, of what can happen when a community has funds and has that power, what it looks like in the real world.

25:00
Rachel Searle
Okay, I'll speak about Dal Mellington quickly, I think the Danaskin Bowling Club, it was just outside Dalmellington. Then I'll speak a bit more widely about other things, if that's okay, Sarah. So we are administering a particular fund, and the strategy for that fund earmarked subfunds for each of the four communities. And about a week after the first payment arrived, one of those four communities learnt that one of the local bowling clubs, which is a fairly iconic facility, much valued, much loved, much cherished, very popular, was going to fold and was going to be put up for sale. And in fact, it was going to auction within about 40 hours. And this was taken everyone by surprise. State of shock, complete loss of control. And it was on the market for sixty five k. And then it was going to go to auction.

25:56
Rachel Searle
If it hadn't sold by the Friday something, there was going to be a very quick sale. And the development trust, who we had been working closely with to develop the fund strategy for their portion of the fund, etcetera, you know, they said, actually, could we just use sixty five k to buy this? And it's kind of like, is that what you want? Has your board approved that? Yes. Fine. Okay. Transferred the money, it all happened. They bought, the club, was saved, it's now in community ownership. And that all happened literally within a few days. Sarah. And it was amazing that the wind farm owner had paid the money as promptly as they had. Unfortunate that this crisis then happened about this community asset, but amazing that the community benefit fund could respond in such an agile and quick way.

26:44
Rachel Searle
I would say, though, that the work we had done with Dan Mountain Parish Development Trust and other community organisations for the three years leading up to that enabled that quick response.

26:56
Sarah Stone
It's a great example of what can happen if you get it right and.

27:00
Rachel Searle
If you lay firm, what, I'd say firm foundations. So there's a clear audit trail for why that decision making could happen as quickly as it did.

27:09
Sarah Stone
I bet you there are people in communities who listen to this and just think, oh, my goodness, so they've spent years fighting to save assets and.

27:16
Rachel Searle
Yeah, and, you know, the amount of red tape required, you know, we had all the governance, due diligence, information needed about where the money was going to be paid to. That is into down Allington Parish Development Trust bank account. We'd done all that due diligence. The red tape work had been done, as it were, in the preparation for the design of the fund and thinking through the decision making processes, etcetera. So that was great. And it was great to go to the final handover and opening of that event a few months ago.

27:46
Sarah Stone
Yeah, I heard about it from the community. It's hair on the arms kind of stuff, isn't it?

27:51
Rachel Searle
Absolutely. So community benefit money can be used and is being used all the time to secure community assets, whether that's a community being able to buy some land, or whether it's community being able to take ownership of a building or a space, or even in one instance, they've invested it into a community owned hydro. When that was being developed, this community also was receiving community benefit from a wind farm. Meanwhile, another community organisation was developing a hydro and they invested some of the money into that alongside actual physical assets. Communities are using community benefit fund to address social issues. There's some really great examples, Sarah, of community benefit funds being significant in social or affordable housing projects. On the kind of west side of Loch Ness, there's a great community company called Fort Augustus and Glen Morriston Community Company.

28:49
Rachel Searle
They don't use a third party like ourselves to hold their community benefit, they hold it themselves, which is fine, it's great. And they do that really capably and competently and have delivered some really strategic projects, including our 16 bed fantastic kind of housing unit, to address the shortage of affordable housing in their area, which means that young families can stay in the area or can choose to live in the area. So addressing kind of social issues is something that community benefit funds can do. In the northeast, there's a community benefit fund called Unlock our future, which is particularly focused on supporting climate, community led climate action, whether that's supporting active travel programmes in communities, or retrofitting community buildings to be more energy efficient, or whether it's education and awareness raising.

29:44
Rachel Searle
I would say also, though, that community benefit funds can provide real value in terms of smaller grants that are transformative. So actually for elderly person's lunch club to be assured of receiving 1000 pounds a year, that it can function well to do what it's doing, not just to provide a communal meal for elderly folk in the area, but maybe also help address some issues of social isolation, maybe actually extend the lunch by half an hour with some chair based exercises, so they not only eat, but they maybe get a bit of physical activity which they might not otherwise get, maybe also a slightly higher grant could enable citizens Advice Bureau to run an outreach service at the end of the lunch. So folk who maybe are not aware or even thinking of access to benefits that they don't know about, but they're entitled to.

30:49
Rachel Searle
So you can begin to see how actually just a small little grant for a lunch club could then grow to have quite a lot of impact.

30:59
Sarah Stone
I'm just listening to you and I'm thinking, you know, I've said you've quite a lot of work in social value in the public sector space as well. And I'm thinking, one of the things I'm always doing is looking for ideas and looking for things that people need. You know, what is it that you need? What is it that a company could do? And it strikes me that the kinds of grants that communities are choosing to spend their community benefit money on kinds of projects are great examples of things they obviously need, you know?

31:25
Rachel Searle
That's right.

31:25
Sarah Stone
So, yes, a community benefit fund could fund that, but citizens advice is a charity. They'll bite your hand off if you're a company. And you went to them and said, can we fund an outreach programme, you know, in the local lunch club for you to go and visit them, wouldn't they? They'd say, yes, they're crying. We're crying out for that. Such a good idea.

31:42
Rachel Searle
Just a shout out, actually, for citizens advice. Some years ago in a remote Highland community where we support some community benefit funds, the Citizens Advice office, that was out with the area, okay, it was in the nearest service centre, which is called Dingwall. And this application came in from citizens Advice. At Dingwall. Initially it was like, what are they doing? Are they trying to come in on this community benefit opportunity? And communities will generally be quite suspicious of external or initially, they may well be quite suspicious of what's perceived to be an external organisation coming in on their community benefit money.

32:25
Rachel Searle
And we looked at what they were proposing and the cab was providing evidence about how many folk were making approaches to them from within the area of benefit and also how many of those were people who didn't have transport, their own transport. Transport was really poor, so they couldn't always get to the drop ins in Dingwall. Long story short, the community benefit fund gave a grant of 5000 pounds for an outreach worker to come and sit once every fortnight for 2 hours in one of the village halls. And within six months they reported back that they had helped residents claim over 90,000 pounds in unclaimed benefits. So if you're looking for a kind of return on investment. Yeah, you know, for 5000 pounds. And also this was, dare I say before outfits like Amazon were our daily bread or whatever.

33:27
Rachel Searle
So that money will have likely. Now, we didn't track 90,000 pounds, but it likely will have stayed very local. So that will have got reinvested into the.

33:37
Sarah Stone
I don't even think about that. Did the community change their view then when they saw it and they suddenly.

33:42
Rachel Searle
Absolutely. And not only that, but were able to share with other community benefit funds and communities were working with. We were able to say, have your eyes and ears open to whether your community has maybe under the bonnet, there are more kind of needs around food poverty, transport poverty, fuel poverty, that folk are maybe not quite getting the support or services or entitlements they have a right to. And we actually have supported quite a lot of cab activity across Scotland through community benefit funds have you increasingly, of course, over the last couple of years who are now providing targeted outreach services into communities. I know it's kind of sticking plaster activity, Sarah, so it's in a different realm to a community developing an asset and then beginning to trade from that and earn income.

34:39
Rachel Searle
And that, you could argue, is more transformative, whereas what I'm describing here in terms of outreach service from a cab is maybe more downstream, more of a sticking plaster, but nevertheless, those needs are there and we can't so important, we can't do the system change stuff all the time, even though that's an aspiration. And that's where increasingly communities do want to go. But there are always people in need in communities and it's important that community benefit funds aren't out of their reach.

35:10
Sarah Stone
I think it's a really important point because one of the things that I really love about community benefit funds is that it's not public money, so you can spend it on whatever the community wants as long as it's structured. I want to come onto that in a minute, but, you know, so it means that you can pay for things like core costs and things that traditional funders won't fund. And we all know that third sector and community organisations really struggle to find funding for their core costs. That's one of my bugbears. That's a whole other conversation.

35:36
Sarah Stone
And the other thing is, you know, things like flower pots and window boxes and, you know, hanging baskets and the Christmas lights and the local football team's football strip and all the things that I'm as guilty as anyone of being quite rude about, you know, you say, but those things are really important in communities and for communities, and they're the things that local people want and local people will go out and fundraise for and they're hard to get funded from other places. So community benefit funding is a great place for that money.

36:03
Rachel Searle
Yeah. And if a community has some colour from either, you know, the flowers or the lights, you know, that gives folk a sense of pride. That does make you feel better. And I know that sounds. I can't quantify that. And maybe someone does need to go and study that and quantify it so that these kind of, these things can be valued. Yeah. Because the allegation is this is just frittering money away. It's frittering money away and, okay, within reason. So a community that spends hundreds of thousand pounds on Christmas lights, okay, that is, maybe I get that is excessive, I think, but let's not suggest that is the default. It's not. That will be the exception. And there will always be some kind of communities that will kind of go completely over the top.

36:49
Rachel Searle
But those small kind of celebratory things in communities build such social capital, Sarah, you know that more than anyone, and they shouldn't be dismissed, but I think they can easily get dismissed because sometimes the stories about both the social capital they build, but also the other more strategic, transformative activity that community benefit is supporting, maybe those stories haven't got shared widely enough or haven't filtered through.

37:18
Sarah Stone
So, yeah, I wanted to ask you that as well, because I know I was really sceptical when I first started working in this space. And I remember thinking, you know, all community benefit is there is that perception by a lot of people. It's sort of a bribe, you know, to offset. You have to have something unpleasant. And I would also question that when farm is unpleasant, now that I know much more about them, but do they always mean a positive impact? And, you know, there are some examples, aren't there, of farms that haven't delivered the benefits and that aren't as good as they should be. What's the sort of downside of them and what do you need to do to make sure that doesn't happen to your fund?

37:52
Rachel Searle
So I think the downside, a downside is when a community doesn't see or feel the benefit of this money, when it's maybe gatekept for pet projects or activity that decision makers are kind of completely zoned in on. So I think what I'm saying is when the decision making is not transparent, when the fund isn't run in a kind of accountable or democratic way, then I think you can run into problems. I think that the kind of governance, to use a jargony word, the governance side of things is really important, Sarah, because it may well happen, you know, communities are what they are, but it may well happen that not everyone in the community will ever know about the community fund.

38:44
Rachel Searle
You know, in the same way that not everyone in the community will know the bus times or not everyone in the community will necessarily know that a big plantation for a new school is there or, you know, it's just not how communities are. Even quite small communities struggle with communication. So I don't think it's so much about whether everyone knows about it or not. I think it's how it's run. And if it's run in a transparent and accountable way, because however transparent you are doesn't mean still that people will always know because people are selective about what they choose to know. So I think that's really critical. I think another thing that can kind of bring a fund into disrepute is, dare I say, when the developer or the owner of the asset.

39:31
Rachel Searle
Developers sometimes are unhelpful word to use, Sarah, because it implies the organisation that developed the project, and often these projects are bought and sold about the asset owner. Sometimes there have been occasions where the asset owner has become a bit elusive, or not have their systems in place to be making sure that these annual payments happen regularly.

39:54
Sarah Stone
So you're being really nice, maybe because.

39:57
Rachel Searle
Of the kind of strong relationships we have with a lot of the asset owners we work with. That's not our experience. But I know of some community funds where that has been a challenge and or when the asset changes hands. I was about to say then something happens to the payment and that can kind of instil a sense of frustration, understandably in a community. Dare I say another? And this again relates back to the governance point. Sarah. We do have some instances where community funds in Scotland have been in the hands of local authorities and communities would suggest that they haven't seen the benefit of those funds. And that's because historically they've been quite far away from the decision making on it.

40:41
Sarah Stone
Yeah, I mean, local authorities do a great job and we know how tough it is out there, especially economically for them. And absolutely, I've definitely seen that happen where you've got local, especially when you've got quite a lot of community benefit fund money coming into a particular area, which you can get can't if it's quite windy. And local authorities, they'll often think, well, we'll have half that money, it can come to us and we'll distribute it equally. Why should all of that money go to 3000 people just because they happen to live in this? And I can see that, but I've never seen that end well. So there's a lot of chat about the fact that community benefit funds should become mandatory. What do you think about that?

41:19
Rachel Searle
I'd be anxious about that, Sarah. I think if asset owners, developers, if they were legally required to provide community benefit, I think a number of things would happen. It would become almost just like another form of taxation. More taxation isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't want to suggest that paying more tax is a bad thing, but I think the implications are that community benefit would become institutionalised. I think it would likely be channelled through the state, most probably, even if it wasn't channelled through the state, it would likely be tendered for through a statutory process that we know is likely full of red tape. And I think communities will not be at the heart of decision making any longer.

42:09
Rachel Searle
I think community benefits, positioned as it is doing enormous amounts of positive things in communities, certainly in Scotland, in a way that celebrates and works with the kind of mess of community and the mess of working in a bottom up way. What we don't have 15 years on is loads of fraudulent activity happening all across Scotland and no benefit, no visible impact of community benefit. We have, I would say, very few cases of mismanagement of community benefit funds. We have some really transformative activity happening in communities. We have communities becoming more ambitious as a result of having the opportunity of community benefit. I think we have a groundswell of real strong community leaders. We have more and more development trusts, anchor organisations getting established. We have really positive evidence that community benefit works as it is.

43:13
Rachel Searle
So please don't muck around with it by suddenly making it mandatory would be my plea.

43:18
Sarah Stone
Nothing else I can say to that because I couldn't agree with you more.

43:21
Rachel Searle
But, yeah, it is unequal and it is unjust.

43:24
Sarah Stone
Okay, let's talk about that.

43:26
Rachel Searle
So community benefit is great. If you live in an area which happens to be receiving community benefit, or happens to be in a very windy area, or a very, you know, lots of rivers, lots of hydro, whatever, then you are lucky. You are a lucky community wherever you are. In terms of. In Scotland, we have the scottish index of multiple deprivation, okay? So you may be a very affluent community, very little, low levels of fuel poverty, many families with steady incomes, etcetera, or you might not be. It's luck whether you have access to community benefit funding. So there is a very reasonable case to make that as more community benefit becomes available in Scotland and it is growing at a rate of not.

44:11
Rachel Searle
Sarah, if Scotland's net zero targets are going to be achieved, then by between 2030, 2035, we're looking at possibly 60 70 plus million of community benefit annually coming into Scotland's communities. That exceeds the National Lottery community funds budget, which is the kind of most known funder of community activity in Scotland. So this is big. And it's not just onshore community benefit. We're also getting community benefit from transmission networks. So the pylons, the battery, energy storage, all the network transmission infrastructure needs to be revamped to cope with the scale of renewable energy projects coming down the line. So there is going to be a lot more community benefits. So there is an argument for saying there needs to be some process whereby a greater number of communities can have access to this amazing opportunity.

45:12
Rachel Searle
I don't think necessarily the answer to that is suddenly regulating it. But I do believe that the community movement in Scotland, which is strong, and there are a number of community led organisations that serve members, like DTAs Development Trust, association for Scotland, Community Energy Scotland, Community Land Scotland, there is a very strong, vibrant community sector, and I believe that community sector can provide some solutions to making community benefit more just and more equal.

45:44
Sarah Stone
Is there work happening in this space? Are there people thinking about it?

45:48
Rachel Searle
Yeah, work has started on that. So my hope and wish and foundation, Scotland, is part of those conversations too. My hope and wish is that we, the community sector, will have sufficient muscle to be able to provide some solutions here. I'm not saying that local authorities or the state won't also be part of that conversation, but I think that the solution needs to be community led to making community benefit more just and more equal. The example I gave of Kate Ness earlier on in our conversation, I think speaks volumes. Sarah. You know, communities will do it if you trust them that are already doing this. It's just because there isn't a wind farm in the middle of Glasgow that Glasgow's communities can access then. The statement, as I have often said, is that it's unjust and it's unfair and unequal.

46:35
Rachel Searle
But if you look more kind of locally, there are examples where. Where it is already being spread. We work with a number of funds that are almost regional in scale. You know, one in Dumfries and Galloway involved. Two in Dumfries and Galloway. One involves 28 communities, another involves 42. You know, these aren't just small communities having access to large pots of money.

46:58
Sarah Stone
Do you think community benefits changes attitudes towards onshore wind, or towards whatever the infrastructure development is that's funded it?

47:06
Rachel Searle
So I think there's a case for saying that actually, onshore wind has generally been pretty accepted in Scotland for many years. And I think I would say, though, yeah, I think community benefit has helped communities see value in what these projects can bring beyond electricity. I think there is a concern in some of Scotland's communities now, though, Sarah, it's not so much whether onshore is an issue or not, it's more the cumulative impact of quite a number of projects in some areas which will involve wind, it will involve battery storage, and it will involve bigger pylons. And I think that kind of cumulative impact in some communities, irrespective of how brilliant the community benefit fund might be, working for that community, that's a challenge going forward.

48:05
Rachel Searle
Part of the answer, I think, is finding joined up ways between the owners or the developers of those different projects to get them to collaborate, to try.

48:17
Sarah Stone
And reduce some of the impact on community. Yeah, there's a huge amount that could be done if that was to happen.

48:23
Rachel Searle
I completely agree. Yeah. One other point I wanted to make to do with your question about what is community benefit, if that's a okay. And that was simply to say that I think one other reason why we often get involved is because we are a charity. And so the funds that come through us, whether it's a philanthropist's money or whether it's money from, you know, a wind farm, once it sits with us, it has the status of being charitable. And that's important because I think that gives the asset owner comfort that the funds will be used for charitable purposes and for public good. They will not provide personal benefit to Rachel Searle or to Sarah Stone. Now, what is charitable is very wide and very deep.

49:12
Rachel Searle
So, for example, we've had community benefit money support private businesses, because in a remote rural area, those private businesses will be playing a kind of significant contribution, often to the sustainability of that community. And as long as the community benefit award is not simply increasing the kind of personal benefit of the business owner, you know, likely they're trying to create another job or take on an apprentice or improve the look and feel of their premises so they look more attractive. There was a garage in an area in the Highlands which was the only business in the community. It was also the shop and the forecourt. It looked terrible, and the community were really embarrassed about it. They, you know, it wasn't pleasant at all.

50:03
Rachel Searle
And they gave a grant for the business to, you know, literally to give it a lick of paint and for it to look much more pleasant. And then they put seating in, obviously not in the forecourt, but near where the shop was, and it actually became a social space. Now, that's a private business. So, yes, likely when that business was sold on, it sold on for a better value than it might have before that kind of enhancement was made. But the community were comfortable with that and saw value in it, and we could justify it as a charitable payment.

50:32
Sarah Stone
It was creating social value. This is a great example of social value to me.

50:36
Rachel Searle
So I just wanted to give that caveat, because there are some arrangements where the community benefit is not held in a charitable context. So, for example, there might be contexts where the administrator of a community benefit fund is nothing, not themselves a charity for example, a local authority. So the container of funds being used for charitable purposes is less robust. It's something about developers take great comfort, I think, from knowing their funds are held charitably. All right. I think they take great comfort from that. Communities sometimes see that as a barrier because a community doesn't necessarily understand that if I want to start a new business that isn't charitable, whereas we would say if your community action plan, or if the fund strategy has got in it about supporting new businesses, we'll make that charitable.

51:31
Rachel Searle
That's fine, because there's a charitable purpose around community regeneration. And actually business is a part of community regeneration. It doesn't just happen by voluntary. Feeling good business is a really important.

51:43
Sarah Stone
Part of the mix.

51:44
Rachel Searle
Yeah, hugely. I struggle a bit when I talk too much about them, charity stuff, because I think that's steeped in prejudice and misunderstanding and misperception about what charitable activity is. I mean, we got legal advice on this at one point, Sarah, when I had that garage example, I got some legal advice because I didn't want to be taken to task that wasn't charitable.

52:09
Sarah Stone
Yeah.

52:10
Rachel Searle
So we got legal advice and got assurance that was in line with our legal agreement with the developer to be charitable, you know, blah. So I feel really confident about saying that, you know, support for businesses, particularly in remote rural areas, can qualify as.

52:25
Sarah Stone
Charitable for anyone who's listening, who maybe is an infrastructure developer and either has community benefit funds that they already run or that they are, you know, going to set up, or even. They might not even be a developer because you can have all kinds of funds that people might be thinking of. Yeah, for different reasons. Have you got any tips? You know, any kind of do's and don'ts or what sort of advice would you give to them?

52:46
Rachel Searle
Well, I would sign, post them to. We wrote a toolkit on community benefit on behalf of. We can put a link a few years ago and I would say that still has currency. So I would encourage developers to have a look at that. And we deliberately made the first chapter understand the community context. So I often say when you've seen one community, and it's easy to think that because you've built a wind farm here in place a, therefore, when you build a windfarm in place b, it will all be the same. And, you know, our knowledge, we know communities are very different in different places. And I think not making assumptions about community capacity and community interest or community capability is really important. Often, you know, developers might not have time to bed in with a community.

53:41
Rachel Searle
But my sense is actually increasingly, you know, good developers will want to get to know a community and want to not just find a way to hear the loudest voices or the biggest people, but that community engagement piece is not an easy piece of work to do, parachuting in as a stranger to a community. So I would advise developers to do their homework on that and if they don't have internal resource, try and find ways that they can. You know, this is where I come from, experts like you, Sarah, to get to know communities better, that's really important. I would also say that, again, appreciate I'm running the risk of moving into. Oh, but it's all just a big bribe kind of allegation.

54:24
Rachel Searle
It's really helpful when developers can be more flexible about provision of a community benefit fund and when, for example, they can provide some of those funds upfront. Some developers only pay a year after the project has been operating, so they pay the community benefit in arrears and.

54:44
Sarah Stone
Just explain to people why that's a problem. Because I think a lot of people won't realise how long it takes to build a wind farm. Yeah.

54:50
Rachel Searle
So it can take ten years to build a wind farm, from an initial scoping through to securing consent to then actually raising the finance. So the company has the confidence to actually build the project and then you.

55:05
Sarah Stone
Can have like two or three years of construction.

55:07
Rachel Searle
Correct.

55:07
Sarah Stone
So they have all that, all the lorries and all the disruption for two or three years and then they have to wait a fourth year whilst they watch the developer or the owner earning the money. And they're not paid for a year. So you're saying pay as soon as it's operational?

55:22
Rachel Searle
Yeah. In fact, you know, some years ago were working on behalf of a developer for a number of their funds and they had a policy of providing what they called a construction fund. So actually immediately the spade went in the ground, they provided a fund for the period of construction and actually what they did during that time as well is often they provided that for an area of benefit that was wider than the final area of benefits. So they took construction into account. So if trucks were rolling through your community for a period of time, they provided community benefit. Those communities weren't then in the permanent community fund, but they had two years of community benefit money for the period of construction that worked really well. It was great. You know, if it's written into the business plan, then it's affordable.

56:14
Sarah Stone
Yeah, it is, actually.

56:15
Rachel Searle
So think carefully about your community engagement. Try and maybe be flexible about when you can start paying it, and even if it means taking it off from the latter years, bring it forward. So it may mean that actually the community fund years 49 and 50, or years 34 and 35, are paid earlier. These things can be worked out. A third thing I would say is write into your legal agreement with either the third party like ourselves, or the community organisation. If you're working directly with a community organisation, write into that in the event of the fund changing ownership, then the community benefit fund will continue. You know, somehow get that baked into the legal agreement which provides the community with confidence that whoever the owner is, at any point, the community fund will be secured.

57:10
Rachel Searle
I think also a fourth thing I would add would be that having flexibility about the area of benefit is increasingly important. And I think this links to our conversation earlier, Sarah, about trying to increase equality, justice, all those things about, you know, trying to make community benefit more democratic. What we've realised is that often there are some communities that are benefiting from multiple developments and or in some instances, community benefit areas or areas of benefit are quite small. And I think if a community and an asset owner can enter into this process with an openness about recognising we don't know what our community is going to look like in 20 years time. We don't actually know whether. What kind of population development may or may not happen.

58:02
Rachel Searle
I think making these agreements reviewable and making fund arrangements reviewable every kind of five years, that's a brilliant idea.

58:12
Sarah Stone
So you could review the area of benefit every five years?

58:16
Rachel Searle
Yeah. I was meeting with the community this morning and were talking about a potential design of a community benefit fund and were talking about an incremental area of benefit, so that initially it would be a certain community and then it would incrementally over time. Over time increase. So I think all part of the learning that we kind of bring to the party and the noise about community benefits, Sarah, which, you know, no, we didn't have it 15 years ago, but we do now. So those are some of the kind of hints and tips I think I'd give to developers.

58:54
Sarah Stone
They're amazing. Thank you so much and thank you for your time. Where can people connect with you if they want to reach out to you? You're on LinkedIn, aren't you?

59:01
Rachel Searle
On LinkedIn? Foundation Scotland is at www.foundationscotland.org dot uk and I'm at racheloundationscotton.org dot uk. If anyone wanted to email, we would welcome any responses or inquiries or anything. Have a team of 16 and growing across Scotland, so people well placed to respond and engage more about community benefit.

59:26
Sarah Stone
Amazing. You're also looking for people who might be interested to work for you as well, aren't you?

59:30
Rachel Searle
Absolutely, yeah. Really interested in folk who have skills in community development, community engagement and also managing funds, grant making and some of the churn involved in grant making and processes that sit behind good grant making. Yeah. So please get in touch if you're interested and have some skills that you think an experience you could offer into our team.

59:55
Sarah Stone
Amazing. Well, we'll definitely try and get the word out for that because I would definitely recommend working for you. Thank you. That's absolutely brilliant. I can't wait to publish this one.

01:00:04
Rachel Searle
Thanks, Sarah.

01:00:06
Sarah Stone
That's all from us today. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Sarah Stone and you've been listening to these insider tips on our monthly podcast, let's talk social value. A new episode drops every month at the end of the month, so do keep an eye out for it and please do share it with your networks and friends. Santala is a social value creation agency. We've been described by our clients as their social value seeker secret weapon. We work with large companies to help them engage with their stakeholders to deliver social value and create real benefits for communities. For more insights and tips, why not sign up to our monthly newsletter, the social value files? You can subscribe for free at Samtaler.co.uk. Thanks for listening.