Lots of blogging this week about what we have all learned during over the last year. For me and the team at the Ethical Property Foundation – the only dedicated property advice charity serving the UK voluntary sector – COVID was the year when our charity clients realised that property could play a pivotal role – for good or ill – in the fate of their organisation. Property shot up the agenda and our phones at EPF rang off the hook. As we look to the future, many clients are asking us, does my charity need this property? Do we need a property at all? Buildings should serve people and in a time of softening commercial property markets and cheap money, there are real opportunities. Many charity CEOs will be itching to sell up or dump leases, but property decision making is complex and involves social capital too: what about those people, including so many young people in our sector, who are desperate to return to the office?
Then there are those special buildings people feel passionately about – heritage buildings for example, or places of worship. With so much income lost to the UK voluntary sector, very tough decisions will need to be made. And when the brick dust settles, what will we have learned?
Perhaps it is about how voluntary organisations can collaborate as a sector to ensure we can be good stewards of our buildings, money, people, communities and causes? Working together, I believe, will be one of the big needs and leadership challenges as we stumble forward into this brave new COVID world.
What COVID has taught me since last March, is that, even as we keep our social distance, none of us is an island.