Winchburgh Development Trust

Helping a board build a shared understanding of sustainability and focus on activities with potential to grow revenue and sustain mission.

Helping a board build a shared understanding of sustainability and focus on activities with potential to grow revenue and sustain mission.

What We Did

We facilitated a board sustainability session for Winchburgh Development Trust, helping the board build a shared understanding of what sustainability means for the Trust and a practical framework for deciding where to focus their energy. The session introduced five dimensions of sustainability, people, networks, finance, environment and social impact, and introduced practical tools that the organisation can use to measure their activities against to understand their sustainability.

The clearest outcome was agreement that the Trust was trying to do too much, and a shift towards narrowing focus to four or five key activities with real potential to grow revenue and sustain mission.

How We Did It

We facilitated the session with the Board, working together to develop a shared and practical definition of sustainability across five dimensions, rather than treating it as a purely financial question.

We introduced a practical tool to support decision-making and encourage honest discussion about where the Trust’s energy and resources were currently being invested, and the financial and social return this was generating.

We guided the Board towards agreement on narrowing its focus to four or five priority activities and clarified the Board’s role in supporting the Development Manager to take this work forward.

What Did Participants Say

“I wanted an external voice, because as the one making the recommendation, I worried the directors might not really hear it from me. The Melting Pot got that straight away. The fun, informal approach was exactly right, it’s a lot to ask volunteers to give up three hours of an evening, and the environment they created was relaxed enough that some of our directors were properly meeting each other for the first time. The next morning, one of our directors was already proposing we build bird boxes to sell at the farmers’ market. That’s the shift from grant-seeking to profit-generating thinking we needed.”

– Leigh Lauder, Development Manager

Women’s Support Project

Creating space for a team to reconnect, reflect on change and shape how they wanted to work together going forward.

Creating space for a team to reconnect, reflect on change and shape how they wanted to work together going forward.

What We Did

We spent one-to-one time with the project manager to understand the team’s context and history, including the individual pressures each person had been carrying.

We designed a day around a deliberate emotional arc, using our innovation tools to create space for the team to reconnect and build trust before going deeper into exploring where they had been and where they wanted to get to.

We opened with warm-up activities and structured reflection to help people reconnect and gently surface differences in working styles. We then moved into exercises that explored what had helped the team cope and what could still undermine trust going forward.

We took the team away from their usual surroundings, giving them the opportunity to reset, reflect and switch off from the day-to-day.

How We Did It

We designed and facilitated a session for the senior team using our social innovation tools, creating space for them to step away from the day-to-day, honestly surface risks and priorities, and look ahead at what needed to be put in place to support the organisation’s growth and strategic aims.

We then pulled out the key themes from the session and worked with the Senior Leadership Team to develop three scenarios: best case, worst case and current case. This also included considering wider risks and their potential implications.

We developed the findings into a full report for the Board and team, bringing together the narrative from the session, a clear scenario summary and three core recommendations.

What Did Participants Say

“The Women’s Support Project were really pleased to work with The Melting Pot recently; we benefited from Helen’s experience in creating a staff development day that felt well-paced, responsive and considered as we explored what periods of change and organisational development meant for us individually and as a small charity in the Violence Against Women sector”

–  Helen Provan, Strategic Manager