A very damp descent!
It’s been a while since I posted anything on here – although it’s unsurprising when I look back at how busy I’ve been over the last year. My last post was a begging letter for my leap of faith from the Forth Rail Bridge. Happily I came out of that experience in one piece (if a little soggy!) and managed to embroil myself almost immediately in something else.
In the wake of the referendum, there was a noticeable increase in bigoted and xenophobic sentiment across the UK, with many far-right groups taking the result as a sign that the nation was beginning to come around to their way of thinking. Here in Leith, the local Scottish Defence League took the opportunity to deface the area with stickers and posters carrying racist and homophobic messages. Gerry and Zsuzsa, two local residents and founders of the local environmental group “Leithers Don’t Litter”, refused to stand by and watch this happen, and decided to oppose the hatred being spread by the SDL with a positive celebration of Leith’s multiculturalism and tolerance. I heard about the event by complete coincidence, when a colleague sent the detail around by email, and I arranged to meet them and offered to give them a helping hand. The next thing I knew, I’d been dragged in alongside Mo (a volunteer coordinator for a local charity) and Nick Gardner (a local councillor) to help organise the event. The biggest issue was the timing, as we had less than a month before the festival season opened, and we knew we wouldn’t be likely to get permission for road closures or the necessary police cover if we left it too late. Thanks to some last-minute support from Unite the Union, we were able to secure enough stewarding and the event was an enormous success!
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I got a brief respite near the end of October with a trip to Florence. The city is stunning, although our stay was overshadowed by the powerful earthquakes just outside Perugia, which bookended our stay. While Florence was thankfully spared even the slightest of tremors, the scenes of devastation all over the news couldn’t be missed, and it made for a very sobering experience when contrasted with the fabulous splendour and decadence of Florentine renaissance art and architecture in the Uffizi.
It brought to mind how little things have changed throughout history – in the days when Cosimo de Medici and Niccolo Machiavelli walked those streets, the works of art they commissioned were an escape from the morbid realities of medieval European life. They celebrated life in contrast to the death and darkness that were familiar facets of everyday life for people at that time. They understood that the darkness only helped to make the light seem brighter in comparison. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see everything I would have liked to during our brief stay, and a return trip is definitely on the cards for the future.
Since the summer, however, more and more of my time has been taken up working on another project, which plays more to my strengths. Those of you who know me well are probably already aware that in May, I officially became the co-founder of a new company. Triskele Services Ltd. is a project set up between myself and a long-term associate, which aims to make life a little easier for the 1.7 million people who work and volunteer in Scotland’s third sector. We both have experience of working in the third sector, and after some discussion it seemed like we would be a natural fit for each other when it came to addressing the many issues we faced day-to-day in our jobs.
Our logo – I was rather surprised to find that the golden ratio Triskele isn’t already in use!
Triskele aims to support the 40,000 small and medium-sized charities, social enterprises and community groups throughout Scotland with a range of administrative, technological and accounting services to relieve the pressure on in-house staff and reduce the sector’s reliance on costly and unspecialised consultancy firms. Our products are being developed specifically for small third sector organisations, with their needs and capabilities in mind, and will be priced at a level that is affordable to even the smallest community group.
One of the earliest products we hope to launch is Triskele Sites – a cloud service that aims to make it easy for any small charity to build a professional-looking website, without needing to worry about the technical details like server security or DNS configuration. If you run into trouble, we’re able to give you a helping hand and get things working again. And our pricing is pretty competitive to boot. Triskele sites will be available early in 2017, and there will be some excellent perks available for early adopters, so keep your eyes peeled!
Overall, I’m looking forward to 2017 – this past year has been trying, but there’s hope on the horizon. The world is changing rapidly, and the future is looking more uncertain than it has in several decades. However, this uncertainty brings new opportunities, and a chance to change things for the better, if we want to. I hope that through Triskele, I can do my part to help Scotland’s third sector evolve to face the upcoming challenges that the next few years will bring.
 New Year, New Horizons: a long overdue update on where I've been, and where I'll be going next! It's been a while since I posted anything on here - although it's unsurprising when I look back at how busy I've been over the last year.