The Joke.

Current obsession - Brandi Carlile. What a voice by the way. "We gotta dance with the devil on a river to beat the stream" struck a chord with me today. To overcome challenges or achieve success, you have to confront difficult or risky situations head-on.

“On a river to beat the stream” suggests going against the current. Facing adversity.

The Budget.

Brandi Carlile has completely resonated with our chat around the office this week. There's been some discussion about the budget, what'll get cut, what will we get or not get. The recent UK budget has had some OK points - for example, Scotland will receive extra funding which is apparently going to be the biggest since devolution. So that's nice. More funding and support for green projects (we'll come onto that later) and the minimum wage increasing alongside the real living wage. All great!

What's not so great, is the changes to national insurance and what sort of effect that will have on third sector and small organisations/businesses that will struggle to afford such an increase. SCVO's response to the budget being released suggests that the increase to 15% national insurance contributions will cost the voluntary sector around ￡75million. That's a crazy amount of money that could be getting spent elsewhere. That coupled with the national wage increase, as great as it is from an employee point of view, that could potentially affect small places expanding services and reaching more people that need support because they can't afford to hire anyone else.

We receive funding from the Multiply fund to allow younger and older generations access to practical programmes, for free, to increase their numeracy skills and employability. Will our funding be cut from that fund? Who knows. The cost of living crisis is expected to increase demand for our services even more so than before...we are however, an agile organisation and we are able to change and adapt to meet the needs of the client group that we serve. I think we'll be ok, if we have to scale things back we will. I just feel for those who aren't in a position like we are. Only time will tell.

Climate Action.

Didn't I say I'd come back to green projects?! We spent some time today talking about different projects, new projects, how we can enhance things that we're already doing etc and I have to say, I don't think I've ever spent so much time researching clean energy projects, what we can do as a community to make change. We can all do better. The recent budget suggested there will be more funding and investment in place for green projects and it sparked conversation on what WE can do as a charity to be better.

We've got a few things in mind, that I'm not going to shout about YET, but I'm excited. I've always cared about the environment, all that lives in it and thrives. But I've never sat and thought about just how shit the world would be without all of our beautiful national parks, animals, plants etc. So yes, watch this space. We potentially have something exciting here happening at Tullochan and I can't WAIT to get started!!!

Halloween

Today is Halloween. So instead of finishing relating back to a song, you're getting a joke today.

Why do witches like hotels? They get broom service.

Happy Halloween folks!