Upskilling the Sector: A BEFS Advocacy Placement

In a time of a cost-of-living crisis, government cuts, and a growing climate threat, how do we effectively advocate for Scotland’s built environment?  

I’m Sally Pentecost FSAScot, Communications & Events Officer at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and from  September to December 2024 I undertook a work placement with Built Environment Forum Scotland (BEFS) to learn advocacy skills to bring back to my organisation.  

The Placement  

A member since the founding of BEFS, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is a learned society born in the Scottish Enlightenment and to this day is an independent voice for heritage. Thanks to the support of its Fellows, the Society has made its views known on a range of issues relating to Scotland’s heritage  sector and the built and historic environment.  

With advocacy issues in heritage on the rise, I worked with BEFS to trial a work placement to learn from their skilled team, which I could then apply to an updated BEFS resource, the Advocacy Toolkit.  

The intended outcomes of the placement were to increase my knowledge of advocacy within the Scottish heritage sector to a level where I am more confident leading on advocacy activities on behalf of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. It would also “road test” the idea of a BEFS Advocacy Work Placement with the goal of expanding the programme to other BEFS member organisations.  

Here is my experience of the placement. 

 

What Worked Well  

As expected, the knowledge-sharing benefits of this work placement were substantial. Through my conversations with Jonna Meredith, BEFS Communications & Policy Officer, we discussed the organisation’s plans for a project to improve Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Scottish built environment. I was also able to introduce Jonna to the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Scottish Heritage (EDISH) project, and its successor project, ‘White Thinking’ and the Failed Promise of Diversity in Scottish Heritage, which the Society has been involved in.  

Representing the Society at the Places of Worship Forum working group helped me to understand how collaboration happens in our sector. It also enabled me to start carving out what I think the Society’s role will be going forward when we increase our advocacy capacity; I’m thinking of the Society as a facilitator, harnessing our independent voice and Fellows network of heritage experts and enthusiasts to respond to consultations, organise letter writing campaigns, provide advice on shaping future projects and supporting funding applications.  

Furthermore, my career conversationswith the BEFS staff have been helpful in shaping my career goals and identifying what an advocacy position might look like for me in the future. By the end of the placement, I had road-tested ideas, researched other resources and toolkits, drafted a strategy document for updating the Advocacy Toolkit, refreshed its contents and made suggestions about improving accessibility of the document.  

 

Challenges  

Something that became apparent from diving into BEFS and their work is that the term “built environment” means different things to different people. There is also a difference between that term and the “historic environment”. Getting the whole sector to agree on one definition is a difficult thing!  

I was also confronted with a lack of data, both in terms of how intended audiences have used the BEFS Advocacy Toolkit in the past, and how successful advocacy resources and campaigns from the wider heritage sector had been. I also struggled to find any recent data on how people in Scotland generally feel about heritage, and where any concern sits among their other priorities, e.g. housing, healthcare and education. I was able to find some helpful data on volunteering numbers in Scotland, and attitudes towards related issues such as the climate emergency, which influenced my strategy for updating the Advocacy Toolkit, but in general, our sector struggles to collect data on public attitudes towards heritage.  

The primary challenge during this work placement was a lack of time. We had budgeted for four hours per week, or half a day’s work over three months, for this placement, which turned out to be insufficient to complete my research and implement any suggested changes. On top of that, a poorly timed cold knocked me out for a week. But as a road test for future BEFS Work Placements, this information was useful, and BEFS Director Hazel Johnson noted that future placements could be flexible and consist of half a day over six months or a full day over three months, building in contingency for things like sick leave.  

My final challenge was a question that I’m sure many readers will be grappling with in their own  work: how do we encourage more diverse voices to get involved in advocacy for Scottish heritage? Both in terms of the people working in advocacy roles, and the public who engage with advocacy. There is no one answer to this, but through the work placement we had many meaningful discussions of how we might tackle this problem. BEFS are actively addressing this challenge.   

 

Insights  

Overall, I found the work placement to be highly beneficial, and I look forward to seeing how this programme  develops in the future as BEFS continues to upskill and provide support for the Scottish heritage sector.  

The sector has a series of resources and toolkits designed to support volunteering and advocacy – for example, the Make Your Mark Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit, the Social Value toolkit, the BEFS Sustainable Investment Tool (SIT), and the Place Standard tool – but in my opinion, they’re not yet joined up, and are not implemented or promoted as well as they could be.  

BEFS is exploring the idea of creating a checklist or route map for all these relevant toolkits, creating a process to guide workers in the sector on when and how to use them to assist in their advocacy campaigns.  

At the end of the work placement, the Society and BEFS also discussed the issue of how we set the messaging for advocacy issues in the sector. What are the key thematic messages or areas that drive advocacy (e.g. the move to Net Zero) and what should the messaging from the sector be? Again, in any area of advocacy, it’s difficult to get all organisations to sing the same tune, but through their working groups, the BEFS communications team assists in coordinating efforts and developing the messaging that we as a sector should be amplifying  to get important messages across. This is something I hope the Society can also contribute to in the future.  

During this work placement, I learned that the heart of advocacy work is pushing for new legislation that increases quality of life for regular citizens. Due to their focus, BEFS uses the built environment as their route into fulfilling this broader objective and I believe that the Society has the opportunity to do the same.  

We know that research into Scotland’s past – our historic landscapes and the experiences of the people who lived here before us – is essential for informing how we can respond to social, political and environmental challenges today and in the future. Shared exploration of Scotland’s past also contributes to building relationships, improving mental and physical wellbeing, and creating a sense of identity and placemaking, which is all crucial for a flourishing society.  

BEFS is supporting its member organisations to advocate for this future, one cause at a time.  

  

Sally Pentecost FSAScot is Communications & Events Officer at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 

 

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