11 tips on building resilience

A blog by Catherine Leonard, Secretary-General

On 28 January we partnered with National Trust of Trinidad & Tobago for a webinar on INTO’s 2021 theme of ‘Building Resilience’. This was a fantastic lead into our conference INTO Online 2021, where we’ll continue to focus on this theme. We were overwhelmed with the positive feedback, and we’d like to thank our partners and all the participants.

We all learned so much and took pages of notes. This blog is an attempt to bring some of those ideas and resources together in one place. There is a full report of the discussion here and if you would like the recording, please contact us.   We’re also sharing 11 tips and learnings from our speakers in the grid below.

The discussion revealed underlying factors influencing how National Trusts have responded to the pandemic. And many of these are directly linked to our values.  We heard about building relationships and showing we care about people.  Not always charging for things – but not being scared to ask for money when we need to. Delegates also talked about working fast and creatively. Adapting to the changing needs of our different audiences and society in general.

And this is not something new. Over twelve decades, the National Trust movement has responded to the concerns and preoccupations of each new generation with courage and enthusiasm.

Over the past year, we’ve leveraged technology in extraordinary ways and done things we might have thought unthinkable in the past. We have surprised ourselves and, in some cases, the publics we serve.

INTO members have collaborated with new and sometimes unusual partners, strengthening our ability to reach a wider public and adding volume to our collective voice.   We’ve reengineered, in some cases, rebuilt our organisations.  This has been painful and exhausting but we’re proud of the fact that we have survived this far.

We recognise it’s not all over yet but we also know that we must not expect things to just pop ‘back to normal’ at some unknown point in the future.  Normal has changed.  Normal means different things now and in the future.

But despite all this change, what has remained constant is our resilience and audacity.  As Neisha Ghany, Vice-Chairman of the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago, said in summing up ‘the monuments we look after have endured wars, pestilence, famine, hurricanes.  They are still standing.  And so are we.  Now we have an opportunity to make our organisations and work truly essential.   By focussing on and responding to current needs.’

And it is much easier to accomplish these things when we work together.  Many of us are islands but we don’t need to act like islands.