Love Your Railway Week Two – Fundraising

Week Two of the “Love your Railway” national campaign is focussing on Fundraising. Where to begin? Typically listed examples of “test of character” include trekking the Himalayas and completing the Gold Duke of Edinburgh’s award. To that one could easily add “Grant Applications for Small Railway Charities”. The Moseley Railway Trust (a registered charity, in case you’d forgotten) has several income streams. In no particular order, they are our members and friends in the form of memberships and donations. Secondly, our beloved visitors who come along and ride the trains (paying for the privilege) and buy stuff in the shop (blatant advert alert- on-line shop ). Thirdly, external grant-giving bodies. The fundamental problem in the latter case is that they (rightly) have very stringent governance requirements, and the demands placed on bodies to whom grants are awarded are severe. The inevitable effect of this is that larger charities, who can afford full-time staff to manage both applications and projects, tend to attract the vast majority of grant funding. The Trust received not a penny in government (local or national) support during the pandemic; prudent management and the generosity of our supporters saw us weather the storm (so far). It’s so tempting to simply stand back and adopt the Teenager Approach of saying “It’s just not fair” – but that benefits no-one. So, we knuckle down, and our volunteers spend their evenings filling in yet another grant application form more in hope than expectation. This all sounds like a litany of despair, and it isn’t; we will succeed in the long term through hard work and persistence. But if you’ve won EuroMillions this weekend (or have a contract to print Manchester City replica shirts), just give a little thought to a 2’0″ gauge railway running trains alongside a park in Newcastle-under-Lyme.