When I started there, it was like it was 1994 and it was kind of beginning to be sort of bubbles and rumblings that there might be a Labour government, and I thought at the time, we need to get more in there and get that on the agenda, and that’s what we did as a kind of strategy, really. There was a whole – I could talk about that in a minute. But I also thought, because of the work that we were doing with bereaved families, then it was possible that we could maybe become a charity as well as the unincorporated organisation, so that we could access more funding. And so I kind of worked quite closely with people on the management committee.
So that we’d meet the management committee once a month, it would be like an evening meeting and meet the management committee once a month and we’d sort of work with them to get to that point, and gradually start to make it a bit more of a kind of, you know, a management committee that was a bit more strategic and less getting involved in the operational. But that was the big thing, really, I think, trying to, you know, enable INQUEST to have a charitable arm that would mean we could apply for grants from a lot of the charitable foundations. I think it, it was like, yeah… I’m just trying to think. And then it kind of grew, so we gradually got some more caseworkers and some more… and an office manager. So it was like incrementally trying to sort of nudge the organisation along and- but getting that charitable status was really important. It was really complicated, because we had the charitable part and INQUEST, and it wasn’t without controversy in the wider community, because INQUEST had always been like able to just say whatever it wanted, because it was an unincorporated organisation. And there was a lot of scepticism, I think, from people saying, well, if you do that you won’t be able to say what you want. And I spent a lot of time talking to people about, look, this is what it says, as long as it’s related to your charitable objectives, you can speak on behalf and say things. But we were always a bit nervous around kind of- it’s quite hard to describe those times, it felt very, very marginal and very edgy, what we were doing, and it was quite, you had to be quite careful about- well, not that we weren’t careful, but there was a fear that someone would come and say, challenge the fact that we were saying what we were saying in terms of speaking out after death and things.
And the fear being that you may lose the charitable status?
Yeah. Which would then mean we couldn’t access the funds. And I think a lot of the work, and in a way I think what Deb and I managed to do, was to kind of tread a really complicated line, which was to be able to stay, able to speak out, but also make sure we didn’t do it in a way that totally alienated people so that charitable funders still wanted to fund us, people still wanted to invite us into the room to hear what we’ve got to say, even though sometimes it didn’t feel like that when you were in there.
