Finding space and paying for facilities

An interview with Gayle Brannigan, CEO of the St Mirren Foundation  

Part 4: Making use of the North Stand, and the cost of five-a-sides…

In the third part of our interview Gayle Brannigan, the CEO of the St Mirren Foundation, explained about the importance of assessing the impact of their team’s work.  Today, she tells us more about two key issues that face the Foundation…

“The first is the facilities available to us, or to any equivalent Community Trust at another club.  For obvious reasons, these vary enormously, depending on the size of the club, its consequent wealth and the physical infrastructure it has available. We are fortunate in that the Foundation is based at the St Mirren ground, which is modern and new. However, on the other hand, there is relatively little space and commercially the club need to ‘sweat the asset’ to generate as much income as they can from those areas. In addition to this, every branch of the St Mirren FC family all wishes to use the various function and meeting rooms, from the Men & Women’s first teams to the academies, Street Stuff and of course the core ops team of the club itself, this makes for a busy booking calendar. Given that the Foundation’s team has grown to five full time staff plus an additional 25 facilitators, we need more space and the club are being extremely helpful, with an area in the North Stand identified which we are keen to make use of and develop in the near future.

“The other side of the financial equation, and the greatest challenge, are the costs associated with delivering our programmes, our core costs. From the rental fee we pay to the club, our payroll costs, supplier fees to let fees we pay to One Ren for hiring space in leisure centres and five-a-side pitches, etc. all are getting more expensive year on year, but every organisation, and every household are in the same situation, our outgoings are rising and to combat this we need to ensure that our annual turnover not only increases, but is sustainable”.

“We are also working hard to secure funding to purchase some vehicles which

Will greatly benefit the projects and help us to transport our more vulnerable groups with cognitive and mobility issues and help to improve the operational efficiency of the team. We are working with three grant funders on this and have

A fantastic new partner for the vehicles themselves. It’s an exciting time and we hope to have our new minibus and vans within the next quarter.”

To be continued…