Eug’s November blog
Admin
As the busy season has drawn to a close, I’m now getting a chance to sit down and focus on my admin work, particularly assisting Karen our General Manager with our HR admin. As AT&MT is a Living Wage accredited employer, I was invited to attend a very interesting webinar on Living Hours and we hope to work towards implementing a Living Hours policy for the Organisation. We are also members of ‘Parents and Carers in the Performing Arts’ and I am working my way through the training modules to ensure that we are enabling supportive working practices which are inclusive and accessible for those with caring responsibilities. I’m also thinking ahead to next year and working with the team to develop our plans for the Café. We are very interested in developing our space to enable more local artists and crafters to sell their work, so if you have work to sell please get in touch with Calum our Visual Arts Curator.
Rebecca has created a small pottery studio at An Tobar and with a lot of help from her, I made my first pot! We had our end of season get together recently and Scott and I did a quiz including a Gaelic guess the meaning of the word round, and a guess the flavour of the crisp round which produced some interesting results!
Green
I attended Business Energy Scotland CPD-certified Green Champion training which was incredibly useful, with a real focus on saving energy, and the importance of monitoring our energy consumption. Rebecca our CEO has written up heating policies and developed monitoring processes for the Winter period, so it will be interesting to see how our energy consumption pans out. As our buildings are closed for the winter, I will be monitoring the buildings over the next 2 months with regular checks.
We were very lucky to receive funding from the Pebble Trust for a Green Education programme for 2025, so we are looking for a practitioner to bring this interesting project to fruition. The vacancy is shared on social media and is on our website, but please get in touch if you need further information.
Eug’s October Blog
Admin
As we wrap up the season, we're shifting gears towards our Winter work-from-home phase. My role often has me jumping from task to task, covering for team members on annual leave or with ill health, so it'll be a refreshing change to settle back at my desk and dive into focused admin work. During November and December, I'll be working reduced hours to dedicate time to refurbishing our self-catering facilities. However, my ATMT duties will still include regular building checks and tackling essential HR admin projects.
This month, I had the chance to attend an insightful one-on-one session funded by HIE with AAB Consulting on Fair Work policy. They recognized our achievements in this area and provided us with an action plan for further growth, which I’ll be focusing on in the coming weeks.
Sustainable Working
Exciting news on the sustainability front! After submitting our data to Creative Carbon Scotland over the summer, we’ve seen a significant drop in our CO2 emissions for 2023-24. This progress is even more impressive given that we included staff accommodation in this year’s report for the first time. This achievement reflects our efforts, including closing our buildings in the Winter and running our Peripatetic program.
The primary source of our CO2 emissions remains the old oil boiler at An Tobar, but we're actively pursuing funding to replace it with a clean energy system. Committed to greener practices, we aim to reach the basic standard of the Theatre Green Book by 2025. Managing the complex heating systems at both An Tobar and Mull Theatre has been challenging, but we've put in a lot of work to ensure maximum efficiency.