Become a TVTA Supporter today

Early on in TVTA's inception, we were indebted to DMBinS who secured £10,000 in funding from Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Borders Council LEADER funding. This initial funding was used to help start up the TVTA to pay for essential training, tools, insurance etc. This funding was, however, not eligible to cover ongoing costs for the charity.

Whilst we are really grateful for the ongoing support from various businesses and individuals to date, most of this funding is ring fenced for specific projects, and we need your help to cover the costs associated with running the charity and to expand our core work. 

In short, we need to ensure the TVTA remains sustainable, so we invite you to join in as a TVTA Supporter.

One of the main uses for your financial support will be to enable us to carry out Dig Days on our adopted trails. Whilst we’ve previously been able to rely on awesome support from others, we now need to factor in the ongoing costs of Dig Days to our overall charity development.

Our amazing army of volunteers obviously give their time for free, but the time and money spent to get them onto the ground and playing with mud soon racks up;

• Each group on a Dig Day needs to be led by a qualified Trail Inspector and Volunteer Co-ordinator
• Each leader needs to be able to deal with First Aid issues so needs to maintain Outdoors First Aid certification 
• No point having the qualifications without the safety kit
• We need to give them tools so they don’t use their bare hands and teeth - someone almost always breaks something too!
• Cake and coffee. It’s not caviar and champagne, but we like to say thanks to people for giving up their time 
• No-one likes paying it, but we need insurance for what we do 
• Admin, website hosting costs, event fees, risk assessment platform etc. It even costs us to receive money - all needed to enable us to run the admin side of Dig Days

This all adds up to mean that the cost of a typical size Dig Day is coming in at around £450. This may sound expensive, but that gets 70-100 hours of hard work put into the trails - pretty good value.

Hopefully that helps you understand where a lot of your TVTA Supporter charge will go.

As we grow the charity and increase our rate of Digs as well as our pool of Dig Leaders, these costs will also increase - but so will the amount of lovely, cared for, woop-tastic trails!