Shared Desks, Separate Identities: Inside Dunbar’s 2026 Back-Office Pilot

Dunbar’s community groups are rarely short of purpose. They are frequently short of an hour. The same administrative tasks recur across dozens of committees: chasing a room booking, renewing insurance, filling a rota gap, filing receipts, and assembling the evidence for a grant report. Each task is modest in isolation. Together they consume the time that volunteers would rather spend on the work itself.

That is the problem the 2026 shared back-office pilot, hosted through Dunbar Neighbourhood Hub, is attempting to address. The experiment is not a merger and not a centralisation of community life. It is a practical test of whether certain routine functions can be delivered once, on behalf of several groups, without eroding the distinct identities and decision-making of the organisations involved.

The cost of well-meant duplication

Small groups often begin with a single volunteer holding several roles: treasurer, bookings secretary, safeguarding lead, and grant writer. This is workable for a season and unsustainable over years. When the same person is also the group’s main point of contact, administrative delay becomes personal strain. A late insurance renewal or an incomplete grant return is rarely a sign of indifference; it is usually a sign that one person has run out of evenings.

The pilot begins from a simple observation. Much of the administrative burden is not unique to any one group. The processes are similar, the deadlines cluster, and the knowledge required is often held informally by one or two people. Sharing that knowledge and some of the routine processing is intended to reduce duplication without removing responsibility from each group’s committee.

What the pilot pools

The shared service is deliberately narrow. It currently covers four areas: room and venue bookings, insurance renewal coordination, volunteer rota administration, and basic finance processing such as receipt logging and grant-report collation. A shared calendar and a single booking request route reduce the number of separate enquiries to the same halls. Insurance renewals are tracked against a common timetable, with each group still confirming its own cover levels. Rota administration uses a shared scheduling tool, while each group retains control of its own volunteer list. Finance support is limited to organising evidence and preparing returns for sign-off; no group’s funds are held in common.

The pilot also provides a small reference library of template policies and a weekly administrative clinic, staffed by a part-time coordinator. Groups can use as much or as little of this as they need. Participation does not require a group to adopt every element.

What stays with each group

The boundary is important. Governance remains with each committee. Safeguarding decisions, membership questions, confidential casework, and the direction of each group’s work are not part of the shared service. The pilot does not create a joint committee, and it does not give the Hub authority over any participating organisation’s mission or spending.

This distinction matters in a Scottish context. Charity trustees remain responsible for their own organisation’s compliance with OSCR requirements, and the pilot’s role is to help them meet those duties rather than to assume them. Similarly, PVG checks and safeguarding arrangements stay with the group that engages volunteers. The shared desk can prompt and prepare; it cannot decide.

Measuring whether it works

The pilot will be judged on whether it returns time to frontline volunteers. Four measures are being tracked through the 2026 test period. The first is administrative hours: the estimated time saved per group per month, recorded through a short baseline and follow-up survey. The second is turnaround: how quickly bookings are confirmed and grant evidence is assembled. The third is continuity: whether rotas are filled with less chasing and whether key tasks are completed when the usual volunteer is unavailable. The fourth is volunteer retention and confidence, gathered through brief interviews rather than a long questionnaire.

There is also a qualitative test. Does the shared desk reduce the sense of isolation that comes with being the only person who knows how a particular process works? Do volunteers feel that support is useful rather than intrusive? These questions are as important as the count of hours saved.

Risks and safeguards

Shared administration carries real risks. A group may become dependent on a service it does not control. A coordinator may inadvertently become the de facto decision-maker. Confidential information may be handled by someone outside the group. The pilot’s safeguards include written service boundaries, a data-handling protocol, and a requirement that each group nominate a contact who retains sign-off authority. Groups can withdraw at any point, and no group is required to share information beyond what the specific task requires.

A further risk is uneven benefit. Groups with one active volunteer may gain a great deal; groups with a well-established administrative team may gain little. The pilot is therefore being offered as a menu rather than a package, with participation reviewed at three and six months.

What happens next

The current phase runs to the end of 2026, with an interim review in the autumn and a final report expected in early 2027. The report will set out the hours recorded, the tasks most frequently requested, and the boundaries that proved difficult to maintain. It will also indicate whether a permanent shared service is justified, and if so, how it should be funded and governed.

For Dunbar’s community groups, the appeal of the pilot is not efficiency for its own sake. It is the prospect of fewer evenings lost to paperwork and more time spent on the work that brought people together in the first place. Whether shared administration can deliver that without blurring the identities of the groups it serves is the question the 2026 experiment is designed to answer.