In reply to Kimberley:
> (In reply to RohanGoel89)
>
> Scotland benefits from Scottish Government support which I understand is not the case in the rest of the UK.
It's more complicated than that. The Justice Department of the Scottish Government provides a grant to mountain rescue that is distributed through the MRCofS. It is a minority portion of mountain rescue funding in Scotland. Because of this centralised funding, other local government assistance or funding has stopped for some teams.
Recently, all UK mountain rescue has received a small grant from the UK government. This has been distributed through national representative and co-ordinating bodies on the basis of how many teams they represent. Clearly, £200,000.00 split 75 ways doesn't make a huge dent but it is up to the teams in those jurisdictions to collaborate to lever the greatest lasting benefit from it.
The single most important factor in raising money for mountain rescue is population. A history of a large number of rescues is also important and certainly turning out to have rescued someone with deep pockets can be helpful. If a mountain rescue team operates in an area containing one or more iconic mountains and a well-developed tourist town of several thousand people then it will probably be able to raise reasonable levels of funding even without reaching outside its home area.
However, some mountain rescue teams in the UK operate in areas where a big town is one with 500 people in it and major population centres are over 200 road miles away. Teams may cover areas of thousands of kilometres squared of wild and mountainous country. In those same areas, a significant proportion of the mountain vistors may be from population centres as much as 500 road miles away and several dozen other mountain rescue teams exist across that intervening distance.
If you live in a city with many active hill-users, and possibly associated clubs and societies, please think about what you can do to help teams who have no way of activating good sources of funding because the landscape that makes their district so iconic and well-loved stands between them and a respectable income.
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The same population factor that affects fund-raising affects recruitment.