About
Putting names to faces
The Team
The one who actually did the paperwork
Robert
Director & Child Protection Officer
Robert inspects bridges for a living, which turns out to be good preparation for building something from scratch and making sure it doesn't fall down. He's been training for three years and became G.R.I.P.'s founding director because someone had to write the constitution and he was the one willing to do it. He holds lead signatory status with Disclosure Scotland and is G.R.I.P.'s named Child Protection Officer.
The tech guy
Cathal
Web Developer & Instructor
Cathal is a computer science graduate, an avid climber, and Scotland's first qualified Bouldering Wall Instructor. He also holds a Climbing Wall Instructor qualification so knows his way around ropes, rigging gear, and teaching people how to stay safe, which makes him quite useful at G.R.I.P. — more than his first job title suggests. He built the website too, which means he (I) wrote this.
How we got here
Our Story
We were a group of aerialists who trained together, on the same equipment, in the same space. Then overnight, we weren't. So we decided to keep going anyway.
It was harder than it sounds. Everything that makes a circus training space work — the insurance, the rigging inspections, the safeguarding policies, the venue relationship, the class structure — had to be built pretty much from scratch. Robert put together the articles of association for a not-for-profit CIC, then came the insurance, the venue, the equipment inspection, the policies. We had help along the way — the Scottish circus community is smaller and more generous than you might expect — but most of it was figured out the hard way.
We're still figuring things out. But we have a space, we have equipment, we have people who show up every week, and we have procedures that actually exist on paper. That feels like enough to be getting on with, and we're still actively working on it.