Four Edinburgh and East Lothian businesses have put their money behind a new fund designed to get young people and community groups into the Scottish outdoors. The Real Mary King's Close, Hargreaves Land, PWB Developments, and HPP Macmerry have become the founding supporters of the Wild Cairns Youth & Community Access Fund at Whitekirk Hill, near North Berwick. The mechanism is straightforward: businesses contribute to a central pot, and that money is used to subsidise or fully cover access costs for groups who couldn't otherwise attend.
The pay-it-forward model is worth paying attention to, because it sidesteps a lot of the friction that typically surrounds charitable giving. There's no grant application, no reporting cycle, no committee approval. A business decides what it can contribute, puts it in the pot, and Wild Cairns does the work of identifying and supporting eligible community groups. That's a structure Scottish SMEs can adopt, adapt, or simply join.
Community investment by businesses isn't new, but the mechanism matters. According to Business in the Community Scotland, the most effective corporate community programmes are those with clear, direct impact and low administrative overhead. A pooled access fund, managed by an established outdoor venue with existing community relationships, ticks both boxes. It also gives smaller contributors, those who couldn't fund a trip on their own, a way to participate meaningfully alongside larger businesses.
For SMEs in Edinburgh and the Lothians, there's a dual case here. The obvious one is goodwill and reputation: associating your brand with youth access and outdoor wellbeing is a story worth telling, particularly as Scottish consumers increasingly expect businesses to contribute something real to their communities. The less obvious case is employee engagement. Research from the CIPD consistently shows that staff in businesses with active community programmes report higher job satisfaction and lower turnover. For small teams where one departure stings, that matters.
Wild Cairns sits within a broader Scottish outdoor access landscape that has real policy backing. The Scottish Government's national outcomes framework explicitly includes community wellbeing and access to nature as priorities, and organisations like Paths for All and the John Muir Trust have long argued that access barriers for young people in less affluent areas are structural, not incidental. A business-backed fund like this is one practical response to that structural problem. It won't fix everything, but it moves money in the right direction without waiting for government to do it first.