Scottish Sports Futures chief executive Pam Hunter on ferries, football fans and falling in love with the voluntary sector

It has its main hub in the east end of Glasgow, an area where instances of poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, neglect and social deprivation remain high.

Sport and physical activity are used as a platform to provide education in areas as diverse as finance, confidence building and nutrition. Participants are mentored by older peers and volunteers, many of whom have previously benefited themselves.

Hunter, 50, has plenty of heartening tales to this effect. She cites the example of a 15-year-old boy whose mother had fallen into a bad relationship and began to neglect her son. The teenager had gone along to Twilight, the charity’s Friday night drop-in basketball sessions.

“The coach noticed he was malnourished and turning up with ragged clothes,” she says. “His mother had been forgetting to feed him. The net result of him getting involved in basketball is that he is now an ambassador, giving hope to youngsters coming along behind him.”

The charity runs six programmes including Jump2It (operating in 100 Scottish schools encouraging young people to try basketball), MEND (Mind, Exercise, Nutrition ... Do it!) and Legacy-funded Active East (a volunteering programme centred in Glasgow’s east end).

Its work is funded chiefly by CashBack For Communities, a scheme which repurposes money seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Oil and gas giant Shell sponsor the Twilight programme, and Hunter hopes to encourage more companies to take on a similar role.

Scottish Sports Futures works in close partnership with the Glasgow Rocks basketball team whose players act as roles models and, as Hunter puts it, provide “a ray of hope for a different way of life”. It is her goal to bring more sporting organisations and governing bodies on board while growing existing ties with the likes of Judo Scotland.

Hunter acknowledges she has some big shoes to fill in taking over from her predecessor Reid. “I have had experience of being a chief exec before but not taking over from someone who has been a founding member,” she says.

“I have a lot of respect for the vision he had in seeing the need for the charity and growing it to where it is today. It is not a case of coming in and doing damage limitation or it being in a bad state. It is in a good place which makes my job a lot easier because the reputation is already there.”

For Hunter, it also marks something of a homecoming having spent much of the past two decades based in Northern Ireland working across the private and voluntary sectors.

The youngest of two daughters, Hunter grew up in Busby and attended Hutchesons’ Grammar School in Glasgow. Her parents Robert and Sybil, now retired, were a chartered accountant and secretary respectively.

“My ambition as a young child was to be a vet,” she says. “I went to a private school that was geared towards high achievement and pushing you to be a lawyer or a doctor. I didn’t fit into that box. I was a shy, introverted child and bullied a wee bit too. It was a tricky childhood from that point of view.”

After studying hotel catering and institutional management at Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh, Hunter spent 18 months travelling across Australia, USA and Canada. Upon returning to the UK, she worked in hotels in Portpatrick and Shrewsbury.

Hunter then moved into the ferry industry. “I was one of the first bar managers on Stena Line out of Stranraer,” she says. “When I was made redundant, I joined the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company. They promoted me to run the terminal in Belfast so that’s what took me over to Northern Ireland.”

She was on the frontline of customer complaints. That included a time when sailings were cancelled after one of the ships went on fire. “People were baying for blood and I was the person whose blood they were baying for,” she recalls.

Hunter took it all in her stride. “People just want to be heard,” she says. “You let them shout, rant and rave, and get all their expression out. Once they’ve said their piece, you can talk calmly and reasonably with them.”

While spirited stag and hen night parties could be challenging, she says, it was dealing with football fans that was arguably the toughest part of the job. Hunter gives a small shudder at the memory.

“This was a time when Celtic and Rangers fans still travelled on the ship together,” she says. “We had to segregate them by closing the doors at the bottom end to keep them apart. They later made separate sailings for the two sets of fans.”

Hunter admits that, until then, she was oblivious to the nuances of sectarianism. “My parents protected me from it when I was growing up,” she says. “The first I knew about any sectarian divide was when I started working with Stena Line. It could be a wee bit scary. I learned a lot in the ferry industry about how to handle human nature.”

She moved to the voluntary sector in 2008 after studying counselling at evening classes (Hunter also has an MBA from the Open University).

One of her first roles was operations director for the Now Project, helping people with learning difficulties into work, later becoming acting chief executive. Hunter is also a former chief executive of Nexus NI, a charity offering support to victims of sexual abuse.

“I walked into the voluntary sector with a bit of fear that it was going to be low work ethic and not as driven as I’m used to,” she says. “Not only is it driven, but it has the passion of the end cause as well.”

Hunter is steadily settling back into life in Scotland. That said, she still gets itchy feet and last year hiked the Inca Trail in Peru. Hunter plans to walk the Great Wall of China next month.

Sport looms large away from work too. Hunter enjoys playing golf, has a season ticket for Glasgow Warriors and was recently in the crowd to cheer on Johanna Konta at Wimbledon. “Anything that is competitive I’ll watch it,” she laughs.

She is forthright when asked about the watershed moments in her life. “The scarred relationships have shaped me,” she says. “I was engaged to a fella and when I ended the relationship he tried to kill himself. I found him and saved him but he has since died.”

Hunter was 30 when she split from her former partner. “He’d had a tough life. He was a diabetic from the age of seven and lost his sight by 21. We split up and two or three years later he got drunk, fell over, went into a diabetic coma and died.”

Already prone to workaholic tendencies, it proved a potent trigger for Hunter. “How I reacted wasn’t entirely healthy,” she says. “I became a complete workaholic and didn’t handle any emotions properly. I woke up from that about 10 years later and thought: ‘Flip me, I need help’ and put myself through counselling.”

Having come out the other side of what she terms “a huge learning process”, Hunter is now a self-confessed personal development geek. “I love listening to podcasts that are motivational, about managing your brain and getting the best out of yourself.”

It echoes the key lessons that she hopes Scottish Sports Futures can help instil in the younger generation. Far too many people, says Hunter, accept their lot in life even if it makes them unhappy.

“I’m a firm advocate that you can always change things if you want to. If you find the strength inside or look for that support, you can change whatever scenario you’re in for the better.”

For more information, visit scottishsportsfutures.org.uk