Monday, 27 November 2006

Spending time with people

Over the past week I’ve become conscious that I need to spend more time with WCVS staff: some show signs of feeling abandoned and this is not good.

This morning, I undercut the rush hour again and spent two quiet hours alone in the office delegating different bits of work and distributing papers and emails. I left some invoices and correspondence for Sue to deal with, some letters about the transport scheme I passed to Laura, and forwarded some fundraising information to Anne. The Performance Hub is holding a conference in Peterborough in February to promote a series of toolkits to improve organisational performance – these invitations I passed to Vanessa.

I then hoped to spend the remainder of the day on informal one-to-one sessions with staff. Sha-Lee arrived before 9:00 and I spent an hour or so talking her through the next stage of her work collating a new voluntary sector directory for Watford. So far, 989 organisations have been whittled down to just over 500, but this includes a large number that are properly based in Three Rivers, St Albans or Hertsmere, and we are still stymied by our ignorance of local postcodes.

Next, I had a meeting planned for 10:00, but this was cancelled, so I was able to have a brief talk with Farzana. She has survived her first week, but she is keen to get to grips with her new role and is frustrated at the lack of progress. But she has many meetings planned over the next fortnight and will soon become more independent.

I then met with Vanessa, who is keen to attend the February conference in Peterborough. She has also identified an opportunity to secure a small amount of funding to visit local VCS organsiations and carry out “health checks”. These are short visits to organisations to give them a chance to benchmark themselves against “best practice” standards in areas such as planning, accounting, governance, employment and so on. As ever, Vanessa has lots of ideas for how this can operate: between us, we need to get down to work in the new year visiting organisations.

Next, I had a short meeting with Maria, one of WCVS’s volunteer team, who works particularly closely with me on maintaining our website. I ensured that she is now set up on our network with her own user ID and e-mail account, and pass over some information for her to load into the website. She is very smart, but she has only been in the UK from Poland recently and her English is still developing. Briefly, I sympathise with Poland losing so much young talent to the West, but Maria is determined to return to Poland one day, and this will undoubtedly be England’s loss.

After lunch, I sat down with Helen to talk through several initiatives she is involved in with the Volunteer Centre. She has made good progress developing new procedures for the Centre, and we talk through these and future priorities. The key priority at the moment is to structure the work so that existing volunteers can support future volunteers to find suitable placements.

Before leaving, I have spent some time with Priti, our bookkeeper returned today from three weeks in India. There is much to talk through but I left early to avoid the worst of the evening traffic.

In the News

There is much of interest in the evening news. Promoters of “Intelligent Design” are making a concerted attempt to get their pernicious ideas taken seriously in London schools, and I am pleased that a science teacher interviewed on the news treats this suggestion with the contempt it deserves. There was also an item highlighting research that suggests that 50% of “blue stickers” in London end up being used by people not entitled to them.

But the most interesting news was that Ken Livingston, London’s Mayor, will boycott a conference on Race Equality convened by Trevor Phillips, chair of the new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights.

This very public falling out reflects the realignment that is taking place across the country on issues of diversity and equality. For many years, Britain’s official approach was to promote and embrace diversity, even for its own sake. Of course there was (and is) racism and prejudice, but despite periodic media panics about immigrants and asylum seekers, the political concensus held up Britain’s diversity policies as a success story.

This concensus is now breaking down. The focus is no longer on the right of individual groups to retain their own traditions, beliefs and faiths. The focus now is on how to secure social cohesion without infringing on these rights. This is not an academic shift in bureaucratic rules. It is a fundamental change in public policy, public debate, and in society.

In Watford, it affects Policing, the way the Council funds community groups, the way the Council consults, the way public services are provided, and the way neighbours and friends interact with each other.

For WCVS, it presents a challenge to our Minority Ethnic forum. Should this remain a forum specifically for “ethnic minorities”? Or should it provide a forum for all marginalised and disadvantaged groups? And how does anyone decide who these are? Or should there instead be a focus on social cohesion? Or on equality? Discussions with Watford Borough Council are planned for the new year.