Tuesday, 28 November 2006

HIC

This morning, I went first to Hatfield for a meeting of HIC, the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium – a loose grouping of all groups in the County that provide support to the voluntary sector. Although there are many reasons for this group to meet, the glue that really holds it together is the money from ChangeUp / CapacityBuilders provided regionally, and managed by HIC. WCVS leads on two key projects: first, a project to define the “value and volume” of the voluntary sector in Hertfordshire, and secondly, the “Better Governance” initiative to provide support to charity trustees in the County.

But there are also plenty of other worthy projects, and HIC meetings are something of a market place for the exchange of ideas and information. Ann, my counterpart in Stevenage, fed back good information from the County-wide strategic plan “Hertfordshire Forward” and I had a very useful chat with David of the Hertfordshire Community Foundation. The meeting was ably chaired by Kate of the Hertfordshire Community Development Association. Kate has now completed her term as chair and a new chair is needed for the new year: who will allow their name to go forward? It would certainly be a useful learning exercise, but how could I possibly find the time?

Drumming up support

I was back in Watford by lunchtime, drumming up support for the forthcoming meeting on the future of the Sunflower project and following up a few interesting leads from the HIC meeting. Before I knew it, I was meeting with Lyn of the Watford Learning Partnership. Funded (poorly) by the Learning and Skills Council, this group brings together all the key players in post-16 learning and provides a forum for co-ordination and the creation of joint projects. Lyn briefed me on the Partnership’s meeting on Friday.

Following this, I had short meetings with members of WCVS staff, including with Sue who had several issues on the redecoration programme. Frazana, our new Connexions worker, needed some help configuring the new laptop she had this morning collected from the Connexions office in Hertford.

Around 5:00, I am surprised by a welcome visit from Omar of the Watford Racial Equality Council. Omar kept me up to date with developments in WREC and I reassured him that I and WCVS are available to help the organisation on any transition, or to wind up its affairs if this is what they choose to do.

After Omar left, I worked through the draft minutes of WCVS's recent trustees meeting, and began working on our three-year budgets.

I arrived home shortly after 8:00: dinner was ready, Midsummer Murders was on the telly, and after this I took to reading. A very pleasant evening. Spoilt only by the news that our two year-old fridge has completely stopped working, and there's a week's wait for an engineer. Thankfully, Jackie is sorting it out; what a wonderful woman.