Wednesday, 15 November 2006

Premises, premises

Arrived this morning nice and early, arranged salary payments for the month, including for new Connexions staff, and deleted my daily quote of spam.

I left shortly before 9:00 for a meeting at the Guideposts Trust (a very effective mental health charity). The group recently had an art exhibition at Watford Museuma dn I had met with two of the staff in October and suggested that WCVS would take some of the works to display on long-term loan. But on arrival at Guideposts I discovered that the people I was meeting had been delayed. I could not wait as I had another meeting to make.

I met our WBC grants officer, Kim, who took me to view possible new premises for WCVS on the first floor of the purpose-built community centre in St Mary’s churchyard, right in the centre of Watford High Street. CAB already occupy part of the building and they were extremely busy as usual. Relate also occupy part of the building, although their working day starts rather later.

At present, WCVS occupies premises at the top of the High Street, close to the Town Hall. The building accommodates eleven members of staff, plus a volunteer team of about sixteen (who help run some of our core services like the Volunteer Centre and the Voluntary Transport scheme), a large archive, storage for equipment available for rental, a reprographics room, kichen, and two meeting rooms available used by ourselves and local charities. But the premises are old and in desparate need of modernisation. And with the recent closure of the Watford Racial Equality Council (once our co-tenants), it is true that there are three empty offices.

But this morning it was immediately clear that the premises offered at St Mary’s were far too small. Maybe, we could just about have sqashed all the staff into the offices. Maybe. But there was certainly no room for storage or meetings. Or for volunteers.

WBC is right to explore options with us. Much voluntary sector accommodation is in poor condition, inappropriate, and inefficeintly used. There are gains to be made by sharing services and facilities. But on this occasion, the disparity between our needs and the available space was abundantly apparent to everyone.

On returning to the office, I sent an e-mail to Shamim (head of CAB) and Adele (head of Relate) tentatively suggesting that there might be ways of sharing the building between the three organisations. But CAB and Relate have little to gain from the exercise, and even with a massive overhaul of it will be a very tight squeeze.

At the office, I was pleased to see that the big re-organisation continues. Sue, WCVS’s Services Officer and a natural organiser, is overseeing a programme of room changes to make way for new Connexions staff, while simultaneously co-ordinating a redecoration programme (with labour provided by voluneers on probation schemes) and supervising the new integrated reception area (until recently, WCVS had separate arrangements for itself, the Volunteer Centre, and the Voluntary Transport scheme).

Elsewhere, Helen was busy pulling together new procedures for the Volunteer Centre, Anne and Vanessa are striving to pull together our complex partnership bid to Reaching Communities (there are so many skills involved in fundraising), Laura was orgaising the Voluntary Transport scheme, and volunteers were busy on a host of other tasks. Everyone was extremely busy of course, but there is a feeling around that Sue has got the fun job – although I know that Sue doesn’t see it that way.

National Animal Welfare Trust

On my way home, I dropped off to meet Allegra, fundraiser at the National Animal Welfare Fund on the outskirts of Watford. NAWT staff occupy small offices at the front of a large area for accommodating animals. I had little time to look around, but the noisiest animals were certainly the dogs.

Allegra was interested to learn more about WCVS and hopes that NAWT will become more engaged with other local charities and groups. She was accompanied at her desk by a small dog that curled lovingly at her feet, but howled with anxiety when Allegra rose to see me out. NAWT should certainly be a popular place with animal-loving volunteers.

At home, Jackie and I spent a large part of the evening trying to fix a laptop computer, and I sat up for a while finalising some correspondence.