Thursday, 4 January 2007

Now things are really getting a little bit busy.

I arrived at the office about 8:00 am to start work on the Accommodation report due to be with WBC by Monday. At 9:00 I prepared work for Priti and Maria to do on Friday and Monday while I am away from the office.

At 10:00 I met with Vanessa for two hours to go through our Strategic Plan targets and talk through top level outcomes and impact assessments. We also spent some time talking through the Minority Ethnic Forum and project budgets. This was a most useful meeting; I am so pleased that Vanessa is here to share her knowledge and wisdom in these things.

At 12:00 I met with Helen for the second stage of her staff review process. Again, a very helpful meeting.

Value and Volumes

At 2:00, I left to attend a meeting in St Albans on the future of the project researching into the “Value and Volume” of the voluntary sector in Hertfordshire. Work carried out in 2005-06 suggested that there were 12,800 voluntary groups in the county. Our latest research suggests that a more realistic figure is around 5,000 although this can vary hugely depending on exactly where lines are drawn – should the definition include churches? darts clubs? reading groups?

In St Albans, I met with my counterparts from Rickmansworth (Mary), Stevenage (Ann) and St Albans (Laura). In the future, voluntary activity in the county can be measured by producing reports from Volbase – the database of local groups that each CVS is introducing. All are agreed on this, but it will take time.

In the short term, we need to understand why the number of active groups was overestimated by more than 100% and why the turnover of these groups was overestimated by an even greater amount. And we need to explain these variances to the people who funded the original research. It wont be easy.

Herts CVSs have revisited the original data and a picture is slowly emerging of why it was so inaccurate. But we now need to produce reliable figures for the voluntary sector’s income and assets, and for the number of people working in the sector as employees or volunteers.

At one point it was suggested that the company that produced the original data should be paid again to tell us why and how they got it so wrong: I think I may have sworn. The four of us finally reached a compromise of sorts on how this can be achieved most efficiently and effectively. I will speak tomorrow with Jacquie in North Herts (who controls the purse-strings in this CapacityBuilders project) to see whether our compromise is intra vires.

Meanwhile, I left St Albans around 5:30 and returned direct to WGC, and then Jackie adn I went on to Letchworth to visit my parents, brothers and others and we all had a very pleasant evening.