Friday, 9 February 2007

Poor Ken

By early morning, the snow was disappearing fast but Ken still wasn’t happy: he just couldn’t understand.

I finished off the new draft membership forms and then visited my Mum to help her sort out some of Dad’s papers. I arranged to visit again at the weekend.

Trustees Together

By this time it was raining steadily and I headed off to the COVER offices at Little Chesterton on the Herts / Essex / Cambs border for a meeting of the Trustees Together group. Although still finding its feet a little, this group hopes to take a lead role co-ordinating trustee support and training across the East of England region. So far there are active participants from groups in Hertfordshire, Suffolk and Essex. Hopefully we will soon be joined by Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.

On the way, I was went slowly around a roundabout, just making sure I was heading in the right direction. A large lorry lost patience with me and impolitely forced me onto the M11 slip road. I didn’t panic as I still had time to reach the meeting and I assumed there would be another junction on the M11 after a few miles and I could turn round and come back. It turns out there are no other junctions on the M11 for a considerable few miles and it took me nearly 40 minutes to return. Then I failed to avoid a puddle and got so much water over my engine that the car stalled and I had to sit for more than 15 minutes waiting for the engine to dry out. I arrived late for the meeting, but everyone was very understanding.

We talked over progress on the myriad little projects we had each been engaged in. We also identified that there was some duplication of effort on trustee issues from the national bodies such as Volunteering England, ChangeUp, CapactiyBuilders etc. We agreed on the need to pull these together and take stock of the situation: Jonathan of SAVO said he would put together a partnership bid to Awards for All to fund a regional weekend school for trustees.

At the end of the meeting I had a very helpful talk with Jonathan about Local Area Agreements. Jonathan is the LAA lead in Suffolk for promoting volunteering and Suffolk is a year ahead of Hertfordshire in the process so there were lots of lessons to learn. All very helpful for putting together my presentation to the Watford group next week.