Wednesday, 21 February 2007

CapacityBuilders

Today was all about ChangeUp funding for Hertfordshire. I drove to Hitchin to collect Jacquie from North Herts CVS and the two of us headed off to Great Chesterford and the offices of COVER (Community and Voluntary Forum for the Easter Region).

COVER were hosting a meeting of all county Infrastructure Consortia to discuss how the latest tranche of ChangeUp funding should be distributed, and how it should be used.

The end result was a near unanimous decisions that the £672k should be divided evenly between the six counties and the one region. We will then each need to produce a strategic plan showing how the Infrastructure Consortia will respond to CapacityBuilders' Strategic Plan "Destination 2014".

We had a very useful presentation from CapacityBuilders explaning their retionale for how the money should be used. Three points struck me.

First, it was very useful comparing notes with other infrastructure bodies from around the Eastern region: there are so many different ways of skinnign a rabbit.

Secondly, it is much more civilised and effective for a funder to allocate money regionally, and then ask the key local voluntary bodies to advise on priorities. Contrast this to the weeks and weeks of effort that have been expended on producing competing bids to The Big Lottery fund.

Thirdly, CapacityBuilders are putting much pressure on the voluntary and community to engage with statutory sector planning forums etc. But what happens if the statutory sector planning forums exclude or marginalise the voluntary sector, as many do? Who puts pressure on them?