Monday, 11 June 2007

Networking lunch

Today at St Thomas’s Hall we held our quarterly networking lunch and our Volunteers’ Week celebration. Ten days ago, we considered cancelling this event as only ten people had registered. In the middle of last week we ordered food for seventy registered participants. By Friday, we had 100 registrations. This morning, people were still trying to register. Then some people just turned up without registering. At one level, it was a very successful event – lively and relaxed and good humoured, we gave out about 40 Certificates of Recognition to volunteers from across Watford, we were joined by the new Chair of WBC Tony Poole and his consort, who showed immense patience and goodwill posing for pictures with everyone. Brilliant.

But there was an alternative view, too. Attendance was chaotic with the numbers who turned up without booking were only partly offset by those who had booked and failed to appear. Our glorious immensely likeable voluntary photographer John took inordinately long to take a group photograph as his camera battery failed. We took a paltry £3 booking fee from people, who then found they couldn’t eat as those joining the food queue earliest helped themselves to liberal (some said greedy) portions. And our chair was late because someone (me) didn’t tell her we were starting an hour earlier than usual.

We muddled through everything in a very chaotic and very British fashion. All in all, I think it was a successful event. But there were lessons to learn and our next lunch will be very different: we must focus more on strengthening voluntarism and social cohesion and less on providing subsidised lunches.

In the afternoon, I finally got to catch up with Sarah Pinnock of WBC and we had a long talk about latest developments. I was also delighted to learn by e-mail that the Disability Law Service (where I am a trustee) has secured £500k funding from the Big Lottery's ADVICE programme. Such good news.