Wednesday, 15 August 2007

Today was my last busy day of meetings before I disappear on leave next week.

Most interestingly, I met with a group from Inspiral Arts who are interested in renovating Watford Palace Theatre’s old Scenery Store for use as a community arts venue. This is a great idea and fits in well with WBC’s plans to develop an “Artistic Quarter” around the theatre. But the plans will cost perhaps £750,000 and of course they need resourcing. We talked at length about funding options and project management options.

There is a briefing session for the Community Assets Fund early in September, and I had hoped it would be possible to send a combined team from WCVS, Inspiral Arts and WBC. Later I discovered that places were restricted to two per local authority, so I will be attending with Sarah Pinnock of WBC. I’ve already had a preliminary talk about the fund with Anne Boyd, our Funding Advisor: if we decide a Watford bid is practicable, we will have to move very fast.

At lunchtime, we had one of our occasional staff meetings. Ideally, we would meet as a group a bit more often, but we are all such busy people. Today only Vanessa was absent. The rest of us had a good talk through some domestic issues such as future accommodation needs, IT, the reception area, meetings, and training.

Later still, I met with She-Lee who tells me that a draft of the Community Directory will be available within the next week or two, and we were joined by Maria to talk through the exact mailing protocols for our September AGM.

Then I was visited by Alison Plant of the new Watford Community Housing Trust. These are major new players in the local voluntary sector, and we will doubtless be doing a lot of work together in the future.

In the evening, Jackie and I stayed in and listened to the pouring rain outside. We do not have an arctic-ready storm-proof tent: its label describes it as "weather proof" which could mean anything. Or more probably nothing. The weather forecast would better be described as bleak than encouraging. We did some contingency planning. Then we did a Daily Telegraph crossword.