Tuesday, 18 September 2007

Another fun day cram-packed with competing priorities

I started the morning with a very nice e-mail from Leslie Billy at Guideposts Trust: Just a quick note to say thank you very much for organising the theatre trip on Friday, Lorna, Howard, clients and I really enjoyed the evening and was very impressed with actors/actresses. Please pass our sincere regards to all the people involved in helping you to organise Friday’s event you should be very proud of your staff team and volunteers it was a great success.

I also received a less welcome e-mail from the Governance Hub: …I regret to inform you that the Governance Hub is not able to support your proposal …. we are unable to provide individual feedback …. We knew it was a "long shot" and we can guess the reasons for the rejection, but "unable to provide individual feedback"? Have these people not heard of the Freedom of Information Act? Open government? Do they think they are completely unaccountable?

I also followed up an enquiry I’d made of WBC about emergency plannign procedures and learnt a bit about Hertfordshire Resilience - the County’s emergency plan.

I continued discussions / negotiations with WBC about getting broader community sector access to training.

I began organising a WCVS stall for the Community Housing Trust launch on 29 Saturday.

I sent some notes to Inspiral Arts about plans for the refurbishment of the Palace Theatre’s scenery store.

I met with Vanessa about trustee training in Herts and about plans for a County-wide trustees conference early in 2008.

I spoke to Andrew Burt at County Hall about plans for a vacant HCC building in Watford’s Lower High Street – sadly HCC have plans for the building so WCVS can’t discuss using it.

I revised WCVS’s entry on the HCC website.

In the afternoon I met with Louise Jones of Hertfordshire Connexions who manages our contract. We had a very thorough meeting about our performance against the contract, and about our partnership with Connexions and with local schools: it was a most productive meeting and I think we made huge progress.

I also spoke with a very helpful chap from Digital Umbrella – an IT services arm of High Peaks CVS. They have a website that contains many of the features I want for Watford CVS’s website. We’ve an application in for funding – let’s hope it’s successful!

Around 5:00 I started work to clear some outstanding minutes that have been piling up. I managed to complete minutes for August’s meeting of the VCS Accommodation working group, and for more recent meetings of the Executive Committee, the Watford One World Forum, and of course our AGM (for which thankfully Vanessa had done most of the hard work).

The Good Life

I left around 7:30 pm and arrived home to a lovely meal. Wonderful stuff. My pleasure was only tempered by the sharp drop in temperature - winter is coming.