Wednesday, 20 February 2008

While Vanessa travelled from Watford to WGC for the Hertfordshire Development and Training Consortium, I journeyed in the opposite direction to make a further attempt to complete our NAVCA quality award submission and to sort through some queries on our IT project with Angelo.

Later still, Angelo and I met again with Melanie Claxton of the White Box Foundation and with her boss David Barker, head of White Box Digital. We talked about the voluntary sector and its IT needs, and David explained the work that White Box Digital are doing to support Survivors UK and with the ICT Hub to develop affordable IT solutions for the VCS. Much of this work falls squarely within the parameters of the ICT strategy that I developed with HIC in the run-up to Christmas so there is plenty of scope for synergy adn collaboration. But the ICT Hub will soon lose it’s national contract and it’s difficult to say how this will affect things. We also need to see how / when / if the HIC project goes ahead. We agreed to meet again at the beginning of April.

Wisdom in numbers

In the evening, I attended a meeting of the Watford One World Forum. This meeting helped underline two strengths of the voluntary sector. First, many voluntary activists gave up an evening for the greater good of their community; that’s pretty special. Secondly, intelligent debate led us to informed consensus on a series of thorny issues. As an inherent strength of the voluntary sector, this second is often overlooked: in fact “committees” are more often identified as a weakness than a strength. But with the right people and the right situation, open debate is a great positive force for creative problem-solving and for building social capital.