Wednesday, 6 February 2008

Two good opportunities to promote Hertfordshire and Watford. First, Jonathan Clark visited from the Big Lottery Fund where he is responsible for getting to know what goes on in Hertfordshire. We had a good talk about priorities and needs in Watford and Hertfordshire, and we talked through WCVS’s soon-to-start BASIS project. Secondly, Steph Gallagher of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium advised that Jon Fox of Capacitybuilders is soon coming to meet the HIC Steering Group and discuss our funding concerns.

And I met with Angelo to discuss further the large WBC-funded IT project on which we are now starting work. There is also a serious possibility of attracting some corporate sponsorship interest in this. But the key is always going to be attracting sufficient local VCS engagement.

Most of the day I spend tying up loose ends around the forthcoming BME Advocacy interviews: agreeing venues, timetables, questions, exercises.

There was rather an alarming incident at the end of the day. Yesterday I carefully set aside some files to check their contents and archive / dump. Today I discovered that an overenthusiastic volunteer had emptied all of the files and started shredding their contents. Those papers that are left are now all hopelessly mixed together. Laugh or cry?

In the evening, I had hoped to attend the How Green Is My Watford event, but things at WCVS needed urgent attention and I had to stay to start work on the papers for this month’s Executive Committee meeting.

For the second time this week I eventually left work after 10:00 pm.