Wednesday, 11 June 2008

I had a morning meeting about the Sunflower project’s website. Then I drove to St Albans to attend a meeting of the Herts BME Partnership to discuss whether the Partnership could deliver a CRE-type legal service. Most people present thought the Partnership should stick to its mission of capacity building. I wonder if a combined equalities service would be more effective.

After this, I stayed for my last meeting as Chair of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium. I handed over without much ceremony to my successor Ian Richardson whose first meeting was thrown into some small disarray by Jacquie Hime’s absence due to local work pressures in North Herts. This is increasingly the dilemma we all face: balancing immediate tangible local needs against the long-term strategic benefits of working together at county and regional level.

We managed to reach some semblance of consensus on the projects to be funded in Hertfordshire under the Capacitybuilders Modernisation programme and under the Big Lottery’s Basis 2 programme.

Plaudits today were reserved for Steph Gallagher who was attending her last meeting as Development Worker for the Consortium. Steph has done a sterling job and will be sorely missed.