Monday, 28 July 2008

The Sunflower Centres in West Herts provide a comprehensive service for victims of domestic violence and hate crime with providers from the statutory and voluntary sectors coming together to offer a seamless service in which people receive expert advice to access the support streams that are right for them. Statutory partners include the Police, Herts County Council, Watford Borough Council, the PCT, and the Probation Service, while voluntary partners include Watford Women’s Centre, the Women’s Refuges, Relate, Victim Support, the CVSs, the Domestic Violence forums and so on. As a model it is impeccable. The reality has been fraught with difficulties and everyone involved has had to work ceaselessly to keep the project on the rails.

I became involved on the Strategic Board when there was no other voluntary sector representation. Having now helped secure three other seats on this Board for the voluntary sector, I think that perhaps my work here is done. Today’s Board meeting continued to make progress and there were pretty clear signs that we now need one (non-statutory) organisation to be responsible for delivery and co-ordination of the Sunflower Project. There are several good candidates for this role and I hope that we can make progress on this in future meetings.

At lunchtime, I wanted to attend the lunch for Mary Green who is leaving as Director of Three Rivers CVS to study in Aberystwyth. But instead I had to devote my time to preparations for our first workshop tomorrow on our new IT systems and to Friday’s deadline for submitting our Herts CVS bid to host the Hertfordshire LINks contract. Good luck Mary!