Tuesday, 27 March 2007

Watford Football Club

After a quick visit to the office, I met Saud outside Watford Football Club at 10:00. We met with Rob Smith of the Watford Community Sports and Education Trust to discuss their Positive Futures project. This is focused on Holywell and there looks to be a lot of scope for joint working: I promised to write to Rob with some ideas / suggestions.

Sunflower

From Watford Football Club I went straight to the Town Hall for a meeting of the Strategic Board of the Sunflower Project. At an operational level, there has been some good progress with the Sunflower Centre working well with voluntary groups. I agreed to find someone from the voluntary sector to sit on the interview panel for the recruitment of a manager for the Sunflower Centre. But at a political level, there is still rancour and suspicion. For example, minutes of a recent meeting of the “Perpetrators Sub Group” of the Domestic Violence forum were largely devoted to criticisms of the Sunflower Centre. Whether or not these criticisms are justified, this sort of thing is most damaging in undermining trust and credibility.

We agreed that the way forward was through practical service-led collaboration. There will be two further meetings: one with a focus on domestic violence and one with a focus on hate crime.

Hunting in Packs

After the Sunflower meeting, I met with Anne Clark (the “temporary” Sunflower Centre manager) and Sarah Pinnock (of WBC) to discuss forums. The Sunflower Centre has been asked to try and establish a “Hate Crimes” forum locally. But what would this be? If it focuses simply on Hate Crimes reported to the Police then it is hard to see what the connection is between different incidents, and it is hard to see what participants will gain from being part of a forum. Other than the negative gain of being labelled as a potential “victims”. If the forum is also to consider unreported incidents, then it becomes very hard to draw boundaries: school bullying? preventative work? community cohesion? And where does this fit in with our own work to establish a World Forum in Watford? And where does this fit in with work to establish a county-wide Race Equality Council function? And where does it fit in with moves to establish a county-wide Herts Equality and Race Organisation?

All three of us agreed that things were getting very confused. We also all agreed that Hate Crime must mean more than racially motivated crime. We also all pitied representatives of the local “black and minority ethnic” communities who must all feel that statutory and voluntary agencies are hunting in packs to recruit them to forums and committees. Tokenism? Issue of the month?

And so back to the office, arriving at 3:30 and finally leaving at about 8:00. Another long day.