Monday, 16 April 2007

I spent part of the day trying to secure good attendances at forthcoming Watford CVS meetings. In the next few weeks we are hosting meetings on volunteering (twice), hate crime, fundraising, and an inaugural meeting for the Watford World Forum. In addition to this, other staff at WCVS are also organising meetings on disability, domestic violence, and (again) volunteering.

Each of the planned meetings has clear origins and a clear purpose – I just need to convince potential participants of this, and then convince them that active participation is a good use of their time given all the other demands they face. Local voluntary groups are on meetings overload and we need continually to make sure that the opportunities for collaboration don’t outstrip people’s capacity to participate. It’s a hard balancing act. The question I always start with is: why on earth would anyone willingly give up time to attend a meeting?

A large part of the afternoon I spent with Mary Green from neighbouring Three Rivers CVS. As ever, we compared notes and looked for ways of working together to our mutual advantage. Items on the agenda included the Sunflower project (Mary is interviewing for the new Manager), our BASIS applications (we are both working on business plans), governance (we both need to recruit more trustees for ourselves and our members), and the Herts CVS group (there is a meeting next week).

I arrived home about 7:00 and after tea I spent an hour or two redrafting bits of WCVS’s Memorandum and Articles of Association so that amendments can be presented to our September AGM.