Thursday, 19 April 2007

I enjoyed a short lie-in this morning. But Jackie (gorgeous wonderful Jackie who I love with all my heart) was not pleased that I worked so late yesterday. Amends must somehow be made.

A bleak outlook

I left home around 9:00 and went straight to Hertsmere CVS for a meeting on the future of voluntary sector training in Hertfordshire. Hertsmere CVS is managed by Robin, who is universally regarded as a lovable old curmudgeon. He has been described as challenging. I have never been certain whether this is meant in the sense of challenging sacred cows, University Challenge, or a challenging toddler.

This morning he helped enormously by bringing home what a bleak outlook there is for voluntary sector training in Hertfordshire. On the whole, the voluntary sector is simply not interested in long training programmes. Why sign up for a year’s training programme when your organisation lives hand-to-mouth and may close at three months’ notice? The voluntary sector also has a ferociously hostile attitude to being patronised or being swamped with bureaucracy and red tape. So voluntary sector training tends to be short-term, informal and unaccredited: functional rather than academic.

In recent times, this training has been funded by occasional grants, by Investing in Communities, by the professional development centre at North Herts College, and by discretionary funds from the Learning and Skills Council. With the exception of occasional ad hoc grants from disparate sources, all this is now ending. No more funding. Except possibly through a formal Training Consortium which must meet rigorous bureaucratic standards imposed by government through the Learning and Skills Council.

I can’t be the only one whose heart despaired at the thought of spending 2-3 years creating another resource-sucking bureaucracy on the off-chance that a quango may then give us some training money in the short window of opportunity before all the rules are changed again.

There must be easier ways of tackling this problem.

Back in Watford

I met with Anne (Funding Advisor) to help her finalise an analysis for Herts CVS of fundraising support in the county. It looks good.

Over lunch, I was visited by a lady from the African Nurses Association (a national group based in Watford) to discuss the possibility of becoming a registered charity.

Vanessa (Development and Training Officer) and I compared notes on the various meetings we’d each recently attended.

The remainder of the day was a blur of meetings and questions and telephone calls.

I only surfaced around 5:00 to start working on a finance report to my trustees.

And this doesn’t even begin to address the incompetence of some fools who came to my home to replace two storm-destroyed fence panels and ended up replacing two perfectly good panels and destroying some plants and trellis in the process. The stupidity of some people is just staggering.