The journey to Watford took an exasperating two hours, leaving me barely time to get to a meeting of a project steering group I’d been invited to join. The project is run jointly by the Guidepost Trust and Watford Asian Community Care and is looking at mental health services for women from south Asia. This is not a field of which I have much knowledge, but I have plenty of experience of project management and I was able to make some useful contributions.
From this meeting, I headed off to Hitchin for a meeting with the Big Lottery’s East of England representative to talk about the second stage of the BASIS programme. Although Watford CVS did well from the first stage, everyone recognises that it was fraught with difficulties. The only people attending form Hertfordshire were myself, Jacquie Hime (from North Herts CVS) and Steph Gallagher (the HIC development worker) and we all stressed that the two key needs were to focus money on core services and to avoid a competitive bidding round. I think our points were well taken.
Of course, the natural thing would be to ask the Herts Infrastructure Consortium to distribute the money. We’ll see: the Big Lottery will soon have a more formal consultation period and decisions on stage two will be announced later this year.
After this meeting, there were further talks about the HIC strategic plan and then I managed to arrive home by five. Jackie and I celebrated my early return by taking a brisk walk through the local woods.