Thursday, 7 June 2007

Accommodation

At 10:00 this morning, I met with a team from WBC (Kim Bloomfield our grants officer and Tim Sanderson and Andy Large from “property services”) to discuss WCVS’s future accommodation needs.

At present, WCVS occupies a large building at the top of Watford High Street just opposite the Town Hall. This is an ideal location for many reasons. But the Council lease the property from a private landlord and High Street rents are of course expensive, and the lease is coming to an end - there are break clauses in the summer of 2008 and 2009 and the lease finally ends in the summer of 2010.

Naturally, WBC want to surrender the lease at the earliest practicable opportunity and to help WCVS find new accommodation in a cheaper location. But WCVS has a range of quite complex accommodation needs. Most obviously, we have to accommodate ten members of staff and a team of perhaps six volunteers on any given day. We also have a drop-in Volunteer Centre that needs to be in an accessible Town Centre location. For our members, we need to broker affordable town centre meeting space – and access to occasional serviced office space. We also need improved access for disabled users, better storage, and a smaller “carbon footprint”.

These disparate needs are clearly not best met through a single unit of shopfront premises on the High Street. To argue this would make us look foolish.

Stepping back, it is apparent to me that the voluntary sector generally does not make efficient use of the resources they have. I suppose it is understandable that each individual charity wants its own offices, with its own meeting rooms etc. After all, no one would expect Asda and Tesco to share shop space. So why should Age Concern and the YMCA share facilities? Or Watford Asian Community Care and West Herts Against Crime?

There are three answers to this. First, because by sharing charities can make better use of their resources and so deliver a better quality service to the people they were set up to help. This alone should be reason enough.

Secondly, because charities should not work against each other in competition. Sadly, in some of the larger national charities competition is becoming acceptable. But thankfully in smaller local charities, the habits of partnership and cooperation are deeply ingrained. These habits are often necessary for survival and they are in fact what distinguish us from Asda and Tesco.

Thirdly, demonstrating the effective use of resources can enhance our general reputation, raise trust in our competence and so attract even greater resources.

So we now have a timetable for developing a thought-through collaborative strategy for voluntary sector accommodation in Watford. Hopefully this process will be kick-started by a meeting already scheduled for 26 June when various voluntary and community groups will get together to discuss options.

Policy development

In the afternoon, I oversaw preparations for Monday’s networking lunch and drafted new policies on Sick Leave and Staff Development.

Art exhibition

In the evening, from 5:00, we hosted an Art Exhibition. The Guideposts Trust runs a very successful range of mental health services in Watford. They are a splendid organisation run by the impressive Lorna Cunningham who leads an equally impressive staff team. Many of their users are talented artists, and the Trust offer plenty of opportunities for people to practice and develop their art skills. For six months we have been working with the Guideposts Trust to collate sufficient pictures to display at WCVS. We now have forty, and tonight we hosted an evening for friends of Guideposts Trust and WCVS. It was a very pleasant and civilised affair. I was delighted that Alison Stainsby joined us from WBC, but the evening was really about the artists who quite rightly took full advantage of the attention (hopefully next week’s Watford Observer will include a picture).

Just as the artists bristled with pride, I was proud of the quiet and efficient way that WCVS staff set about things: making everything look excellent, making people welcome, serving drinks, bringing out the food, clearing things away. Sometimes they are so good I just want to gather them together and give them a great big hug: I suspect this is not best management practice so I resist all such temptations.

After everyone had dispersed, I finished off our final 2006-07 monitoring report to WBC and made a final few preparations for tomorrow’s interviews. I arrived home tired but rather pleased with things.