Tuesday, 11 September 2007

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Driving through early mornign mists, and via an hour or so at the office, I arrived early at the Niland Centre for the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium's self assessment day (paid for by CapacityBuilders and facilitated by Liisa Wiseman) to assess our strengths and weaknesses and define our future priorities. The timing was a bit odd as HIC has already established a steering group that is now part way through … assessing our strengths and weaknesses and defining future priorities. But the first three-quarters of the day were useful in approaching things differently and extending the discussion beyond the steering group.

Those present (less than half of HIC members) had to assess ourselves across six headings: Stakeholder Engagement, Skills and Knowledge, Equalities, Performance Management, Consortium Team, and Communications. In each category there was a good discussion and in each category we scored ourselves somewhere around the middle.

Asset Transfers

In the evening I was back in Watford for a meeting of the Community Centre Strategic Group co-ordinating the attempted transfer of five community centres to local management. The meeting was chaired by Normal Powell of Community Matters who occupies No-Man’s Land somewhere between all parties.

The overall project seems to be quite some way along its trajectory, although some centres are more advanced than others. Two of the five transfers are being sponsored (not quite the right word) by substantial and experienced local groups (YMCA and the Women’s Centre) so will probably happen. Another transfer involves a consortium of groups all looking for place in the Holywell Centre And this will probably happen because it must. The other two transfers are more difficult as they involve smaller groups in looser alliances needing more support.

Community matters have set aside more than 40 days of training events for the five transfers. I think this is rather a lot. I must see if the more general VCS can “piggy back” on some of this training.

A brief chat with YMCA convinced me that they could build a good application to the Community Assets Fund built around the refurbishment needs of the Orbital Community Centre. Given staff absences and turmoil elsewhere this might be the simplest option. But I still beleive that the strongest application would be a no-holds-barred bid to renovate the Palace Theatre's old scenery store.