Thursday, 8 May, 2008

Too many meetings

I left home shortly after 6:00 am to attend a breakfast meeting of the Watford Chamber of Commerce where I was to talk for a few minutes on the Voluntary Sector, the Community Fund for Watford, Volunteering, the Endowment Challenge and Grassroots Grants. I managed somehow to fit all this into 7 minutes and was rewarded with several expressions of interest from local private companies offering to help with various initiatives.

Back at the office, I met with Phil Ely - a volunteer at the local Betel residence. Betel was formed in Spain and now operates across several continents offering an evangelical Christian approach for those seeking to recover from addictions and homelessness. I was pleased to meet with Phil and hope that we can encourage the Betel group to enter into more partnerships with other local groups.

I then left the office shortly after 1:00 to attend a meeting of the BME Advocacy Service’s Contract Monitoring group at the Development Centre in Wheathamstead. There were perhaps half a dozen present from HCC, including our commissioning manager Jim Hyland and Maggie Woods, HCC’s Head of Achievement and Inclusion.

We discussed staffing for the service, targets, and mapped out a future meeting schedule. The meeting seemed to go very well, although I still have concerns about the targets.

After this, I just had time to pop home to work for an hour on WCVS's next newsletter and then I was back at Wheathamstead at 6:00 for a meeting of the Community Partnership Board helping with the implementation of the service. Several discussions had suggested to me that this might be a difficult meeting, but in fact there were excellent debates, helpful insights, and an amicable consensus on all points.

I returned home about 9:00 feeling very tired.