Thursday, 18 September 2008

I enjoyed a gentle start to the day, travelling to central Welwyn Garden City for the second Learning Together conference staged by the Hertfordshire Training and Development Consortium. This is a project of the Hertfordshire Community Foundation, funded by the Learning and Skills Council and operating broadly under the umbrella of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium. Sarah Elliott has done remarkably well to move the Consortium forward, get agreement on an action plan and secure funding.

But there is little to connect those providers engaged in workforce development within the voluntary sector and those engaged in delivering community education. And of course there are still precious few resources available for workforce development in the voluntary sector. Today's conference provided a welcome opportunity to talk through these questions.

In the afternoon, there was appended a meeting on the operation of the Grassroots Grants programme. The Hertfordshire Community Foundation have taken a bold and imaginative step of working in close partnership with the CVSs to deliver this programme. We are all supposed to be allocating grants already and in fact the funding is front loaded toward the start of the programme. But we have had no time to get structures in place, guidance is almost non-existent, and no money has yet been actually released. The Foundation, under their CEO David Fitzpatrick, have been working hard to get things in place, and they deserve huge plaudits for this. But nevertheless, the programme has the usual critical failings of central government initiatives.