Thursday, 11 December 2008

This morning I went to the very pretty town of Ware for a Community Cohesion conference organised by HCC for Hertfordshire Forward. Having had rather low expectations, I conference was excellent and there were some very good presentations from ICOCO (one of my favourite acronyms), the Suffolk LSP, and the HCC Community Information Unit.

I have two concerns about this morning's event. First, there were only 100 of us present and many of us attended a very similar event last year in WGC. Where is the broader engagement in these issues? Secondly, “community engagement” seems to be a very limited tool. Of course we want everyone to be engaged but what if an individual or an organisation or a community choose not to engage? The response is a shrug and an almost audible “oh well, at least we tried” – after all, there are plenty of other individuals / organisations / communities. And why does everyone need to engage only with the statutory sector’s agenda? What about the statutory sector engaging with the voluntary sector’s agenda? Now that would be something!

In the evening, Jackie and I put our recent ailments behind us and went dancing: great fun!