After a morning at home catching up on correspondence, in the afternoon I met Kate Belinis of CDA for Herts to discuss issues of mutual interest. We covered a lot of ground and reached common ground on most matters including some very practical steps to help improve future collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, we agreed that the Herts voluntary sector needs to pull itself together at county level.
We have many instances of good practice and certainly Ann Jansz is doing a very good job as the VCS’s LAA representative. But as a sector, I have been worried for some time that we are “punching below our weight” - missing out on opportunities and too willing to let others set the agenda. More recently, I have also worried that HCC have lost the knack of dealing with the voluntary sector: symptoms include meetings cancelled, network gatherings not attended, consultation processes by-passed, decisions taken behind closed doors, decisions not communicated, and increasingly defensive responses to criticism. At first, I thought these difficulties arose because HCC staff were overworked, there was a period of internal HCC re-organisation, and issues such as the recession and child protection getting higher priority. But the new culture is in danger of becoming entrenched: something has to change if it’s not all to end in tears. As the voluntary sector’s infrastructure, we should be sorting ourselves out and offering a better lead: we owe this to ourselves, to front-line organisations, to the sector’s beneficiaries, and to those many marginalised groups who use the sector to give themselves a voice. But we also owe it to HCC who have a right to expect us to speak up when we think something’s going wrong.
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A relentless blog of 1,000 days (from Nov 2006 to July 2009) - giving far more detail than you want about my personal life and my role as CEO at Watford Council for Voluntary Service.
