You can be my partner

Another partnership day with collegues cross county.

An early morning visit to the office responding to the urgent and the essential. To Wealden and a Dynamics of place workshop which I was not looking forward to and had agreed to having been pestered. Actually, this proves to be an extremely fruitful day and a new way of looking at the issues we face economic, housing, community in a new(ish) way. Very well facilitated and bringing together representatives from LSPs throughout the County. Despite my usual cynicism about such events we all work rather hard and produce some discussion which is actually rather creative about some key problems for the County. I still bang on abouty my key issues at the moment which are:-

1. The importance of understanding the informal economy
2. The value and improtance of community activism and how vest to support it
3. That those at the bottom of the pile (not suprisingly) have a different value base and, not suprisingly, do not believe the stories they have been spun (value of education, the harder you work the more successful you will be et al) and find their own ways of getting by.

Finally, I remind some people that one of the reasons people do not acccept low paid work is that they do not find the prospect of doing an unsatisfying job for 40 hours a week attractive when it will only net them about £12 more than the benefit level and frankly nor would I. Must find a way of making these points without sounding like some naive young socialist in the student union batr. Gravitas perhaps but, hell, why bother!

Anyway the journey back with two colleagues from the Local Authority. They are both good at their jobs and, thankfully, also good company so we put the world to rights on the way back. Tommorrow (saturday) and a conference with Church leaders looking at the role of the Church and Community. So long as I don't get struck by lightning or exposed like the child in Damien II (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNZrTgskUrI) I will report on the blog again tommorow.

Anyway our lyric today is The Stones and Tumbling Dice an absolutely brilliant song from the Exile on Main Street Album. If you have never heard this you are seriously missing out. Here is a video of The Stones doing it live in one of the larget concert venues in the world in Brazil. CYA!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3hCbFqRHKk