This morning enjoyed cream cakes and tea with the team organised by Habibah, our Community Cohesion Officer, to celebrate Eid ul-Fitr – End of Ramadan. For Muslims, this is an occasion that marks the end of a month of fasting and the achievement of enhanced spirituality. It is also a day of peace of congregation, fellowship, brotherhood and unity. How fitting that the whole HVA team should share in this celebration!
Caught up with Jill, our deputy director as she emerged from a monitoring love-in with members of the team, laden with various publications on measuring effectiveness. Jill reliably informed me that there was a great deal of excitement around gearing up for the NAVCA performance standards and that as far as she was concerned it was the best thing since aunty Mable caught her left tit in the mangle. Had a chat with Jill about the ongoing success of our volunteer accreditation programme and reported back on my wild night out at the Hastings Achievers Awards. For those of you that want to get a flavour of the good works going on in Hastings there is a very good video of the Achievers award on the Observer website http://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/ . Three awards for Best Community Group, Making a Difference to Hastings and Overall Achiever went to one of our member organisations Gizmo, in recognition of their community arts work with children and young people. It was great to hear Pat Fisher from Gizmo crediting HVA for supporting their work. HVA have been involved with Gizmo through thick and thin - and in the early days there was plenty of thin! - so it was great to see them take their rightful place up on the podium for once.
Talking to Jill reminded me that on the last night of the NAVCA conference at Keele Uni she had a dream that she was on a bus on some kind of magical mystery tour with other CVS worthies and Kevin Curley at the wheel. At some point on the road there was a general consensus that they were lost. Jill popped out to retrieve a map from a run down community building and popped back on again. Unfortunately the map wasn’t much good as no one knew where they were let alone where they were going! What was that all about?? It must have been something in the strange tomato blancmange they served as as the starter at the end of conference dinner!
Todays lyric is the excellent Talking Heads led by David Byrne. A real groundbreaking video too which you can see here http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LLiX8sgfgQU
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