My job as Director of HVA takes me to some strange places - perhaps no stranger than the place I find myself today. Court 4 at Hove Crown Court. Fear not, dear reader, I have not erred or committed some act of outrage. I am here to witness a sentencing. Over a year ago HVA - or rather its first class group support worker Pat - uncovered a strange set of transactions in the accounts of one of our members (for whom we were conducting an Independant Examination). Well one thing led to another and we had uncovered a fraud. We have supported the group through the entire process. Many voluntary groups run exclusively by volunteers would have "thrown in the towel" but they have soldiered on much to their credit. The Police were only the verge of dropping the case due to lack of evidence but we complained and persevered to bring the matter to its conclusion. Hence my visit to the crown court. Its a long running saga finally over. Although the evidence is overwhelming a guilty plea on the part of the person concerned takes the matter beyond doubt. Hit it...http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzV_0l5ILI

"In the morning and the evening 'til the end of the line"

Monday brings a discussion with the chair of the Community Network and Fran - HVA's Network Development Officer about the community empowerment white paper and the feedback both HVA and the CEN would like to give the Govt. There is lots of good stuff in the White Paper which uses the right rhetoric but details of how this will be arranged and, crucially, how it will be resourced are sketchy. Our experience was that the old community empowerment fund - coming directly to the VCS with lots of flaxibility was probably the closest the Govt have ever got to an empowering funding regime which put resources precisely where they could best be used.

From there I see Sandra, the coordinator of our volunteering passport project which accredits volunteering activity and enables participants to secure a qualification. We have a success story on our hands as the first cohort of students have graduated and the verifying body see us as national "best practice". Indeed they have decided to use us as a case study example of how to do it. We plan a small ceremony to award certificates during National Volunteering Week.

From there it is a quick dash to the station to catch the train to the Board meeting of the Sussex Community Foundation. I buy - for the first time in maybe 20 years - a copy of the NME. Now I was used to the old style version where the print came off on your hands. Now in 2008 it has been revamped and has all gone glossy/upmarket and the writing isn't as good. Free copy of the new Coldplay single though - although as this is on vinyl I will have to give it away as I do not own a record player. Also on the music front I pick up for 50p a copy of the first - and I think possibly only - album by Cornershop. You may remember this band as they were more widely noticed after the success of a Fatboy Slim remix of their song "Brimful of Asha", a song writtten as a tribute to the prolific Indian playback singerAsha Bhosle and the entire Indian music industry in general. Norman Cook mixed the track without charging a fee because he liked it so much.

Anyway I digress the Board meeting discusses Endowment funding grassroots grants and progress towards levering money from the wealthy in the County. Apart from meetings it is a day trying to catch up with e-mails cheque signing and letters.

The evening is spent over a drink where I am briefed about the Youth Service Review as I have to prepare for a special meeting of all the area boards at which this will be discussed. This is partly my responsibility as I raised some quesations about how the funding formulae works and whether this unwittingly loads money away from the most deprived parts of the County. The meeting will review how these services are being delivered and funded.

In the spirit of opening choice and the empowerment white paper. Here on the HVA Directors blog you can feel empowered to make choices of your own by picking from either:-

the original Cornershop version of the song here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QBbKMoKiIg

or

the Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim) remix here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniTypXFje4

The Choice is yours - feel empowered!!

And all I really want is some justice

Lyric today is from Alanis Morrisette and the justice in question is an Employment Tribunal case involving one of HVAs members. It brings home just how vulnerable small organisations are when they are legally challanged. It costs over £2,500 to instruct a solicitor to prepare a case and represent at one of these hearings. Let alone the costs of an award made against a group which could threaten its very future. It is for this reason that very ocassionally I brush off some professional skills as an Employment Law practitioner and step into the advocacy role.

This one is a little hurried as I don't actually hear that we are going until I receive a panicked phone call the day before. As a consequence I don't see the full trial bundle until I get into the car to be driven over to the hearing itself. These days are always full and not without their unique stresses as there is a lot at stake. Seven witnesses later plus closing arguments and we a wait for a decision. This eventually comes and the case is decided in our favour which is a huge relief for the Trustees concerned who have been involved with this matter for a long time. The lunchtime also presents me with a copy of a PJ Harvey album for £2 as well. HVA derive no funding for this aspect of our service but it is one of those days when you feel you can make a difference. Certainly the implications and risks for the group were significant and it was the right thing to do in offering to represent them.

Apart from that I resolve that as my desk and I have been strangers for a good few days now I feel that I need to look through everything on my desk rather than just snatching up the most important items. Perhaps monday.

Here is Alanis with our lyric reference http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXCCv5ngyI0

I want to be elected...

A classic Alice Cooper song introduces the aftermath of the local elections. For ages, the Council seemed paralysed by being in "purduh" (or whatever it is called) with no real decisions being taken and no strategic issues being addressed. No change there you may think, but I would rebuke you for your abject cynicism. I have always believed that within each tired and flaccid Local Authority there is an active and radical one waiting to come out.

More than usual the local elections were awaited with some excitement. Ironically, the Sunday before the elections I ran a 5 mile road race in support of the local hospice. It started at the Town Hall and I spent some timechatting to Kevin the Councils marketing manager who I know well. We discuss what is likely to happen and both agree that this election will be a difficult one to call. As a former local politician who did not have a bad track record in calling elections I really did not know which way this was going to go.

Anyway, there is a huge political change in Hastings from a "hung council" to a, well, slightly different "hung council". Interesting individual results though, as one seat - and ultimately the whole Council is literally decided on a lottery. The Old Town ward is tied after 6 recounts and in situations like this the Returning Officer literally pulls a name from a hat. There are some who argue that the performance of Local Government in Hastings might actually be strengthened by picking all 32 councillors this way but that again would be a cynics viewpoint and I urge you not to adopt it.

John, our information worker does stirling work to ensure that all new Councillors receive a welcome letter from us as probably the first piece of official mail they get after their election which portrays us as an organisation which respnds to political change quickly. We will do new member briefings no doubt to the new Councillors in due course.

While I am talking information I should record a small piece of CVS history as we have become the first CVS in the country - we think - to record its own podcast. Actually I had a Sunday afternoon at home and download the software from a free Linux source called Audacity. I thought I would give it a quick go just to see if the programme worked. Before I knew where I was I had recorded a 25 minute unscripted podcast about local VCS issues. You feel a bit self-concious at first but you soon get "into the groove" as it were.

I bring a copy into work and give John an opportunity to listen. We are now working on how to get its memory size down to manageable proportions. Check the website soon and you may be able to download me to hear in the comfort of your own home or via your ipod. It is entirely experimental of course but it does open up other possibilities to offer some briefings on line and maybe find new ways of reaching our members. We shall see.

Alice over to you my friend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jggm7VWqhLs

We're in the Money

I know, I know it has been an absolute age since the last blog update. No excuses really except that things have been a bit busy on the work and personal front. The non work headlines are that both Kate and Lorna my step-daughters now have small babies who contrived to arrive within 48 hours of each other. On the work front I completed some teaching at the University of Brighton which I do every year. Not very many sessions but the always fall in the same week. There is a 2 day commmunity work theory into practice course followed by a young people and the law workshop at the end of the week. A tiring period with all the travel to and fro but it forces me to keep in touch with the theory and read around an community development issues. Often I find that the most interesting work is going on outside the UK. Anyway during the second day I am in the middle of teaching when I receive numerous texts and missed calls on my mobile phone. I can feel them but it is only at the coffee break that I can find out whay I am in such demand. Fearing for some family emergency I was suprised and delighted to learn that it was the news that our commuinity assets transfer proposal was approved and a building plus £750,000 to convert it into the resource which both the Town and the VOluntary Sector deserve is ours. A real achievement down entirely to partnership work - credit entirely due to Glyn from the Council and Mel from the Trust for helping us to turn a last minute decision into a robust proposal. I give a press quote which is embargoed until the official announcement.

There really can only be one lyric reference to support this news and here it is complete with classic Busby Berkley routine hit it girls...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqbuS7U1SWQ

It's the end of the world as we know it

Perhaps not the end of the world but at least the end of the financial year as we know it. A strange administrative phenomonen which results in a range of service providers realising that they have unspent cash in their coffers and then deciding that the vol sector is the place to utilise. No problem there but it does result in a lot of of running around and frantic e-mails about service level agreements and what-not. Apart from this it is also the busiest time of the eyar for the training I undertake for the University of Brighton. I only work there about 5 days per year but 3 of the days are in a single week which means I am on a train from Hastings to Falmer. 2 days community development and half a day teaching a module on young people and the law.

Wednesday saw me to the first meeting of the advisory group which is advising the Council on how to spent the money it has been given from the Working Neighbourhoods Fund. The background to this is that, in a masterstroke of strategic planning, the Borough Council planned on the basis that Hastings would no longer feature in the indices of deprivation (wrong) and would no longer receive additinal funding as a result (also wrong). It restructured its own activities creating massive disruption on the basis of its earlier analysis (completeley wrong). As a consequnce when it is announced that Hastings is still a poor place and will receive money we need to embark on a process to allocate it. There is much scraching of heads over this (profoundly wrong).

The Council are at pains to point out that it is the body who will decide on the allocation of Working Neighbourhoods. This is a good job as they have raided the till, as it were, to support its own restructuring. They have also convened an advisory group or partners to help in this process. This is either a genuine attempt at partnership or a cynical attempt to justify a series of decisions which have already been taken - depending on how you view it.

I attend the meeting in the conference room at Priory Meadow shopping centre. It is an eclectic discussion - a few ideas but no real progress on the complex issues we have to address. I leave somewhat frustrated that the key issues remain unaddressed. In Hastings we are rich in data and the measurement of poverty but poor on analysis (a point I make at the meeting). We know the impact of what is happening but not the reasons for it or, most crucially, what to do about it. The employment and economic problems of Hastings are not sudden (they have arisen over more than 3 decades) but there is a struggle to diagnose them or attempt to articulate what can be done - even with a cash injection of over £3m. For what seems like the 50th time I talk about the importance of the third sector and the need to understand the informal economy in order to plan a way forward for the Town. I leave the meeting unable to feel that a single decision has been taken or that a clear way forward is within our grasp. On a slightly more positive side some transitional arrangements are planed to take forward some of our funding. It has been neccessary to highlight to the local authority the inconsistency of their approach taking lonog term decisions over their own structure but offering a mere 12 weeks funding to the sector. More of this is accessible via our website if you really want to know the details.

I am somewhat cynical over the Council's ability to respond to reported breaches of the compact. We have one already filed which has so far taken 9 months and still awaits a response. I have briefed Alfie my 11 year old grandson about this issue - in case I am no longer around when a reply is received. He in turn has given me an undertaking to pass the information to his as yet unborn children should the issue not be resolved. So the compact breach of 2007 will be passed down father to son through the generations until a reply is received from Hastings Borough Council.

Here is a UCLA high school students personal interpretation of the REM song from which we derive our lyric reference. Not bad in my humble opinion so enjoy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0c6VnT-TLw

Back to the Grind

After the marathon I have to say that I didn't feel too bad and the legs held up well. After a couple of days break I gently started running again midweek. Apart from that its been work all the way with an awayday to cement progress on the CVS partnership. This is a project to build stronger and better joint activity between the 4 CVS in East Sussex. We had a review period with all the trustees and Chief Officers which gave a mandate to move ahead with the creation of a new legal structure. What else, much to report on the health front with the Health and Social Care Forum having a successful conference and the appointment of a new host to support the embryonic LINKS process. It is early days yet but HVA have been supporting the transition through Jan our Health Development Worker. Lots of preparation for the Review of Area Boards and an evening meeting to look at proposals for maximising community input. Basically there are 4 area boards in HAstings which examine service delivery and try and align it to the needs and issues of each neighbourhood area. HVA have a staff member shadowing each board so that vol sector issues remain on the agenda. My view is that the process will only be operating to its maximum effectiveness if the Boards have some resources they can deploy but I appear to be a lone voice in this. Saturday also saw us visit a pub in Hollington to see a colleague Terry play in his band. Apart from enjoying their set there is an ulterior motive as we are searching for a good band to play at Sues birthday celebration much later in the year.