Is it already Friday?

Hi everyone.

Welcome to my weekly Friday blog.



We welcomed Sophie Webb to join our team this week. She is with us for six months under the sponsorship of the Future Jobs Fund and is a great asset already. She is working on cleaning up our database of Member organizations, so that she and Kate can then undertake a new Members’ Survey. We want to find out your opinions of ours services, and also check out the scale of your activities with young people so that the Voice of Young people can be magnified at what is a tough time. Impact is a key word. So I commend the Future Jobs Fund to you as a source of (free) staff.

We have passed through the first stage of the Pqasso process – the desk review of our submitted documents – stacks of them! Next stage is that the assessor inspects us on 13 Oct.

The main focus this week has been on getting our Annual Report and Accounts together; we are improving its presentation considerably, recognizing its value as a marketing document to funders.

I mentioned Social Impact Bonds last week, and you will have heard about the Peterborough Prison project on the national news today. More later

Heard a very interesting presentation by the Chairman of the National Community Foundation Network about the Big Society…. No one builds a pyramid from the top down….

Great discussion last night at the University for the Creative Arts at Epsom under the auspices of Common Purpose, and a presentation by the Dean and Professor of Creative Arts on the subject of creativity – how do we capture creativity and risk taking rather than saying- no, can’t be done, too risky , failure, redundant? He pointed out that in the USA and India mistakes, are just episodes to learn from.


Big Picture: Collaborative working, and social impact bonds.


Personal disclosure: Had builders in over the last two weeks to renovate our cloakroom….why is it always that builders always muck up something (our central heating) when doing other work? I also got older this week…and wiser?

Trivial Pursuits:

1) Last week’s answer is that Plato’s theory of the cave was about prisoners in a cave seeing only shadows, not ideal forms , unless they climbed out. The Family (Roger Chapman was a great 1960s group with which , later, the lead singer had a hit with “Shadow on the wall”. No one got it, so this week:-

2) Paul Weller missed out on this week’s Mercury Awards, but despite this, why is he always a winner?



Cheers,


Mike