Christmas Vibes (sorry!) and Legal Complexities

It’s been a short week for me. I was off on Monday and Tuesday to look after my mum following her hospital visit so the rest of this week has felt like trying to catch up on emails. On a positive note, I did miss the Wi-Fi blackout on Tuesday so silver linings…

Christmas is on my mind, and probably on everyone else’s now that the festive adverts are everywhere. I’ve even seen some Christmas lights up on a house near me. The venue for our staff Christmas lunch has been booked and now the difficult decision about food choices must be made. (I am less decisive than most, so really need to think about this). It’s always a lovely afternoon and great to be able to catch up with everyone outside of the office.

Wednesday seemed to be a day of team meetings this week and it was great to have a chance to sit down with my colleagues and talk about how our work connects, which it does in so many ways.

There are still a lot of different enquiries coming in on a variety of different topics. Lease issues seem to be cropping up again and again now and they can be so complicated, especially when they involve charity law and permanent endowments. These questions need a certain legal specialism that we don’t have but we are building good relationships with organisations that do have that expertise and can support trustees to negotiate these documents.

Ripples are starting to come from the work we’ve been doing with the Community Spaces project with groups now looking for support to make their buildings more energy efficient. As with legal issues, this is a very specialised area of work, so we are starting to build list of organisations that we can signpost groups too (never recommend!) and build relationships with.

Another busy week next week with the Share and Learn as my main event on Thursday. We’re fully booked now (numbers up to 50 which is fantastic for our network meeting) and I’m really looking forward to seeing some new faces.