The good, the bad and the ugly
Overarching feelings of the week
It’s been a week of catching up after two weeks holiday. It was straight back in with the Community Spaces project, making sure that we had all the information we needed to move the groups onto the next stage. I’ve also been speaking with Craig and Tracy about how we support the organisations that were not successful in the first stage, how we can work with them to meet their individual requirements and think about how they can move forward.
Highlights
I received a lovely phone call from a group I’ve been working with for years now. I’m currently supporting them with funding and during the call they mentioned that they’d been nominated for a local award. I’m thrilled for them. It been a pleasure to watch them grow since first meeting them as they started up a small charity, to helping them find funding, to registering with the Charity Commission. They’ve grown massively over the years and are now supporting up to 80 people a week to help reduce social isolation.
Some puzzles
Following the above-mentioned phone call, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve developed relationships with a variety of groups in the county.
One of my colleagues once said that our role can be a bit like a documentary filmmaker when they see a baby elephant in trouble, but they can’t step in to help it and that’s always stuck with me. While we can offer information, advice, and guidance but we can’t force groups to take it on board. Groups must make their own decisions and our role is to support organisations to do this, not make those decisions for them.
Developing long standing relationships with a variety of groups is so important so that they know that they can come back time and again when they have questions, big or small. It can be hard to see the difference we’ve made when we give one off, ad hoc pieces of advice over several years but being able to look back over a longer period helps to clarify the role we play and the difference we make.
