I am immersed in the wonderful world of core funding bidding for the next 3 weeks so you won’t see me for dust..

If you haven’t heard the story of bubbles and buckets then here is the news…

Our lead commissioner came to do a presentation about how they were approaching funding the VCS in the borough. She was brand new and clearly thrilled with the post and the work ahead. We were all well established and not thrilled with what we thought might be coming. She kicked off by saying ‘we have an excellent idea of how to work out what services should be commissioned and what levels of funding’ We all groaned inwardly – with fixed smiles on our faces as she has all our money in her back pocket.. ‘We are approaching this by setting up a number of bubbles to group together similar services and there will be a bucket of funding allocated to each bubble, with possibly some sub buckets for some bubbles and some of the sub buckets may be moved from bubble to bubble’ At this point we all felt that she probably had small children at home. One of my chums said ‘how much money is on offer?’ he is a plain speaking man. She seemed concerned that we were not more engaged with our bubbles and buckets and movements of sub buckets and seemed disappointed that such a rude question had been asked. ‘ We have visuals on the totality of the envelope’ she said, slightly bristling. ‘Ah he said, so how much money is on offer’ ‘ I can’t share that’ she said very cross. ‘Ah’, he said ‘so it is invisible visuals then?’ and so it all started and – guess what- is continuing in much the same vein so I am deep in the world of bidding and jargon – re watching W1A and Twenty Twelve on iplayer in the evenings as light relief.

Back here in December… meanwhile.. enjoy not being bombarded with surveys and nonsense from me 🙂