A satisfying breakthrough

Things are looking up at last. Yesterday our CBS team - Ashley, Sara, Kevin and I met with the new Police Chief Inspector for the City Centre and one of the Divisional Superintendents. They came for a briefing on the work of RadioNet and the problems we've had making progress on re-establishing the Business Crime Reduction Partnership board, now a year overdue.

The delay has been attributable to changeovers in personnel responsible in the part of both Council and Police, with a series of newcomers to their office hungry to slow things down and make their mark by re-inventing the wheel, rather than listening and trying to understand the complexities of who we are and what we do. This has been a hindrance which has deprived us of appropriate help and support in the redesign of the Board and its constitution. 

It'll be another three weeks before we finally meet up with the most recently assigned Council officer, who was tasked several months ago to liaise with us, and has left us way down his priority list. It has been a hard task, getting things refined to the stage where the appropriate instruments of governance are fit and ready, now we're there. We've done it in the end with no help from any of the legal experts of Council or Police - ironic when it's a matter of partnership in communications, for public benefit.

Today, before going off to officiate at the funeral of a centenarian, I met with the Partnership Steering Group chairman, Rory Fleming, who has accompanied the formative process with perceptiveness and exceptional patience for the past eighteen months, given that I halted the last planned inaugural board meeting at the eleventh hour when I discovered faults in our documentation which we'd not noticed previously, or else nobody scrutinizing them had bothered to draw to our attention. 

Being a shrewd business manager, I believe Rory understood my reasoning and was willing to give us the benefit of the doubt. He went on to idenitfy a deficiency in the constitution I'd not grasped, being too close to it. That led to more work, more discussion more drafting, and eventually a cautious degree of satisfaction that design and content will serve the purpose of getting the Partnership Board established properly in a correctly structured relationship to CBS as its trading arm. Today, we fixed another Steering Group meeting and set a new date for the inaugural Board meeting. It comes just at the right time, when CBS is ready for the next development phase to get under way. It'll mark the end of a challenging birth and five year infancy for our home grown not-for-profit voluntary social enterprise.