This was the Week, This was.... 24th - 30th April

Monday 24th April

Well here we are again, another Monday and a packed week ahead.

I was up early this morning and buzzing because there is so much going on within the community of Chippenham at the moment that there are times when the Hub can't keep up.

And to be quite honest this certainly is an issue that we need to address this week!

There are many advantages of being a totally independent organisation, not least because usually it enables community to be first and foremost thing on our minds, but in practical terms there are times when that old evil issue of money pops-up causing us extra work and a rethink!

Of course with the services of our great volunteers, together with community help and fellow trustees, we can keep everything very tight, but we have now got to face it that the funding from Chippenham Borough Lands, who contributed towards our fantastic managers wages for the first two years, has dried up, and this combined with the increase in community demands means that there is both the need for a new part-time person to help carry the load, and some additional income to finance the extra hours that Donna has agreed to do.

This makes applying for funding from various pots of money essential - and if you ask anyone in this sector for one job they find particularly difficult, I can guarantee that the answer they give will inevitably be the sourcing and submission of grant applications at the top of their list!

The Crafty Chainers were at the Hub in great spirit and this along with a revolving door of people left little time for anything else which meant that the afternoon was busy with admin.

A calming concentration saw everything progressing well, that is until the phone rang with a call from BBC Wiltshire Radio asking for Vox Pop to play during the next days early morning news because they were covering the start of the 'Chippenham One Plan' consultation.

Now, not many people know this, but I am an extremely nervous person where public speaking is concerned and at that moment turning my head from form filling on to the intense subject of the planned town wide consultation (that had been been worked on by brighter brains than me) was a difficult in the extreme.

Little did I know that a reporter had also been at the Hub during the afternoon recording our wonderful volunteers views on the consultation for the very same reason.

It had already been a busy day and an early evening virtual 'Teams' meeting with several members of the Town Partnership Board and Wiltshire Council officers to make sure that all would go well with the consultation process capped all....so, you would imaging that I would sleep well, but of course that was not the case. As usual I both dreaded and looked forward to catching-up with my old friend Ben Prater on his show the next day, and so the restless night was really inevitable!