WATCH AGM Today

WATCH (Working Actively To Change Hillfields) is having its AGM today (330pm, St Peter's Community Centre, Hillfields, Coventry, CV1 5LY).

WATCH's services are essential for Coventry, whether it is their employment project (with help for the long-term unemployed, migrant workers, and refugees/asylum seekers), the Hillz FM community radio station, youth training projects, or ongoing support for community groups in Hillfields.

WATCH, however, has been caught in a funding bind. The city council stopped all of its funding to WATCH (£120 000 a year, 25% of the centre's funding) at the end of March 2007. Andy Matchet shows up to Respect agenda photo-ops at WATCH. Tony O'Neill and Kevin Foster have been interviewed on the Hillz FM and say they're friends of WATCH. Then, this comes down the pipe. Why is work that provides services to youth, the unemployed, and refugee communities undeserving of funding? WATCH would have to be recreated if it were to go under the waves, so why not fund it in the first place?

It would be welcome if the city council would decide which 20 organisations in the city require core funding for their operations, and then provide multi-year funding to said organisations. As a city, we could then avoid the year-by-year funding instability that plagues non-profit groups.

Ironically for a Conservative-controlled council, David Cameron was calling for support for groups such as WATCH in August of this year:

The social enterprise is the great institutional innovation of our times. At the moment, however, we are not making nearly enough use of the potential of the voluntary sector. Only about 5% of public services are provided by independent operators, who report a range of financial and bureaucratic obstacles to effective contracting with government ... Smaller, locally based voluntary organisations, which are often the most effective at combating entrenched deprivation, are losing out to the large national operations. The government is funnelling the majority of its third sector funding to the big players, which in turn allows them to generate the publicity which ensures they also receive the lion's share of voluntary giving as well.