Project Steering Group born

Roy Thomas is a commercial lawyer who works for the Cardiff based Public Trust Parternership. He is also a member of St John's church congregation, and we share a great interest in the value of Christian presence and activity in the world of business and government. Unlike yours truly, Roy has done a course at the famous St George's College in Windsor, and knows all about courageous leadership. Last year he led the Welsh National Botanic Garden project out of danger of death from its debts, as interim CEO.

He accompanied me tonight to the meeting of Cardiff City Centre Churches Together council to explain his ideas which, having heard them, I am happy will provide us with a way forward

Roy proposed that the research be handed over entirely to a professionally competent organisation within a University, which would be offered a fixed fee to produce a report according to the briefing established by a project steering group. His role will be to manage the research team and eventually to publicise its findings and organise the conference.

This was well received, and appointments to the project steering group were made, including Mr Malcolm Thomas, secretary of Ebeneser, Mr Chris Daley of St David's Metropolitan Cathedral Council, Prof. Paul Ballard, Cardiff University's professor emeritus of Pastoral Theology, Revd. Monica Mills, Chaplain of Cardiff Bay active in the work of Cardiff Inter-Faith, Roy and myself.

New light in the tunnel

My possible volunteer to handle the employment of a reseach worker has expressed misgivings about what is proposed, thinking that the costs of advertising and setting up are going to be far in excess of what was originally proposed in our grant application budget, with no guarantee of sucess given the short time-scale - we need someone to start by end of June if we are to stick to a timetable that concludes the research by the end of the year. Not good news.

However, a conversation about the management with another member of the congregation yesterday morning took me by surprise. Without realising, I have someone whose day-job is managing projects, consultations and development processes. So I sent him all the documents I'd prepared and had a positive reply before retiring to bed. I must now wait to hear more fully what is on offer.

Welsh ecumenism and Inter-faith

Meeting this morning with Gareth Foster, the Diocesan Social Responsibility Officer, to brief him on the project and explore possibilities of using his administrative capacity to employ our research worker. He is willing to offer us this support, as a solution to our lack of capacity.

He introduced me to Brigid Bowen who has been employed for the past year by CYTUN, the national ecumenical body for Wales, to work on inter-faith networking across the Principality with funding from FCCBF under last year's Round One programme. She has developed an Inter-Faith Wales website and has been involved in organising interfaith events related to the Senedd.

Both were interested in the prospects of seeing a research worker in place, working on inter-faith affairs. However, that's not quite what we are about. We want to enquire of every kind of faith community group about their relationship to civil society. How they do and don't succeed in contributing to it. Talking better to each other about this should be a fruit of the process we've started, but really, the research outcomes should really stimulate a dialogue between our secularised public administrative culture and religious communities that they are meant to serve.

A way forward?

Confirmation today that using DBSR to administer our funding is not acceptable to CDF. The time spent arranging this is wasted, except that the complexity of involving another organisation in the process has been highlighted, so this may be just as well.

Where do we go from here? Well, I have discovered someone in our congregation with many years of H.R. experience who would be willing to manage the employment of our researcher, and that will include the recruitment process. I have formulated a fullsome project briefing and a job specification, and even produced application forms based upon an old CofE job application form I found in my archives.

Dead end

The response to my enquiry was more questions about the relationship between the Parish and the Diocesan Board of Social Responsibility.

The view from CDF is that the Parish is the recipient, and cannot simply make use of the services of another diocesan agency to administer the funds on our behalf, unless there is a prior 'service level agreement' in place.

Even though the DBSR is a perfectly respectable body holding and managing funds and grants made for its own projects, we will have to find another way of doing this.

Project ownership

Tonight's meeting of City Centre Churches Together council welcomed the award of the CDF FCCBF grant. and was happy that St John's should be its appointed recipient. The proposal that it should be managed by the Diocesan Board of Social responsibility was entirely acceptable. This meant that the proposed way of handling CDF requirements is acceptable to both local stakeholders involved in the application.

Wrote off to the grants administrator Martine Davies, to relay our decisions, and ask if they was an acceptable way to proceed.

Promise of funding

A letter arrived at St John's Church today advising me of the awarding of a Grant applied for in great haste last November, from the Community Development Foundation's Faith Capacity Community Building Fund. CDF - FCCBF

We have the promise of £30,000 to spend on our project between 31st March 2007 and 31st March 2008. It's enough money to employ a research worker, mount a conference and produce a decent publication. But it all requires a lot of management.

The project grant application was made in the name of St John's City Parish with the full support of the City Centre Churches Together. However, the grant is to St John's as the lead partner in this venutre.

Immediately, there's paperwork to be read, signatures to be acquired, in order to manage the money, a lot to be organised in a relatively short space of time, to ensure we put in place the appropriate employment mechanisms, and the means to handle the finances.

As St John's doesn't have any administrative staff, this could prove something of a problem. There's now some talking to be done with the Diocesan Board of Social Responsibility, and with the Churches Together council, which meets, fortunately, next week.