Sarah Fletcher - Assistant General Secretary of Peterborough Council for Voluntary Service

My name is Sarah Fletcher and I have been the Assistant General Secretary of Peterborough Council for Voluntary Service for over 13 years. Our organisation provides the membership for the vast number of voluntary and community groups in Peterborough.

November is a very busy month for our organisation. We start the month with activities during National Compact Week. The national Compact has been around since 1998 however, Compact was not fully adopted in Peterborough until 2005. What is Compact? It’s about better working principals between the voluntary, private and statutory sectors which lead to better outcomes for communities and people.

On Monday 2nd we had the launch of the Next Steps Compact Working Group. This group is tasked with taking Compact forward. After a lively debate the group agreed that over the next few months we need to set out objectives for the local Compact, enabling it to demonstrate to signed partners the impact it has made. The next meeting is planned for December.

From 10am to 4pm on Tuesday we had a drop in for voluntary groups to come in and ask about Compact with an end result of more groups signing the Compact pledge. Despite heavy rain all day we had a steady stream of voluntary groups come along. Our goal is to have at least 10 more signed groups by the end of November.

On 5th and 6th the NHS Peterborough and Peterborough City Council who are both signed partners engaged in a Compact briefing delivered by me. The plan is to remind signed partners what they have agreed to and start to spread the ‘Compact’ word. I hope my presentation was well received and no one was too put out by Jason from Friday the 13th! (you had to be there). It was really good to see Gillian Beasley, Chief Executive of Peterborough City Council involved this will greatly help Compact move forward locally.

The National Compact document is undergoing a refresh at present to find out more about Compact or the refresh go to http://www.thecompact.org.uk/

We are now preparing for the next big event on Thursday 12th November. One of our projects Peterborough Volunteer Centre is hosting the annual volunteer awards event. A little like the ‘Oscars’ of Peterborough this is a great event for all concerned. I will update you on the Awards Evening next blog.