Friends Centre and SCIP training

Good meeting with Juliet and Chris at the Friends Centre in Brighton. We talked about the FC's current strategy and I explained some of what is going on at SCIP. We also covered some ideas about links which could be useful in my Champion role.

In particular we discussed the continuation of the current contract SCIP holds with Friends Centre, which ends at the end of the month. We've been struggling to hit targets, and had considered stopping this work.

Luckily FC is interested in use the money to do some other work, especially if it helps develop their partnership with us and Working Together Project. Suggestions included:

• an edemocracy-related project, linked to the Brighton and Hove issues forum, which SCIP help set up and now runs
• joint work on newsletter or web site production with a neighbourhood group
• developing new courses, as a pilot for our BASIS funded work with Working Together Project

Spoke to Paul at WTP and he's interested so we'll meet in early September to see what we want to do.

technorati tags:scip, scipmark

UK Online

Have now contacted Sarah Bridgeman at UK Online - she's the regional coordinator and I've bumped into her a few times in different projects.

I'm keen to get SCIP set up as a net:gain centre, so I'll be applying for UK Online Centre status. She handles the process and seemed confident we'd get through it okay, so that's great.

And we're meeting up next week to talk about regional connections.