(Film by the Disasters Emergency Committee)

84MM at Bar Med, Crawley, 30/11/08

Sunday evening I went down to the Bar Med in Crawley, where the young people of the town were organising, playing at and going to see a charity concert.  Although I am far from young myself, they did need some volunteer responsible adults for the event and I managed to pass as a responsible adult somehow.As expected, watching the bands play I was torn between the pleasure of seeing so many people enjoying themselves and sheer jealousy that every single kid playing was a far better musician than I could ever hope to be.   Unless I lost track completely, which is not impossible, there were six acts on the bill, all local artists and all playing for free.  Bar Med let them have the place for free, because it was in a good cause, and by the end of the evening there was a £630 profit to be sent to the Great Ormond Street hospital.

Scrappy MC at Bar Med, Crawley, 30/11/08

It kicked off with a chap called John Refford  singing and playing acoustic guitar.  Then there were Dizzy Tales, a pair of rappers called Scrappy MC & Amo, Smile From A Stranger, 84MM and US & Them.

I had seen 84MM before but had not heard of any of the others, who all turned out to be quite good too. The headliners, US & Them¹ were especially good.  I was dead impressed by the bass player.

In parts they were, like Dizzy Tales before them, quite reminiscent of the Arctic Monkeys, but they also managed to have some cracking tunes that encourage audience participation like the Kaiser Chiefs do – lots of big choruses to get everyone going.  The term ‘crowd-pleasers’ could have been invented for them.

What impressed me was the levels of confidence shown by all the acts.  Maybe not all the music is to everyone’s taste, but they all looked totally at home on the stage.  I shouldn’t single anybody out but the taller of Scrappy MC & Amo and the singer with Us & Them really did have a good presence and way of handling a crowd.

The organisers

There were a few nerves amongst the organisers.  There had never been a youth event at the Bar Med before, and some recent under-18s events at the Liquid/Envy night club had gone badly wrong, but it all went off without a hitch, thanks to the efficient security at Bar Med.  Obviously there was no alcohol served, there was not even any alcohol advertising visible – all the beer taps were covered, etc.  This meant that I saw local character and fellow responsible adult, Chris Mullins, with a soft drink in his hand.  I took a photo of course, because otherwise nobody would believe me.

The security staff said that the crowd were extremely well-behaved and viewed it as a quiet night. Not as quiet as their normal Sunday nights of course, when the club is closed, but it all went as well as could be hoped.  One reason for this is that all the advertising was restricted to the local area- flyers and word of mouth in Crawley schools and some plugging on Radio Mercury in the last week – so there were not large crowds of kids coming down from Croydon and London.

The audience, the bands and the organisers were all a credit to Crawley youth.  Check out the links above to the various band MySpaces and see just how many charity concerts they are all doing as well as shows in local pubs, schools and youth clubs.  There is a thriving local music scene going on that is practically invisible to us old fogeys but keeping a lot of youngsters occupied in ways I can only envy.

I did take quite a few photos, and a selection of them are on Flickr. (Note – all high-res and under Creative Commons so if the local papers who don’t send photographers out on a Sunday evening want to use them that is fine)

1. probably not named after the Pink Floyd song, but you never know

Flyer for charity concert

Apparently half the population thinks that children in the UK behave like animals.  To give a bit of balance, here are three groups of youngsters who show that the ‘feral’ stereotype is not applicable:

1. The group of Crawley school pupils who have organised this charity concert in aid of Great Ormond Street hospital.
2. The young musicians who will be playing at the concert
3. The audience who will (I hope) turn up to support the cause

Full details are:

CYG are holding an Under 18s Charity Gig in Bar Med on Sunday 30th November, 6-10pm. Raising money for Great Ormond Street Hospital, it promises to be a fantastic night, and a chance for Crawley’s brightest up-and-coming music talent to play to a crowd of teenagers in one of the town’s most exclusive venues. This event has been highly anticipated for some time, and word is spreading fast!

84mm, Scrappy MC, and Smile from a Stranger are all from local schools here in Crawley, and tipped to have promising futures. There will also be a DJ on the night, and all profits will be going to a great cause. Aisleen Byrne (16) and Nona Buckley-Irvine (15), from Oriel High School in Maidenbower, are the driving force behind what has been quoted as being Crawley’s event of the year!

£5 entry, with tickets available on the door. Alternatively, advanced tickets can be purchased. For more details text CHARITY to 07950 219628.

Don’t miss out, and we hope to see you there (if you’re Under 18…)!

It was all Jayne’s idea. She decided it would be a good idea to have an auction at the Broadfield Community Centre fete last month, so people were bidding for someone with gardening skills to come and do a few hours in their garden, or for someone who is a hairdresser to do some hairdressing.

I was press-ganged into being sold off as a computer expert and someone bid money for me to go and sort out problems with their computer. I think the deal was that they bid the sort of amount I could earn at work in about half an hour, and in return I would give up several hours of my free time, and the money would swell the Community Centre coffers. As it was in a good cause, and because Jayne is not someone who takes no for an answer, I went along with it.

The trouble is that this was the day before we went on holiday. I gave my new owner one of my cards and told them to give it a week or so before calling. They said not to worry, I should just call when I was back and available. Fine. They had given their details to one of the volunteers so I could get their phone number later.

We came back from holiday, I went to get the phone number so I could discharge my obligation, but the scrap of paper has gone missing… I can remember what the people look like and know what road they live in, but thats not quite good enough.

So if you have bid for some IT consultancy from someone who is frankly a bit rusty in that field and have been sitting by the phone for a month, waiting for it to ring, do get in touch.

Not only that, but they had the full support of their local management who, I believe, chipped in with some supplies. They are going to come back to do some clearing up of the gardens and say they will pop back every month or so to keep the grounds tidy. I hear that Homebase has been persuaded to donate some plants as well.

I can remember from my brief time as treasurer at the community centre that paying for gardeners was quite expensive. With the steady reduction in grants over the last few years the centre has had to do away with that and it really shows – the gardens have been getting tatty – so its great to see all this volunteering activity ramping up to fill the gaps, and its another reminder that the world is not all black and white but has various shades of grey: even big, bad multinational banks now have corporate social responsibility policies.

It sometimes sounds like a load of jargon, but it can make a big difference to some charities to have a team of helpers come in like that. As soon as they get the place bright and shiny we will have to persuade them to start booking rooms for meetings!

The story is about the funding of the Broadfield Youth and Community Centre, and how the council’s grant is, yet again, lower than what was applied for and lower than the previous year. I can remember how it was always the same when I was treasurer for the place so I can understand how everyone associated with the place feels about it.

Broadfield North councillor Adam G Brown (Con) says about it:

Broadfield is a deprived area and the community centre is one of the few places in the neighbourhood which brings people together.

And I can’t argue with that, though I reckon things will get worse before they get better – if they ever do, thanks to his party’s fixation on low council tax. When they come to setting their budgets I have always predicted that grants to voluntary organisations is likely to be a soft target for cuts, and during the election the Tories got very upset when I suggested the areas they might look to save money – even if they were only the same areas where they suggested cuts would occur if the transfer of council housing failed to take place.

Anyway, Adam is not going to change his party’s general direction, but there is something he can do: start pushing for BYCC to be removed from the voluntary grants system, along with a couple of other strategically important recipients like the CAB. He could also try to get the whole distribution of voluntary grants removed from councillors’ hands.

There is little chance of success – I know because I tried both myself – but both measures are even more important now that the overall fund for grants is at risk. The community centre should have a budget ring-fenced from other organisations and tied to a service level agreement.

But it was not Adam who got me annoyed in this story, it was Janet Treagus, the council’s spokeswoman (actually a press officer who provides quotes on everything) who said:

We don’t expect to fund everything a voluntary organisation does. They have to raise some funds themselves.

But hold on. In every other neighbourhood of the town the council provides community centres, which the council funds without looking for donations, sponsorship and other fundraising. If the BYCC did not exist, Crawley Borough Council would have to provide a community centre, and it would cost a lot more than the £24,486 which was given in a grant, and would be a much worse service as it would not provide a full-time centre manager to deal with the public.

So don’t give us all that bollocks about it being a charity as if it is something optional and in addition to council-provided services: it is a facility provided by the local churches, supported by individuals within Broadfield to provide a service on behalf of the council.

On the face of it a reasonable question, but I have not been involved in the BYCC for a couple of years, and don’t really keep up with all the comings and goings.

It will be interesting to see what the paper writes, if anything. I don’t know if they were expecting any juicy gossip or hints of scandal but, unfortunately, the resignation was quite straightforward and much as I dislike the bloke personally and for his politics I couldn’t be bothered to make up any juicy gossip about Alan Quirk, tempting though it was.

The truth is that following the Tories taking control of the council in May, Alan was, contrary to all common sense, elevated to an executive position. His portfolio (community engagement) includes responsibility for grants to the voluntary sector and the BYCC, which he was chairing, depends on one of those grants for its continuing existence. Obviously that promotion created a conflict of interests and one of the jobs had to go.

All very boring, but I still have a few questions knocking around in my head like: as Quirk must have resigned from the BYCC in June or July why is it suddenly newsworthy? Since when has the Broadfield community centre’s internal politics been at all newsworthy? Why do the papers keep phoning me but never leave a comment on here to say hello? Where did my DVD of Family Guy series one get to?

Sorry.. my mind wanders sometimes.

Just don’t get me started on why anybody on the council still has any responsibility for how grants are apportioned. Even while I was still a politician I was trying to get that decision taken out of the politicians’ hands – after sitting on a grants appeals panel and seeing the arbitrary nature of the discussions, and seeing the officers prepare huge reports on the pros and cons of a particular application only to see decisions made on a whim. Its a debate I tried to start but nobody else wanted to have.

Over the weeks they have been publishing stories about local charities and then inviting readers to vote for which one they would like to win a cash award/grant. The total pot of money was something like £30,000 with the top ‘prize’ being (I think) £10,000.

The dinner had a number of people from each of 10 charity finalists and a load of Barclaycard and newspaper staff who hosted tables. Apart from the obvious benefit of picking up some much-needed funds for the local community centre it was a good chance to meet not only other charity workers and trustees but also to build some bridges with the local rag and Barclaycard.

This turned out to be extremely beneficial as Barclaycard encourage their employees to support local community events and facilities and often organises them to go out (in company time) in teams to help out. Jayne had a chat with one of their managers about the work our community centre does and the state it is in and they offered to bring down a gang of workers to do some serious redecorating and refurbishment. They even said they would buy the paint. That will be a good one to follow up.

Jayne only went because at the time the invitation came she was vice-chair at the centre, athough she has since resigned from that for reasons too complicated to go into.

Its good to see that even companies with a bit of a tarnished reputation amongst left-wingers can still have some socially conscious policies.

In the end our community centre got £2000, which will go a long way towards providing new furniture and facilities. The last time we had such an award we managed to replace a lot of the cooking appliances in the kitchens and make them generally better and safer. We could have used more, but what charity can’t say that?

Jayne enjoyed herself and managed to negotiate some extra help for the centre, so she was happy, but it ended up causing me to have a really late night. I went to put the good news on the community centre website and while I was editing it I thought I might as well make a few other changes that needed doing. And then I thought I might as well add a new page for photos of the recent church anniversary service and dinner. And then I thought I might as well add another page for photos of this year’s summer fete.

And thats why I spent all day today doing an impersonation of a zombie.

The top award went to an organisation which does audio news services for the deaf. On the face of it, their overheads are extremely low and the amount they won will probably keep them going for ever and might seem unfair when other organisations need to make hefty capital purchases, but apparently the atmosphere there was friendly all round with no nasty rivalry between charities. The Happy Hut pre-school group of Broadfield (and Bewbush) got £1,000 I think.

Today I had an email from her saying that it is actually a pair of goats but she got an ‘out of stock’ report for the second goat.

For some reason I find this extraordinarily amusing.

It is even better than the chap at work who wanted to adopt an elephant for his wife as an anniversary gift (ivory anniversary) but left it too late. He was using lastminute.com and elephants could not be adopted at such short notice so he had to settle for a chimp.