Chris West	Churches Together in Caversham Youth & Families Initiative
Tim Clewer	Mustard Tree Foundation
Karen Ross	Reading Relate
Vic Hills	Reading YMCA
Laura Collard	Children's Information Centre
Nina Sethi	Reading Council for Racial Equality - Project Alafia
Jackie Oversby	Homestart
James	Reading Refocus
Cath Bethell	RVCYS
Andrea King (guest)	CYPSP partnership manager

The group applied for and have received a Local Network Fund Grant of £7000 to run a collaborative consultation project involving a number of the Trailblazers groups.

Based on comments made by members of the group, there is a clear feeling that the work that is done in the Voluntary and Community Sector is not widely understood by the statutory agencies in Reading. One of the things we are planning to do is to try and raise our profile. I will collate half page summaries of the work of each of the Trailblazer organisations. This will cover - what we do, statement of purpose and more detail of our areas of expertise with a matrix summary. Everyone needs to let me have half a side of information and I will generate the matrix. The propose of this is to ensure we make our skills and services more widely known to the statutory agencies in the area so they will be better able to access the services that they require for their clients.

Several of the groups are in financial crisis at present. We didn't have much discussion but I made some details of funding trusts and other opportunities which are available. This has since been added to the website under Finding Funding .

concern that the "statutory" agencies view/knowledge/understanding of the voluntary sector was very limited and that work was often being done which these agencies were unaware of. For example, while Andrea said that there was a perceived lack of counseling services available for young people in tier 2 & 3 (see the triangle in the document p9), a number of people noted that they were offering counseling services, such as Relateen, which were not being fully used and had few referrals from Reading based statutory agencies. This might be addressed in part by our "marketing" strategy but more work will need to be done to ensure that this gap in knowledge is bridged.

children & young people can sometimes be maintained in universal services with the appropriate support even though they have level 2 or higher needs. This needs resourcing (as highly cost effective solution) and communication between agencies

some "mainstream" provision was not "universally available/accessible". This often grew up around perceptions of the young people and of the adults in a position of influence. For example, Duke of Edinburgh awards are offered to young people in Grammar Schools but less so in comprehensive schools and then often only to the more able pupils. Since it's original intent was to engage young people who left school with no or minimal qualifications at 14, this appeared to be the exact opposite of the vision for the award. Reading Refocus have got a group going which is proving very successful. We need to encourage a rethink of some of these idea like this which are simply not encouraging those on the edge of marginalisation to re-engage.

Extended schools project - VCS very keen to be involved but there was a real issue over the fact that VCS groups seem to be being asked to make a financial contribution to able to offer their services through the extended schools.

Shouldn't theLPS include reference to the needs of specific groups such as BME, disabilities etc which could get left out of the final action planning if they are not mentioned by name here? Nina was going to come back with some specific information to Andrea on this point

Queries about parenting projects in Reading. Nina was looking for access to parenting for families with disabilities. Chris Hollingshead (Partnership parenting coordinator) had found a lot of provision but not much joined up thinking and difficulties with referral mechanisms (which seems to match our earlier concerns about referrals from statutory agencies)

Information sharing could be a key issue - we'll revisit this in our next meeting looking at the Information Sharing and Assessment Protocol - in developing partnership. There was a sense that partnership was more notion than reality at this stage. Trailblazers is perhaps one mechanism for the VCS to move the agenda in a positive way and facilitate a more effective partnership process.

Training available dealing with ISA and LPS on 16th, 17th, 21st and 22nd March - 8 half day sessions in the Civic Centre. The VCS is not a signatory to the ISA protocol yet BUT it was felt that it might be of strategic importance to ensure that we had VCS attendees at each of these sessions and it also covers the LPS.