FLAGSHIP DIAMOND WOOD

To celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Woodland Trust is helping millions of people across the UK come together and plant six million trees. With HRH The Princess Royal as Patron, the Jubilee Woods project aims to create hundreds of Jubilee Woods and 60 special Diamond Woods, transforming the landscape in a generation and providing a lasting and meaningful tribute for many years to come. This includes the Trust’s exciting new flagship Diamond Wood in the heart of the National Forest in Leicestershire, which will be a haven for wildlife and open for all to enjoy.

After all the bunting has gone, the trees planted for the Jubilee will leave a lasting legacy that will leave a lasting legacy that will transform neighbourhoods, school playing fields, hospital grounds, rural and urban areas – creating homes for wildlife and areas for people to relax, explore and enjoy.

A delegation of seven from Leicester Council of Faiths is attending the event at the National Forest today, at which HRH The Princess Royal is guest of honour. There they are outside Pilgrim House, about to board a minibus and head off (left to right: Ajay Aggarwal, Gursharan Kaur Thandi, Cllr Manjula Sood, Tony Nelson, Sewa Singh, Inderjit Singh Gugnani, Keyhar Singh). They're all well enough turned out to meet a royal personage; I'm not sure how they'll get fare if they're asked to wield a spade or push a wheelbarrow today! Still, to coin a phrase, "Any sleeve can be rolled up." I just made up that ancient Chinese proverb, but I think it's “Pretty good; pretty, pretty good.”

I'm not going on this trip today. I have an hour's worth of Stronger Communities Partnership Self Assessment Sub-Group at the City Council this morning. I just wanted to make sure I got this photo for the blog. But seeing me here this early, one of my colleagues asks if I slept in the Welcome Centre, adding that he wouldn't be surprised. Perish the thought! I'm clearly overdoing it - and I should take heed of that, today of all days, being my fifth anniversary in post.

Stronger Communities Partnership

Third meeting of the day - and it's still only 1100. I'm at 16 New Walk for the Stronger Communities Partnership. Iris Lightfoote (who chairs the Partnership) and I have dashed over here from the meeting on Transforming Local Infrastructure at Voluntary Action Leicestershire (which will go on till 1300 in our absence).


Leicester Council of Faiths has been represented on the Stronger Communities Partnership by our Chair, Councillor Manjula Sood. However, Manjula was appointed one of six Assistant Mayors who make up the Cabinet of Leicester City Council. The Assistant Mayors are being asked to attend meetings of the Stronger Communities Partnership when it discusses topics realted to their portfolios. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, Manjula asked if I would take her place in representing Leicester Council of Faiths on this body. I have attended these meetings several times in the past, but then I was representing the late lamented Equality and Diversity Partnership (EDP).


The theme for today is Children and Young People. There are several members of the City Council's Children's Trust here today, to make a presentation and to asnser questions. We also have the benefit of Assistant Mayor Vi Dempster attending (she is Cabinet Lead for Children and Families). Other community groups represented here today:

• Leicester Multicultural Advisory Group
• Refugee Action
• The Race Equality Centre

Transforming Local Infrastructure in the city

Second meeting of the day: 1000 at Voluntary Action LeicesterShire (VAL). We're meeting to discuss Transforming Local Infrastructure, the latest tranche of money to be released by The Big Fund. I'm not going to try and explain how this one works here - my head hurts enough trying to understand it myself. If you want to find out more, faithful reader, then visit the Transforming Local Infrastructure website.


As well as ourselves and VAL, there are nine infrastructure service support groups represented here this morning, each of which has expressed an interest in this bid:

• Communities in Partnership (CIP)
• East Midlands Racial Equalities Consortium (EMREC)
• Imagine LeicesterShire
• Leicestershire and Rutland Community Foundation
• Leicestershire Cares
• Leicestershire Centre for Integrated Living (LCIL)
• Leicestershire Ethnic Minority Partnership (LEMP)
• Mainstream Partnership
• The Race Equality Centre (TREC)

This is the first of two meetings at VAL on this topic today. The morning meeting is looking at a potential bid for this funding in relation to the city; the afternoon meeting is doing the same, but for the county. I have to dash out of this meeting after only three quarters of an hour (along with Iris Lightfoote) to get to the meeting of the Stronger Communities Partnership at 16 New Walk. I'll be back at VAL for part two of this meeting in a couple of hours though!

BACK TO EARTH

To Leicester City Council, Block B, New Walk (photo by Tim Hallam), where I'm presenting a paper to a meeting of the Stronger Communities Partnership. The paper is an Equality and Diversity Strategy for the Leicester Strategic Partnership, written on behalf of the Equality and Diversity Partnership (EDP). I've knocked it into its present form, but it's been a joint effort written along with Irene Kszyk, Head of Equalities at Leicester City Council, and Liz Carney, a specialist in equalities and employment law who has been working with LeicestHERday Trust. This is one aspect of EDP's "Embedding Equalities" agenda that we've been furthering for well over a year now with the Leicester Partnership.