Carrical, General, Leases

General Lease

An increasing amount of time is currently being invested into looking at the General Lease for Carrical and what we need to do to be in a position to sign this off. There are several steps involved in this process – one of which will be ensuring that Committee is abreast of all relevant information in time for important decisions to be made at the May committee meeting. In a nutshell everything appears to be on track right now – we have had a comprehensive property condition report carried out at Carrical, have met with the Dept, have informed the Registrar of our General Lease intentions and have started to timeline all the other pieces of work that are required to ensure we are ready to sign the General Lease.

As a footnote to this it is reasonable to say that the Dept is currently in a greater state of chaos than usual. People are disappearing from their positions there on a daily basis. My confidence in the Dept is at an all time low.

General

Thursday

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One day in the life of Servants at the present time seems like, well, I’m not quite sure what – but it is full, varied, challenging, creative, thought provoking and, mostly, fun!

Thursdays highlights included a phone conversation with long time DHS connection Maggie Laurie re the General Lease, interviewing and accepting a 44 year Christian guy into Romana, the first delivery (of many) of quality, free mulch to Romana, an amazing afternoon of Narrative interviews and liaising with a choir in relation to a couple of functions.

Servants is vibrant at this time!

General, Governance, Romana, Uncategorized

Meeting with Housing Registrar

This arvo I met with Christine and Kai from the Housing Registrar to show the around Romana and for a general catch up in regards to all things Servants. It was a low-key, quite informal meeting; but all very positive. The meeting lasted 90 minutes so there was plenty of ground covered. And a sign of the continuing good relationship with the Registrar was perhaps best exemplified when Christine advised me that she will be putting a person from another housing group in touch with Servants in regards to a specific item  ‘as Servants knows how to do these things better than anyone.’ I tried to appear humble – but what she said was true!

General

Urban Seed

Amanda and I had a most fruitful meeting at Carrical this morning with top brass from Urban Seed. Servants and US alike have been looking forward to this meeting since our initial talks at the Surrender Conference a couple of weekends ago. The relationship is off to a terrific start; several ideas have been floated in regards to the possibility of the establishment of something of a pipeline of Housing Managers for Servants being generated from US. Our next step in this evolving relationship will see Amanda and me visiting US to see some of their work. This meeting today made the looooong weekend spent at Surrender completely worthwhile!

Romana

Site meeting

The first site meeting at Romana was held this morning involving the builders, Architect Steve and Mark, Brian and me from Servants. It was full of mostly very good news. At this stage the builders are talking of a handover date to Servants of Tuesday 22nd April. In general the builders are ahead right now of where they had anticipated being. There were/are of course a few little issues to sort out along the way – but nothing that looks likely to cost us significant time or too many additional dollars.

Minutes- SiteMeeting #1(25-03)

General

Free tickets to Comedy

Candlelight have offered Servants 4 pairs of complimentary tickets to Squeaky Clean Comedy this Saturday night in the City. If you would like a pair of tickets please let me know by email no later than this Wednesday night and I will arrange tickets for you.

Development projects

Confidentiality Deed

After lengthy negotiations and work with our lawyers, Matt and I signed a confidentiality deed with Boroondara council on Friday. The deed was revised to address our concerns after the last meeting. The next stage will be confidential but will not result in any commitments by Servants Community Housing.

We are looking forward to what comes next.

General

Amanda

Amanda has just commenced her 5th year of living on-site at Carrical. Amanda informed me last week that she believes that her time at Carrical is drawing to a conclusion – as always has to be the case, eventually, when one runs Carrical. Amanda is currently house hunting and it appears logical to put a new manager/s into Carrical as Amanda moves out. This might happen in a relatively short timeframe. I am already in serious conversation with a couple in regards to their following Amanda into Carrical.

At this stage Amanda fully intends to stay on with Servants in her role of Operations Manager.

General

SAHAC conference

Friday arvo I attended and spoke at the inaugural City of Boroondara Social and Community Housing conference. Expecting it to be as toothless and dull as a quarterly SAHAC meeting (extraordinarily toothless and extraordinarily dull) it was, pleasingly, anything but!! There were 4 speakers – including our friend Stephen Nash. There were some intriguing conversations. Boroondara Police wanted the Servants opinion about the future of Ivy Grange – and the future of private rooming houses within the municipality was discussed at length. I made a couple of useful new connections but, perhaps of most significance, was the realization that we are seen as a very significant voice for the homeless/low income folks within Boroondara – this was quite a revelation!

General, Uncategorized

Meeting @ Trinity

I had a terrific meeting at Trinity yesterday morning where this developing relationship went to the next level. I met with my main man there, social services coordinator Tom Delahunty, and the 2 Year 11 boys, Noah and Nick, who are working on the Narrative book. You may recall that Trinity held a fundraiser late last year in the form of a Trivia Night for Servants. The second edition of this event will be held in late October – and will apparently be a still bigger and better event. The school has also agreed to become fully involved and supportive of Team Servants ’14 – much in the style of the model adopted by Strathcona last year. I am encouraging small groups of Trinity boys to become involved in lunchtime bbqs at our houses and in Term 2 will commence focus groups with students for the proposed leadership program commencing 2015. There is something very positive at play in the Servants/Trinity relationship.

General, Uncategorized

Harvard application

I submitted my scholarship application to the Harvard Club of Victoria a full 4 hours prior to the cut off time! Despite clearly not meeting all the specified criteria I was pretty happy with what I submitted. Thank you to Warren for his help in reviewing the application.

General

Narrative update

Thursdays are rapidly becoming the standard Narrative days at Carrical. The pre-planning now complete the project has really started to blossom into life over the last 2 Thursdays. My early thoughts are that Narrative will end up being a publication that will a) be a wonderful companion/follow up to Anthology and b) will be far more hard hitting than Anthology.

The behind the scenes team working on Narrative (me, Mike Cutter, Esther Ling and Zoe Bradley) are excited! The next few weeks are going to be pretty special I think.

General, Uncategorized

Communities in Control

I booked in today for the 3 day Communities in Control Conference at Moonee Ponds racecourse in late May. I have attended this conference on 3 or 4 occasions over the years – last year it was particularly good – and very much look forward to what new things I will hear/learn about this year.

Giving, Donations, Fundraising

$580

Chapel Service at Carey on Tuesday morning saw $580 raised for Servants.

More importantly than this significant amount of money raised will be what will come out of this talk/introduction to Servants for Fullard House @ Carey.

Giving, Donations, Fundraising, Romana

Rotarians, Romana and Mark

14 Rotarians spent many hours this morning/arvo working alongside Brian & Pat and Mark on the bathrooms at Romana. A huge amount of tile removal was accomplished. I am hopeful of posting a picture or two to the Servants Facebook page tonight. The community support we have for Romana is remarkable. It’s so lovely to finally be showing off Romana to people – all are stunned at just how terrific the place is. There are many more work days ahead for volunteers – I cannot even begin to imagine how many tens of thousands of $$$ this might be saving us – let alone continuing to develop mighty relationships and opportunities left, right and center!! In fact, whilst considering how many $$$ of labor we are receiving it would be remiss of me not to mention the work that Mark Hislop continues to give us, as project manager, in getting Romana ready for occupancy. I have learned a great deal just in watching Mark at work and how he has attacked the project in front of him/us. And of course, this has all been free of charge too. I think a nice ‘thank you’ bottle of scotch or something similar will be the order of the day once the project is complete.

Romana

Asbestos in Romana?

No. There is no asbestos in Romana. Ahead of bringing in the first group of volunteers on Wednesday to get busy removing tiles from the bathrooms a question was posed as to the possibility of there being any asbestos in any part of Romana. Steve the Architect thought not. Romana was both built and opened in 1992 – which should well and truly mean that no asbestos would be present. But just to be sure Mark Hislop took some tiles, tile glue samples and anything that looked likely to be an offending article to be tested locally at a lab. The relief when the samples all came back this morning with a ‘negative’ verdict was pronounced!! We roll on ……………

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