Meetings

Two meetings in the past week, The Story of Bernie and an RYA Meeting, both of which were examples of current trends.

Bernie is a project where the S. Wales Fire Service seem to have applied scientific method to dealing with grass fires in the valleys. They titled it Social Marketing. Having finally deciding that grass fires cost them a lot, they thought they would do something about it. What was new was their attempt to understand why they had the problem by doing some simple market research and then trying to do something about it basedon what they found out. Some of this involved showing and interest in the young people and providing interesting things for them to do. Part of it was to use Facebook - interestingly this took a lot of time for the staff member. Surprise, surprise not only did they reduce grass fires but other incidents of vandalism were reduced. Now how did they cost that? The project should have been titled applying common sense to public service delivery!

Then the RYA had a meeting and continued with their usual arguments. Stating that the RS200 is the answer to retaining young people in sailing. Doing the same old things in the same old way with the same people. Life continues.