Last night (3/11/09) at the Compact Awards ceremony we won the award for Excellence at a National Level. We are very pleased and already it’s causing a bit of a stir through the department. And so it should. Defra’s Third Sector Team is the grit in the oyster in all of this and we have been lucky enough to be around after years of sustained effort to raise the profile and build strong relationships with the Third Sector that go right back to the establishment of Defra’s Compact group way back in 2003 and before. Several of the people involved in the Compact Group are still guiding us today through our Advisory Board. They include: Sylvia Brown of ACRE; Pauline Buchanan Black of The Tree Council, Trewin Restorick of Global Action Plan and Matthew Thomson of LCRN. Trewin chaired the Defra Compact Group. Then there’s Phil Barton of Keep Britain Tidy who, as a secondee to Defra, had a role in establishing the Compact Group.
Good relationships are the foundation to getting things done and this is where the commitment of Defra colleagues is so important. We have spent the last couple of months asking colleagues here for updates on the commitments we made in our Third Sector Strategy which was published a year ago. The level of activity has even surpised us as the Third Sector Team. We plan to publish our ‘One Year On Progress Report’ here before the end of Compact Week.
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Commentary on the award in Third Sector Magazine