June 2007 - Richard Aston

June was a month of catching up after my big trip to the UK. I had many follow up emails from the mentoring organisations I had met over there; they are still picking my brains! I am doing what I can to advise them on the secrets of recruiting men but at the same time being careful it doesn't take over to much of my time, Big Buddy is definitely not ready for export yet! Well maybe Big Buddy is but I am not.

Picking up on our Wellington progress I found all the advertising etc we had done yielded 50 applicants for the Wellington Coordinator position. Great response but unfortunately none of them were suitable. Our standards are high but they have to be in the interests of safety. I bit of a blow really as I realised finding our man in Wellington is not going to be that easy. I reviewed our strategy and accepted we will need to find our man through focussed networking and maybe even headhunting. I have started building stronger networks in Wellington with again some help from my fellow WOD award winner Deborah Morris Travers. It's slower than I'd like but I am making headway in developing some good contacts. It's also a confirmation that we are asking for some special skills that may not be in big supply, ie emotional intelligence and good organisational skills. We have also been working hard on training requirements for new coordinators, again it's proved to be a bigger piece of work than first imagined and will take reasonable resources from Big Buddy. This coupled with keeping up with the many men volunteering in Auckland means I will need to free up the time of our existing coordinators and myself if we are to devote time to training new coordinators outside of Auckland. To this end we decided to recruit another coordinator for Auckland but based them eventually in Auckland/Rodney, meaning they could extend our coverage right up to Wellsford as well as take some pressure off the guys in Auckland. This is proceeding well, as we have good networks in Auckland and has already tagged two potential candidates able to do the job. While all this is happening we have started the initial consultation work in Christchurch, talking with interested community groups their with a view to opening up a ChCh office next year. Whew, it's been a busy month!

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