It’s been ages since I blogged and my excuse is that I have been totally bogged down in the budget.  In my last post I wrote that I hoped the NI Executive would agree a budget and make me eat my words. And they did. Sort off. So I’m half eating my words. It’s my very own ‘but I didn’t inhale' moment.   

In NICVA we are in the middle of a pretty intense series of consultation meetings with each department about their budgets. The meetings are incredibly helpful and my colleagues in the sector aren’t being shy about the questions they are asking.  Five meetings in and clear themes and trends are beginning to emerge.  It will definitely make crafting our response much easier than if we had simply read and tried to analyse the spending plans.  NICVA has asked Esmond Birnie from PWC to do some work on interrogating the numbers and analysing the positive and negative aspects of the overall budget and he is diligently attending each meeting with a list of suitably probing questions.  

 Even though these events are crucially important it can be draining to attend meeting after meeting to talk about cuts and their impact. Everyone is feeling it.  On top of that I spent some time this afternoon preparing for a meeting with David Simpson MP on the draconian cuts to social security that are being pushed through at Westminster. After that I had to agree with my colleague who recently announced she had lost her policy mojo. 

So in search of distraction I opened an email from a friend  working for the  Democratic Party who sent me a message earlier this week to mark Martin Luther King Jnr Day in the US.  It was a text of Dr Kings final speech in which he talked about the Drum Major Instinct. Dr King implored people not to seek gratification and validation in material goods or by showing off and selfishly pushing ourselves forward – like the Drum Major of a band. For Dr King people could seek greatness and show love through service to others  “because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.

Service to others, self-help and the protection of vulnerable people and disadvantaged communities is what our sector is about. If its good enough for Dr King, its good enough for me. Mojo firmly back now.  

 You can find out about our meetings on the budget here.