In March 2007 a letter was sent to all partner organisations requesting their contact details. This received a limited response but those who replied had their contact details updated.

We followed with a call to every partner who had not responded and updated their contact details over the phone or via email. This process has continued from April to July 2007.

This has resulted in almost every partner organisation being spoken to directly or personally emailed.

Where contact between WNC and partners had ceased due to a change in contact details, communication was re-established resulting in many partners having a renewed enthusiasm for partnership working with the WNC.

Finding out new contact details for organisations was often complex as many of them had merged, changed their names or ceased to exist. We think there are around 50 partners in this category.

There are also around 30 partner organisations that we have not been able to contact and it is important that in these cases, it is thoroughly checked that they no longer exist before they are excluded from the directory. We are planning that the directory will be available around September 2007 and it will be sent to all partner organisations.

As part of the process for the directory, new partner details have been updated in the WNC database. Previously all-partner emails would result in some `failure of delivery' responses. This should hopefully now be resolved.

The database now contains up-to-date information about organisations such as their remit, head-of-organisation and the contact for the WNC.

The WNC is reliant on interns and volunteers to assist with our work. Without them we would be limited in our capacity.

Following a staff meeting in June 2007, we are implementing an internship system. This includes a handbook for interns, supervision forms for regular supervision during internships and end-of-placement evaluation forms.

This should hopefully result in internships at the WNC becoming more structured and any problems being addresses quickly.

It should also allow the WNC to get the most out their interns and vice versa. It will also allow us to gain a greater idea of the unpaid work-hours we gain from interns and volunteers.

In June the Government produced `A Framework for Fairness: Proposals for a Single Equality Bill for Great Britain - A Consultation Paper'.

The WNC is hoping to provide a response to this, we emailed our partners on June 15^th and are collecting responses from partners until 23^rd July to submit our final response by September 4^th.

Some WNC staff attended an event on this consultation which included a briefing by Angela Mason and a questions and answer session about the proposals with Angela Mason from the Women and Equality Unit and Melanie Field from the Discrimination Law Review team.