North East Together 16: Generation together: making it happen (June 2019)
This event focused on young(er) and emerging social leaders, building on February’s whole network event on the future of social leadership. Our key questions for the event were
- How do traditionalists (born 1900–1945), baby boomers (born 1946–1964) and generation Xers (born 1965–1980) make space for younger people (millennials/generation Y born 1981–2000 and generation Z born after 2000) in social change leadership?
- How do the generations collaborate to make the difference we want to see in our locality, region, country and planet?
- How do we share power, resources, knowledge, skills, ideas, passion and drive with each other?
We know social change leadership does not belong to a small number of people in formal leadership roles. We also know social change leadership does not belong to specific age groups. We’ve been inspired by activist and co-founder of Our Future Our Choice Femi Oluwole; climate activist and School strike for climate catalyst Greta Thunberg; feminist activist, writer and founder of Everyday Sexism Project Laura Bates; former Sheffield mayor and councillor, now Green party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, Magid Magid; and, many more.
We asked North East Together members to join us to lend their voices, their power, their resources to explore how we make generation together happen, to ask their own questions, and also to listen, to step back, to let others take the floor. And to build a wall of cardboard boxes (we didn’t tell them this in advance, it was surprise!). Around 50 members answered the call. The event’s advance information pack and slides tells you more about the event.
Young leadership: our journeys
To start us off, we heard from three young(er) leaders about their leadership journeys
- Alex Black, regional development officer, Youth Focus: North East
- Charlotte Windebank, managing director, FIRST
- Nil Neale, head of business and people development, EY Foundation
It was inspiring to hear them speak about what they’d done in their careers so far, who had helped them, what they’d achieved, and what they’d had to overcome. We also worked with Alex, Charlotte and Nil to co-design the event.
Charlotte ran our icebreaker activity — generation timeline — asking everyone to line up in order of age without talking (though hand signals allowed). We realised together we spanned the generations from traditionalist to millennials/generation Y, narrowly missing out on generation Z. We used the generation timeline to create tables of mixed age groups for our roundtable discussions.
Building the wall, and tearing it down: young leadership challenges and solutions
In our groups we explored the challenges for young leadership, reflecting on the three talks and bringing in our own experiences. We wrote each challenge on a cardboard box, which we then collectively built into a wall (see photo above), grouping together into key themes and topics (see below).
Each table chose a topic to discuss in more depth to understand the problem and then look for solutions, with the work captured on templates (read the write up).
Each roundtable was facilitated and led by a young leader recruited by Alex and Charlotte. We felt it was important to put younger people in the driving seat, to lead the discussion and to practice being in a leadership role.
Young leadership: making it happen…together
We stayed in our groups to take forward a solution and make it happen. We tasked each group to come up with, and commit to taking, real action, again capturing their work on templates (read the write up). Some of the facilitators’ prompt questions were: who has the resources, knowledge, skills we need? What do we have the power, resources, knowledge, skills, ideas, passion and drive to do together? Why do we want to do this?
Young leadership: making it happen…my pledge
We asked each person to take one of the challenge boxes and to come up with their pledges — what they would keep doing, stop doing and start doing — to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. NET members took the boxes home with them as a reminder of their personal pledges.
Thank you
Thanks to everyone who spoke at the event, the nine young leaders who facilitated the groups, and to everyone who came and took part in the event. And thanks to Newcastle University Business School for providing the venue, refreshments, support and student ambassadors.
Next event
Our next event in October will focus on climate change, another vital subject for our time. Watch this space for more details!
About North East Together
We believe that bringing leaders together to tackle social injustice will create positive change — in our communities, organisations and the social systems we live and work within. Our network inspires social leaders, enabling collaboration and mutual support. We offer a series of dynamic network events; self-organised collaborative working groups; pathways into coaching; and independent social change events. It’s for leaders from the voluntary, charity, social enterprise, education, public and private sectors. It’s for experienced, new and future leaders of organisations, work, and ideas.
