North East Together 22: Getting to know you and your leadership (November 2021)

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you….and your leadership.

Our November North East Together event was event 22, and marked seven years (SEVEN!) since our first event in November 2014.

The event aimed to give us space to get to know each other better, build and strengthen relationships, understand our areas of interest, and identify opportunities to collaborate with the intention of reducing isolation, strengthening personal resilience and building social capital. And because of this, we used a simple format to maximise the time we had for each other…talking and listening to each other, encouraging us all to contribute and make connections. We used the chat to share links and contact details, as well as by those who wanted to participate this way rather than verbally. All these were shared back to those who came along as part of the follow up.

The prompts we used this time were

• Who I am
• My work/practice/organisation
• Areas of interest (what to speak to me about)
• Opportunities to engage/collaborate
• Needs/offers (for help/support)

Carol Botten, VONNE, and Kevin Franks, Youth Focus North East, had a couple of longer slots (about 10 minutes) to talk about two region-wide collaborations…

• North East England Climate Coalition and Going Green Together, VONNE Climate Change Alliance’s movement and campaign to support the north east’s VCSE sector towards net zero (with Carol joining us even more virtually than the rest of us via pre-recorded video)
• North East Youth Alliance (and you can also join Youth Focus North East)

We all enjoyed the event, and we think it gives us a way to come together, support each other and build community — shorter, online gatherings focus us to talk and share, focusing on us, together — and we’ll look to repeat these in 2022.

Thank you

Thanks to all our members for showing up and being there for each other. This is what it’s all about and we appreciate being part of this community in the north east. We’re also grateful to Dr Joanne James and Cissie Tsang from Newcastle University Business School for continuing to collaborate with us with North East Together. Thank you all.

About North East Together

Our collective mission here at NET is to create the conditions, and platform, for collaboration to become the norm in the north east and to nurture a healthier social change system. Together we can do this.

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. The whole network events hear from inspirational speakers who provide new insights into social change. They are a supportive space where leaders can meet one another, explore issues of social change, network and begin to collaborate. 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.