#014 (June 2023): Helping you learn and grow

Published in

Sowing Seeds

5 min readMar 27, 2024

Hello friends

It’s been a little while since we’ve popped up in your inboxes. We hope you’re doing alright. We’re loving the warmer, sunnier days…it really lifts the spirits!

Join us for Lead and manage: Best self, great teams, amazing together autumn-winter 2023

We’re already half way through our spring-summer programme, working with eight social change leaders from north east VCSEs. Where does the time go?

We’d love you or your team to join us for our next Lead and manage programme, which is stating in September.

We focus on what we think is important for all of us in leadership roles — being your best self, being part of and leading great teams, and working on amazing things together.

The programme is three full days — one for each of the three themes Best self, Great teams, Amazing together — and two half days to help us start and end well. These will be energising days to learn together — from us and each other — and give you time out of your every day to reflect on your own leadership and connect and build relationships with your peers. We use our three leadership frameworks to guide the days. Here’s the Great teams leadership framework…we’ll be exploring this with the learning group on Wednesday.

The programme is about growing and developing ourselves to be able to do our best for ourselves, our organisations, and our region.

If you want to chat with us to see if it’s for you, we’d love that. You can talk to either of us — Stephanie or Rob.

What we’ve been up to lately…

We’ve had a busy last few months doing some great work with great people and organisations.

We’ve collaborated with chief executives of VCSE organisations on Leaders Together for North Tyneside, a 12-month leadership programme to transform how they lead and collaborate in North Tyneside. The formal bit of the programme has now ended though the work is continuing as we put the finishing touches to two frameworks: collective leadership for North Tyneside and involving people and communities in North Tyneside.

We’ve ventured slightly further afield to Middlesbrough working with LocalMotion Middlesbrough to help with the next step on their system change journey. And with Middlesbrough and Stockton Mind for a mini governance review. We’re so pleased to be able to be working more across the region this year.

More recently we’ve been in Newcastle for North East Together, the network for social change leadership. We host this in collaboration with Newcastle University Business School. The event in May was the first in a four part series focusing in on collaboration using the North East Together collaboration framework as our guide. You can read more about NET in May’s update, and look out for the write up of May’s event (coming soon!).

We’ve also gathered online for our four-week Being a great trustee programme, and run three What helps? This helps! workshops for Thriving Communities North East, the network for social prescribing hosted by VONNE, on the theme of what helps when times are tough focusing on leading, resilience and communication. And hosted NET Connect, the short online networking gathering for North East Together members.

The free Coaching for social change offer from North East Coaching Collective is continuing. We’ve matched 13 people working in small VCSEs or independently for social change with NECC coaches to receive 4.5 hours of free coaching. We’ll be sharing the story of this work in the autumn.

It’s such a privilege to do this work, for people to trust us with what’s so important to them. We know how people’s time and money is precious, and we always work to make the best use of both.

What else is catching our eye?

01 A better brainstorm

A webinar recording to help you run a better brainstorm. XPLANE’s Elizabeth Hinckley talks about how to collaborate and think better with any team by learning how to establish better ways of working, ideation, and decision-making.

02 Digital trustee matching

Third Sector Lab’s Digital Trustees initiative is about getting digital on the agenda of every charity board. There’s monthly matchmaking events and sharing resources and experiences to make it straightforward to connect charities and professionals from tech, data, design, IT and other digital backgrounds.

03 EDI in systems work

An Equity, diversity and inclusion resource for Human Learning Systems practitioners is a new guide for being more inclusive in systems work. An essential read from Collaborate CIC to help us all improve our practice.

04 Impact and systems podcasts

Our friends Alex Blake and Toby Lowe have been getting into the world of podcasting. Alex interviews inspiring social change leaders on his podcast Charity Impact (latest two guests Ruth Ibegbuna and Ben Lindsay OBE). And Toby is part of the team at Next Stage Radicals podcast. You can hear Toby being interviewed and his conversation with Claire Robinson.

Need help doing your best work? For you, your team, organisation, network, system

We offer internal and open training programmes, networks and communities of practice. We offer coaching, mentoring and action learning sets. We work one to one with VCSE organisations to help them think, learn, plan and change.

Our mission is collaborate to grow and develop social change leadership in the north east, and we work on leadership, governance, collaborating, coaching, and more. Talk with us