#015 (December 2023): A look back at 2023 and a merry Christmas

Published in

Sowing Seeds

7 min readMar 27, 2024

Hello friends

We hope this finds you well. It’s that time of year when we get a little reflective, looking back over the last year to what we’ve done (and maybe not done (yet)).

A look back to our 2023

Everything we did in 2023 was very rewarding with each piece of work a genuine collaboration between us and the individuals, teams, whole organisations, collaborations and systems we worked with.

We supported Show Racism the Red Card with strategic planning and board development; Wallsend Childen’s Community on community, vision and mapping their network; ran away days with Recyke Y Bike, Difference North East, and North East Law Centre; and Together Women and Middlesbrough and Stockton Mind to review and make plans for their governance.

With Tyne Housing, we celebrated the end of the second leadership programme We lead through our values, part of their internal Leadership Academy. We continued Tyne’s focus on coaching with a third Leader and manager as coach training day, and started a new series of coaching CPD and check in sessions. We also kicked off a year-long growing and embedding reflective practice programme. And we started work with Your Voice Counts to support their coaching initiative for Your Voice Counts members to coach health professionals in South Tyneside.

We started a pilot with a small group of emerging leaders from North of Tyne Combined Authority to train and form an action learning set, which will continue to meet and learn with each other in 2024 with a mid-point and end-point check in with us.

We worked in Middlesbrough across the year on LocalMotion Middlesbrough system change initiative focusing on community wealth and community wellbeing, and in North Tyneside for Leaders Together for North Tyneside, supporting VCSE leaders to nurture their relationships for better future collaboration. We took a more region-wide focus with a short series of online workshops called What helps? This helps for the social prescribing network, Thriving Communities, hosted by VONNE. The three workshops were Leading well in uncertainty, Looking after myself and building resilience, and Communicating openly and effectively.

We were joined by 14 people across two learning groups for our new Lead and manage programme to 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. We had fantastic feedback from the spring-summer learning group, and will share the autumn-winter group’s thoughts in a few weeks. And we ran our Being a great trustee training programme in January for trustees from Newcastle Carers, Northumberland Carers and Meadow Well Connected.

We continued to host North East Together, the network for social change leadership, and North East Coaching Collective. With NET, we ran five events (two in person, three online) with Marie Foalle and Dr Jo James (Newcastle Business School) making up our dream team. And with the coaching collective, our 13 coaches continued to coach for social change in our region. We also offered free one to one coaching to people working for positive social change in the north east with the intention of helping people cope with and respond better to change after continuing challenging times for us all working and volunteering for social change. In the end we coached 13 people working or volunteering for small VCSE organisations (with a turnover of less than £250,000) and people working independently for social change in the north east. We asked coaches from the North East Coaching Collective, and qualified coaches and coaches in training from the Newcastle University MSc in Coaching and Mentoring to volunteer their time, knowing gifting a small amount of time each — 4.5 hours — would make a big difference. We hope to offer this again in 2024. Together with Cath Brown we contributed towards creating a coaching culture in the north east with The Phoenix Way North East and Cumbria to create a coaching initiative for Black and/or racially minoritised communities in the region.

In the summer, as we looked towards our fourth year as Yes We Can Community CIC (our financial year starts in September), Rob and I ran our own strategy planning sessions. We’ll be writing up and sharing our strategy tree early in 2024 to better share our purpose, as well as sharing more stories about our work, so you have a a better sense of how we can help you fulfill your purpose.

We continued to volunteer as trustees/directors this year: Stephanie at Scotswood Garden, and Rob at Beacon Films (until the summer) and joining Youth Focus NE in the autumn. Stephanie continued to co-pilot Urbanistas NE along with Rozie Akram, Cathy Russell and Victoria Keen.

We’re looking forward to 2024, to what we have planned, and what might emerge, to connections, collaborations and social change with you. As we say at North East Together…together we can.

North East Together in 2023

North East Together event 25: Perspective, participation and power

We gathered on 22 November for our 25th event to look at system behaviours as part of our continuing collaboration learning journey with the help of Dr Max French, assistant professor, Northumbria University’s Business School. We explored Lankelly Chase’s system behaviours of perspective, participation and power, and thought together about how they can help us have a conversation about system change and collaboration. We also heard from Dr Joanne James about sources of power and creating an environment for participation. Jo asked us: How can we create environments where everyone feels they belong, and their uniqueness is valued? The event write up gives you the full story.

North East Together plans for 2024

We’ll continue with our big large scale whole network gatherings for the second half of our collaboration learning journey, our more intimate NET Connect gatherings, and plan to host more NET pop ups to inspire us and nudge us to collaborate as topics and opportunities come up. These are our plans, so far…

14 February 2024 — NET Connect #5, 16:00–17:15, online — bringing together North East Together members and network friends to connect, grow and nurture our relationships
21 May 2024 — North East Together #26, whole network event, 13:00 for 13:30–16:30 + later for more informal networking — we’ll open bookings as soon as we can
11 September 2024 — NET Connect #6, 16:00–17:15, online

Your learning in 2024

In case you have 10 minutes over the next couple of weeks to think about your own learning and development plans for next year, here’s more information about our Lead and manage programmes. We’re running this twice in 2024 — spring-summer (April start) and autumn-winter (September start) — and we’d love you to join us.

This is for you if you, your team or your organisation want to think more deeply about leadership in 2024.

As you know, our purpose is all about developing social leadership, and this programme is part of our contribution to developing our north east voluntary, community and social enterprise sector workforce. It really bothers us people in our sector don’t get as much of a chance to learn and develop their leadership as in other sector. We hope this goes somewhere to fill this gap.

Our big picture for thinking about leadership and management, we find it helpful to focus on three things: being our best selves, creating the conditions for great teams, and leading collaboratively with other people and organisations so we are amazing together.

The dates, with links to more information and how to book, are

spring-summer 2024–3 x full days (1 May, 5 June, 3 July) and 2 x half days (17 April, 17 July) — all Wednesdays…book your place
autumn-winter 2024–3 x full days (24 September, 22 October, 26 November) and 2 x half days (10 September, 10 December) — all Tuesdays…bookings are open too

These are energising days with a learning group, active and participative to think and learn together, offering a reflective space and using creative facilitation, and we’re also connecting, building relationships, . We’re all about ‘learn today, use tomorrow’. We share learning resources of ideas, theories, models, frameworks, tools, techniques, self-assessments, and links to additional resources to use, read, watch and listen to

If you’re interested in taking part and/or would like to find out more, email Robert or use our booking form for spring-summer or autumn-winter to book your place.

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

And finally…

We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful festive period, however you spend it. For us we’re aiming for restful and restorative! We look forward to connecting with you all in 2024.