Sowing Seeds #017 (April 2024)…our leadership mission
Hello friends
We’re very happy to see spring this year after a too-wet and dark winter. We’re welcoming longer days, a bit more warmth, green shoots, new blossom, and a bit more energy. We hope you are feeling the joys of spring too.
Extract: Why I’ve spent the last nine years creating leadership and management development programmes for people working in our north east VCSE sector
Rob’s been putting his pen to paper to share his thoughts about leadership and learning about leadership in our sector. Here’s an extract from his longer article: Why I’ve spent the last nine years creating leadership and management development programmes for people working in our north east VCSE sector.
“What we know is there is an absence of relevant, quality, and affordable learning and development opportunities for this workforce, particularly in relation to leadership and management. No doubt this absence is one of the many negative consequences of over a decade and a half of accumulated socio-economic/geo-political factors, beginning with recession in 2008, accelerated by austerity policies of the 2010s, and perhaps wrung out entirely by the pandemic and subsequent cost of living crisis.
When I think back to the 2000s — one of the most significant decades in my social leadership journey — these feel like halcyon days, when we could reliably access great [leadership and management] programmes for no more than, say £500, made available through subsidies in the system. And matched funding for learning and development activity was quick and hassle free to access — usually on the strength of a one-page form. This enabled cultures of leadership, continuous learning, personal and professional development, and, ultimately, organisational performance.
So why have I spent the last nine years creating leadership and management development programmes for people working in our north east voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector?.. Simply because I am trying to put some of this back. Because I am worried, otherwise, that we’ll struggle as a sector, more than we need to, and we’ll burn great people out along the way, despite our best intentions. None of us do great work on our own. All of us need to access learning and development opportunities to grow, develop, thrive, flourish, and do great work, together.
On reflection, I realise I’m fascinated by how we organise ourselves in society, what we need to grow and develop our ability to lead and manage well, how we create great organisational cultures where people thrive. And this is why I now spend my time co-leading Yes We Can Community CIC with my ace social enterprise partner Stephanie Cole, and Cath Brown, Marie Foalle, Duncan O’Brien, alongside volunteering as a trustee, chair, and mentor. Nothing more, or less, than a small contribution to a big need.”
A few good things to share…
01 Resource: Framing adversity, trauma and resilience
Framing adversity, trauma, and resilience is a new resource from FrameWorks to learn how, together, we can build better narratives about trauma and resilience.
02 Event: How can charity trustees centre lived experience?
A free event hosted by NPC to explore different approaches to involving people with lived experience in charity governance and decision making. 2 May, online
What else have we been writing?
We’ve written up our latest North East Together events
- NET Connect 05 (February 2024): Grow and nurture our relationships — 10 North East Together members coming together in conversation to meet, learn about each other, share what’s important, offer help and make connections. The themes explored together included building capacity and leadership skills; working across organisational scales (national, regional); for profit, academia, VCSE sectors working together; people and places, highly local; and, community bridge building in Gateshead
- NET pop up #06: Growing hope and power (March 2024) — Southampton University’s Dr Kate Paradine and Professor Harry Annison shared their project and paper ‘Growing hope and power — charities, academics and evidence’. In this collaborative project they explored the dynamics relating to the academic and third sectors, particularly the opportunities and challenges of collaborating with the aim of achieving positive change. The project focus was women caught up in the criminal justice system and those experiencing male violence against women and girls. We were delighted they’d used our strategy tree model to explore and understand this.
And for new Sowing Seeds subscribers, we’ve recently uploaded all the past issue to our Sowing Seeds publication hosted by Medium. A long overdue task and we hope you enjoy rummaging through our archives.
What’s in our diaries
- Coaching…making the difference, International Coaching Week 2024 event, 14 May
- North East Together event 26: More than you imagine is possible, 21 May
- NET Connect #06: Grow and nurture our relationships, 11 September, online
- Lead and manage autumn-winter 2024–3 x full days (24 September, 22 October, 26 November) and 2 x half days (10 September, 10 December)
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, through collaboration, to grow and develop social change leadership in the north east. We work on leadership, governance, collaborating, coaching, and more.
And finally…
…we’ve been thinking about ‘practice’ lately…what it means to practices something, to have a practice…and so loved this quote from Samantha Slade’s Going hortizontal: Creating a non-hierachical organisation, one practice at a time
Cheerio for now.
Stephanie, Robert, Cath, Duncan and Marie
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