North East Together event 26: More than you imagine is possible

What might happen when six funders collaborate with each other and with six places across England and Wales over 10 years? We’ll hear about the first three years of LocalMotion’s ambitious, system change journey from both the local and national perspective. We’ll hear from Kathleen Kelly, LocalMotion’s director of collaboration, and from LocalMotion Middlesbrough’s core team.

As we’re on our own journey through the North East Together collaboration toolkit, we’re asking our speakers to reflect on the following areas in their storytelling…

• Conflicts and tensions: We know how, why and when conflicts and tensions happen, and how to resolve them
• Goals, indicators, outcomes, impact: We have ways to plan, measure what we’re doing, reflect and learn, and share what we’re doing with others
• Leadership: We have the leadership roles, practices and skills to nurture, care for and lead our collaboration
• Governance: We have the right governance for our collaboration

We’ll share more details about the event in the coming weeks.

Our outline timings are

• 13:00-13:30 - arriving, settling in, mingling and informal networking

• 13:30-16:30 – More than you imagine is possible with inspiring speakers, conversations together, and learning from each other

• 16:30-17:00 - informal networking in the room

• 17:00 to later - more informal networking and food, if you are free

Be part of our collaboration learning journey in 2023 and 2024.

This is the third in our series of four half-day in person events for 2023 and 2024, all focused on growing and developing our collaborative leadership capacity and capability. We’ll be using this time together to learn about and start to apply and develop the North East Together Collaboration toolkit and framework to support more, and more effective, collaboration across the north east. To help us translate theory into practice, we’ll be spotlighting inspiring examples of collaborative leadership in action – learning from social leaders who are currently leading the way in this work.

We know our region faces challenges and opportunities that no one person or organisation can resolve or respond to alone. We also recognise the need to embrace complexity and systems thinking when we reflect on the health of our social systems in the north east in order to develop more nuanced and ultimately effective interventions. Embracing complexity and systems thinking requires a fundamental commitment to working collaboratively.

Together we can.

About LocalMotion

LocalMotion is building a social, economic and environmental justice movement, by communities, for communities. The movement seeks to understand local strengths in the places where we live and work. It aims to challenge typical power structures and hierarchies that become barriers to a community’s progress and hold us back. LocalMotion was created in response to funding squeezes and the increasing demand on charities and local grassroots organisations to plug the gap; people and communities who traditionally have little power, minimal resources and are often working in silo from one another. It was started as a collective idea of six prominent funders in the UK, who recognised that the system was not set up in a fair way.

The six places are Carmarthen, Enfield, Lincoln, Middlesbrough, Oldham and Torbay, and the six funders are City Bridge Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Lankelly Chase Foundation, Lloyds Bank Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and Tudor Trust.

About LocalMotion Middlesbrough

To grow strong communities, creative connections and opportunities. To seek to build community wellbeing and community wealth

The dream for LocalMotion is to pave the way for a thriving, growing and resourceful Middlesbrough; building on our strengths to create an equitable, fairer place created by our diverse communities for all our communities. LocalMotion Middlesbrough will build impetus to rebalance power within our place, bringing it closer to our communities, through communities empowered to affect change and ensuring everyone’s voice is both heard and valued.

“We want everyone to be proud of Middlesbrough: a place for ideas to form and grow, where people and communities flourish, where we model new ways of being, and where our diversity is celebrated.

“LocalMotion will be the catalyst to systemic transformation, tackling root causes rather than symptoms. We will grow our knowledge, understanding, and practices of working together in more collaborative, complexity informed ways. Working collaboratively, bringing together our combined resources, working across systems, and rebalancing power, we will tackle inequalities and alleviate poverty.

“As people we will all be better connected, ambitious, adaptive, brave, open, and caring, together.”

The event title comes from John Atkinson, MVDA’s community action development officer, talking in The LocalMotion story video where he said ‘the potential here is we achieve far more than you imagine is possible’. The full The LocalMotion story: Middlesbrough video gives more of the local story.

About North East Together

North East Together is the network for social change leadership in the north east.

Our collective mission here at North East Together 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 people together to tackle social injustice will create positive change - in our communities, organisations and the social systems we live and work within. Our network offers mutual support, enables collaboration and inspires social leaders. We offer a series of dynamic network events; whole day 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.

North East Together is hosted by Yes We Can and is a collaboration between Yes We Can and Newcastle University Business School. We’re grateful for the support both organisations give to North East Together.

How we use your data

We use your name and email address to run the event. We will send you a confirmation email when you book, the advance information a week or so before the event, and an event follow up email. We will not use your email address for anything else. If you ask to be added to the NET mailing list when you book, we'll add your name and email address to our mailing list, which we run via JISCMail.

We will share information about how to join North East Together if you are not already a member in the confirmation, pre-event and follow up emails. You can also join at the event.