January 22, 2025

Our Powered By Communities event, held at our AGM In November, saw 100 people come together for a powerful day of collaborative conversations.

We will again be facilitating an online space where the group can catch-up, listen, share their wisdom and knowledge, and make recommendations as to what we should all be doing next.

Using the Open Space Technology format, attendees created the agenda on the day, starting with the question “How might we work together and support one another, as people who care about Cumbria, to build on what’s good and create sustainable futures?”

Participants came from across the VCFSE sector, and also from both Councils, BAE systems, Cumbria Community Foundation, UCLan, Active Cumbria and many more organisations from across the county, keen to work together.

Attendees populated the ‘marketplace’ with ideas for topics they wanted to host a discussion about. Slots were rapidly filled with a fascinating range of subjects representing the breadth of topics people were passionate and curious about, before those present selected the conversations they wanted to be a part of.

The outputs were captured in ‘Padlet’ interactive online spaces, and shared with participants after the event. The intention was always for this to be part of an ongoing collaborative process, and the next step in this will be a sense-making session with a dozen or so people from across the breadth of those who participated in November, which will take place on Friday 24 January.

From the saved Padlet information, we’ll be asking those attending to come along with an overview of the outputs, before breaking in to sub-groups to discuss two or three key points in more detail.

To ensure we carry the momentum forward, this event will be part of an ongoing process, ensuring we can all continue to work together, share our collective insights, and keep building on the collaborative atmosphere so brilliantly displayed at our first event.

We’re committed to involving members and communities at as many stages of this process as we can, including digesting the information gathered during the AGM, to allow us to inform, recommend, or request actions or changes identified from what was shared.