A Road Less Travelled

Last  week has been one of those involving lots of travel. It happens occasionally for us staff that regardless of well made plans and diary management sometimes we need to be in 3 or 4 places in one week.  This week started on Saturday in Blackburn and finished in Nottingham.  To summarise:

Saturday  means Blackburn at the Community Centre in  Little Harwood helping the RSA Projects team deliver a community workshop on health and wellbeing research project for Blackburn Council.  The aim of the session was to feed back to the community and disseminate the findings of research. With a community as diverse as Little Harwood the sessions shifted between in-depth individual conversations and wider group discussions.  This demonstrated the value of tailoring  methods to engage with your audience. For further information on this project contact Gaia Marcus

Workshop, Little Harwood

Tuesday a fleeting visit to North West and the latest planning meeting for the Keep Calm and Prepare for Change Conference planned for Manchester on 18 October 2012.  This event will connect and combine new ways of doing business, examine how we can use resources wiseley and shift society perspectives around living sustainability.   Co-ordinated by a groups of Fellows the event has already secured major support from the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, Business in the Community and the RSA.  If you would like to get involved please contact Lilian Barton.

Wednesday leads to Yorkshire to talk through governance changes and preparing for Fellowship Council and Regional Chair elections.  I also connected with York Fellows at the Ebor Lecture with David Halpern.  The York Network is exploring a collaboration with Ebor and their many partners (including York St John University and Joseph Rowntree Foundation) to encourage debate and discussion with this programme currently focusing on "Big Society".   The next event will be on the 2 May in York Minster with Will Hutton.  The York Network will be hosting a small get together to continue the discussion and debate.

Thursday finds me in Nottingham for a Network meeting on RSA SkillsBank, a project I am currently leading on.  As well as general relaxed networking and connecting we also talked through the aims of SkillsBank, how Fellows can get involved and how we can swap into the expertise or knowledge to help their project.  We also found time to play the Skills Game and demonstrated how everyone has something to contribute.

So a busy and productive week highlighting the many diverse activities of the Fellowship.

Vivs Long-Ferguson, Senior Networks Manager

Twitter @vivslf