Blog: Making our Futures Bristol: call out

A call out to Fellows to get involved in organising Fellow-led events in Bristol.

"Making our Futures 2015-6" is the theme for a series of events that the RSA West Fellowship Team is facilitating in the Bristol area. We are now seeking Fellows' own ideas and energy to help make this real.  Get out of the comfort zone of waiting for someone else to make the change and be part of making it ourselves: push our thinking beyond words to collaboration, design and investment in practical solutions to our real challenges. 

To kick this off we are offering you the opportunity to help develop, design and run workshops which look at the key issues facing Bristol and the local area. The RSA and our Fellowship provides an ideal platform for us to raise this issues, properly, creatively and beyond our usual practitioner contexts.   We hope participation will enable you to build on your local network of interesting and interested people, and your integration with the RSA.  It'll be fun, inclusive, developmental and, of course challenging.

We piloted this format a couple of years ago, with events focusing on shaping the city and health and well-being and found the events were really well received and built up significant practical ambition and exciting relationships and ideas,  so "impact" in various ways will be part of our programme design.

We will provide project support and some basic quality assurance for events to ensure they are successful, and we have set aside some cash to help with premises and other costs for propositions although we will aim for matched funding to get the best from our investment.

If you are not sure what the subject for this series could be, think about:

• Looking at the RSA’s key themes and see how they can relate to Bristol
• Think about the national issues that come through as local concerns
• Look at your practitioner blockages: the ones that rarely get addressed.  Could these form an interesting event?
• What has worked locally? Or been tried out say in Green Capital, or Festival of ideas, or a theme that came up in a networking situation or a lecture etc, which would deserve revisiting.

If you are interested in finding out more and discussing your thoughts and some others that have come forward please contact us via ted.fowler@council-rsa.org.uk we will aim to start serious planning for events this autumn.