The 1st ever Link4Growth Conference took place on the 8th January 2016. The venue was the amazing Missenden Abbey in Buckinghamshire and brought the Link4Growth family together for the first time. A historic moment and one that many of us will remember as the day that connected people in the flesh who had previously only known each other virtually.
It is incredibly difficult to single out individual performances and comments fed back through January confirmed this as one of the most inspirational collaborative events people had attended. Link4Growth has indeed come a long way since its initial launch on January 9th 2012; nearly 4 years to the day.
Below some of the highlights... links to picture albums, the live video feeds of the 8 speakers on the day and also the 6 Laminates which will help us to visually explain the different aspects of Link4Growth going forward.
We live in highly complex communities in our modern society. There are the familiar boroughs and councils, parish councils, the volunteer sector, community groups… business groups, in fact there are many communities and even, communities within communities.
One of the big irony’s of our modern era is that there is so much going on in our communities (and really good projects / initiatives too) but that very few people ever get to hear about them. We hear often about the 3% which constitutes the bad stuff going on, there is a whole system in place to get that information over to us. We have very little though in place to share the great and amazing good things happening in our communities... that's about to change!
This then is the purpose of the Link4Growth CKi programmes. To provide in each town (village or city as well) a communications hub that is open to everyone and on which all of us from that town can become ‘reporters’ or ‘journalists’ and share what is going on. It is free to use and enables us to categorise information into the 9 segments that make up our communities.
The 9 different areas are : Community and Charity, Business & CIC’s, Education, Health, Leisure & Entertainment, Faith groups, Local authorities, Communications (TV, Radio, Newspapers) and Sustainability.
By coming together and sharing what is happening in our communities in a common space open to all we can start to appreciate all the good things that are happening around us, plus, we can recognise those fantastic community centric people who are putting in a huge number of hours and applying themselves to projects that benefit those around them.
This really is our time. Our time to create the community that we want to live in. It is not the council’s responsibility, they have neither the resources (human or financial) to do all the things that need doing in our community. We have the people, it just needs to be much much easier to find out what is going on and be able to lend a hand.
The great news is that there is something for everyone. So diverse is our community that there really is an opportunity for every single one of us to get involved and be part of this. It doesn’t require money, it doesn’t require permission, all it does require is taking action.
If you would like to start a CKi project in your town, or you want to know if something is already happening then please do ‘take action’ … yes… you… it’s your time to take action… if not you? … then who?
By the end of 2018 there will be 8 million of us helping to rebuild communities right across the country… we are starting in earnest right now!! … it’s the beginning of something so huge and it is not linked to politics or money or business… it’s linked to people, doing what is right and working together for us… and for the kind of future we want…
