VSNW are pleased to announce that our Festival of North West Thinking 2020 will be taking place online over four weeks from 23rd October through to 12th November. The theme of this year’s festival will be Covid-19 recovery.

The series of four events will bring together panellists from organisations across the VCFSE sector with representatives from the combined local authorities to listen and identify the key issues the sector is facing, feeding key challenges and potential solutions identified into strategy. This is part of VSNW’s work to facilitate the VCFSE sector’s response to re-design and recovery in the North West region.

Over these past six months, the conversations VSNW have been working to support and facilitate across the region have increasingly shifted from co-ordinating the sector’s immediate emergency response to Covid-19 to looking forward to how we rebuild, and what we want this new world to look like. 

Each event has been designed to bring together different perspectives from across the sector to explore the threads of Covid-19 recovery conversation taking place across the region. We have identified a number of key areas where the opportunity to listen and learn from one another is essential to build a strategic response which places the goal of building a more equitable, socially just society at its heart.

The Festival will be comprised of four online events. For more information and to book, please click on the event title:

Covid-19 Recovery: VCSE Leadership Voices Assembly with a focus on Inequalities
Friday 23rd October – 10am-12pm

This event is intended for our colleagues in leadership roles at VCSE sector organisations and equalities networks across the North West.  It will give us an opportunity come together and start to coordinate a strategy for using our sector’s Covid-19 recovery as an opportunity to combat inequality.

Covid-19 Recovery: The VCSE Infrastructure Perspective
Wednesday 28th October –2pm-3:30pm

This event is intended for our colleagues at VCSE sector infrastructure organisations across the North West. It’s an opportunity for us to bring together our different perspectives from across the region, identify the salient issues the sector’s infrastructure bodies are confronting, and to coordinate and synergise our response.

We are delighted to announce that the following national VSCE sector leaders will be joining us for a panel discussion:

• Rita Chadha, CEO of the Small Charities Coalition

• Andrew O’Brien, Director of External Affairs, Social Enterprise UK

• Karl Wilding, Chief Executive of NCVO

Beyond 2020: The Role of the VCSE Sector (including VSNW’s AGM)
Thursday 12th November – 2pm-4:30pm

This event is intended for our membership, but we’d welcome new organisations who are interested in attending, to see if you’re eligible for free membership. For more information on what this entails and how to apply please see the membership page of our website.

We are also hosting a discussion on the Future of Funding for the sector. Speakers confirmed include:

• Paul Streets (Lloyds Bank Foundation)

• Elly De Decker (The National Lottery Community Fund)

• Sarah Longlands (IPPR North)

Building Back Better: In Conversation with the North West’s Metro Mayors
Date & time TBC

VSNW is the regional VCSE sector network for the North West of England. We work to ensure the sector, in all its diversity, takes its full part in shaping the future of the North West. VSNW is a membership organisation; we connect to the sector through infrastructure organisations, equalities networks and regional and national providers. If your organisation fits this description, we’d like to invite you to join us as a member of VSNW. Membership is free and joining us will ensure we’re able to keep you linked into the strategic conversations we help facilitate across the region. To find out more and apply for membership, please take a look at the membership page on our website.