Conference Forums
Connect, share and work together on big cross-service issues. Following our online Challenge Events in September, our Conference Forums are taking place in person on the second day of Annual Conference.
Come and try something new
Our Forums at Conference build on the key ideas generated at the Challenge Events around partnerships, embedding lived experience and client journeys. Each Forum provides the opportunity to work on specific ideas in roundtables with other like-minded colleagues. They’ll give you the space and time to explore new ideas, connect with other people from all roles across our service, and work with colleagues who are interested in the same topics or doing similar work. Our facilitators Perle and Julia will guide you to share ideas and practice with one another and build locally-focused solutions together.
Example topics you’ll be able to explore
Forum theme: Tools for building sustainable and equal partnerships (Friday morning)
Example sub-themes to work on in this Forum will include:
* A mentoring programme for local branches struggling to establish strong and equal partnerships with their local authority / health / statutory peers
* DIY partnership/conference workbook. A toolkit that would enable LCAs to easily publicise, prepare and produce a small local partnership conference, showcasing our work and our data
* Raising awareness that CA is a charity (not a government provision) and needs funding to deliver services. How we can lobby grant funders to understand that and support our longstanding work
Forum theme: Practices for embedding lived experience insights into our work (Friday morning)
Example sub-themes to work on in this Forum will include:
* Campaign to improve representation of lived experience and diversity in our trustee boards. Analysis, assessing, identifying where gaps are and planning how they are addressed
* Changemaker programmes for future leaders (staff, volunteers or clients) to boldly reimagine how to remove barriers to effective collaboration with clients, and being adaptive to change
* Community engagement toolkit with top tips and best practices from across the network
Forum theme: Deepening the ways we understand different client journeys (Friday afternoon)
Example sub-themes to work on in this Forum will include:
* Advice First Aiders (model 2) in community settings with volunteers who are representative of the community they serve to engage people who don't ordinarily access CA services
* Client e-news - clients and general public sign up to it and is sent weekly with helpful self-help topics in advice areas
* Harnessing AI across the network - by finding uses of AI that work for us and improve capacity, we will improve the client journey overall
“So valuable to come together to hear different perspectives and push ourselves to think differently about this important area of work.”
“Energising, brilliant, new ideas with people I never normally get to work with. Expanded my thinking.”
FAQs about our Conference Forums
Why Forums?
The Conference Forums are the direct result of research we held in March. As part of that we held several collaborative group conversations with colleagues from every part of our service, where we explored what they’d value most from our conference programme.
So many of these conversations highlighted a real desire to connect with colleagues dealing with similar challenges in other parts of the network and to have dedicated time to talk, share ideas, practice and develop new ways of thinking about tricky questions.
People know that there’s incredible work happening across the network, and it’s full of great ideas and untapped expertise, but are frustrated that there’s not been any ways to find, meet and talk to people doing this work. Our Forums will be that space, where you can have those conversations and benefit from light touch facilitation to guide you.
What can I expect?
You can choose between three forums taking place across day 2 of Conference (alongside other sessions), exploring the following themes:
Tools for building sustainable and equal partnerships (Friday morning)
Practices for embedding lived experience insights into our work (Friday morning)
Deepening the ways we understand different client journeys (Friday afternoon)
Each Forum will offer you a choice of sub-themes to explore (some examples of which are below). Once you’ve made your choice you’ll be sat in a roundtable with other colleagues who have chosen the same sub-theme. Our brilliant facilitators Perle and Julia - who some of you will have already met at our Challenge Events - will guide your table through a series of discussion-based activities to help your group unpack and dig into your sub-theme.
The aim for each Forum is that you and your table will have the space to have the conversations that are most useful to you all. You might want to share existing practice and tips, you might want to devise new approaches that you’ll take back into your office, or you might just want to get (and offer) some peer support on the big challenges we’re all facing.
Where did the themes and sub-themes come from?
Our overall themes of partnerships, lived experience and client journeys came from feedback collected by the events and strategy teams across the past year, following conversations with hundreds of colleagues from all parts of the network. These three themes were identified as key areas cutting across all our missions and affecting the majority of local offices.
The sub-themes came out of our three online participatory Challenge Events in September. Facilitators Perle and Julia worked with 100 colleagues to explore each overall theme and develop key ideas for addressing core challenges. Those ideas were voted on by all event attendees, and the most popular ones are what we’ll explore as sub-themes in the Conference Forums.
This all sounds amazing. But is it for me?
Yes! The three Conference Forums are designed to be open to a wide-range of experiences, expertise and knowledge on the topics. We’ll actively encourage each roundtable to be a mixture of colleagues working alongside each other.
So you might be:
Completely new to the topic and curious to learn more
Already doing work in this area and have lots of learnings and ideas
New to working in this area and have a lot of questions for how to develop your ways of working
Working on the frontline delivering this work
Managing other people doing this work
The best conversations will happen when there is a mixture of experiences at the table. We want the many and varied perspectives from across the network to be considered as ideas are discussed and develop. If you’d like to have a chat about which Forum to attend, or just want to understand more, we’ll have a Forums stall in the marketplace on day 1. Come along and meet Perle and Julia, and we’ll talk you through the different ideas and help you work out which Forum suits you best.
I have more questions
No problem! Get in touch with our Events team at events.team@citizensadvice.org.uk.
