Dear Friends,

We wish to express our gratitude to all who participated in exploring Collaborative Ways Forward in recent months. We deeply appreciate you taking the time to share your stories of the work that you are doing in Galway and beyond and your commitment to Collaborative practices and a more sustainable, inclusive  politics and culture.

To follow up on the ‘Emerging Futures’ event, we offer here some brief reflections.

During the inquiry into individual and collective needs we recognised the familiar calls for action to acquire some shared spaces in the city. This is an ongoing issue and one of the tougher challenges we all face. It is clear that there is a desire to take that particular conversation further and we encourage those of you with a passion to pursue this to get in touch.

We also recognised that there is a wealth of knowledge and experience locally that holds great potential for shared learning. Many of the needs expressed on the day could be met through sharing of existing skills and know how. This in itself is fertile ground perhaps for the creation of some kind of skills and knowledge sharing network again if any of you are interested in taking this further get in touch.

A number of follow up events and gatherings were also proposed. Participants suggested a ‘Pecha Kucha’ with short presentations as a way to learn about what people are doing. Others suggested a Community ‘Hackathon’ and ‘Innovation camp’ to share creative solutions to the challenges we face. Less formal gatherings such as a Potluck meal or even just a pub meet up could be easily organised. How about a get together over the upcoming holidays to share stories and achievements of 2015 and ambitions for 2016?

If you felt inspired by Emerging Futures and would like to see more gatherings like this happen in Galway we would really love to hear from you. – collaborativewaysforward @ gmail.com

Many thanks and best wishes from everyone of us at Collaborative Ways Forward

If you are interested in seeing some of the images from the notes that were taken on the day see

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B8Xm_5V-GWHnQzVCcjIzR3IyVXc&usp=sharing