Fellowship for Leaders: ideation, innovation and influencing

The third and final residential from our second Fellowship for Leaders programme took place in the stunning High Leigh Conference Centre in Hoddesden last week.

The delegates spent two days surrounded by greenery and bright cloudless skies – the perfect environment for letting your creativity fly free.

On day one, we explored ideation techniques and created space for judgement-free brainstorming. When your role is so focused on finding practical, personal solutions to the issues young people experiencing homelessness come up against, it can be hard to let your imagination run wild, unchecked by practical considerations. In this session, we practised a number of methods that our Fellows can use with staff teams and young people.

The Fellows broke off into their regular action learning sets to share challenges and make space for problem-solving. By this third go at the practice, the tricky open-question technique seemed to be getting easier!

With the Speakers Trust, we worked on some storytelling and public speaking with a view to influencing the people you need to buy into your ideas for young people. From weaving a creative narrative to declaring ‘good afternoon!’ in our best Brian Blessed voices, it was a great chance to get outside our comfort zones in a constructive environment.

As this year’s Fellowship draws to a close, we are delighted to announce that we will soon be opening applications for the 2020-2021 cohort. Watch this space for more details soon!