Doing Tech For Good: How can we Build an Active Movement in Manchester?
Last Wednesday saw us host our first Tech For Good Live event of 2020, and boy was it busy!
We wanted to kick this year’s events programme off with a session more in keeping with new years resolutions, to take a breather, chill and reflect on Tech For Good Live and the year ahead. It was great to see so many of our Tech For Good Live attendees joining us in this reflective session and pressing the reset button with us.
Our first speaker was CEO Mike Wild from MACC, an organisation that does amazing things in the voluntary community in Manchester and around the country. Mike wanted us to think about how we can ‘make more good things happen’ in Manchester’s voluntary sector, and that he most certainly did.
In Manchester there are over 3,000 voluntary organisations, social enterprises, charities and community groups and over 11,000 paid staff and 100,000 volunteers who work to support these organisations. All of these organisations have the task of keeping up with the tech sector without necessarily the most efficient means of doing so. Mike put out a call for the tech community of Manchester to be a part of helping the voluntary community build momentum in their tech capabilities and laid out a number of methods for doing so, such as, (1) matching tech leaders to voluntary sector leaders for informal chats and knowledge exchange, (2) offering short talks or webinars for voluntary organisations to learn and develop tech capabilities and (3) convening meeting spaces where voluntary sector representatives can make asks of the tech community. Get in touch with MACC if you are interested in doing more to help digitise the voluntary sector.
Jonah Ogbuneke CEO from Manchester based social change agency, Love For The Streets, was our second speaker of the night. Jonah gave an impassioned speech about how to better engage the public on issues of social change. He highlighted cause marketing successes and gave a shout out to charities and social change movements already utilising this extremely effective resource. To find out more about Love For The Streets and the fantastic work they do, visit their website here.
Our final speaker was social change maker, Hannah Paterson. Hannah talked about the importance of inclusive design principles. She outlined ways tech initiatives often fail to incorporate the perspectives of everyone who uses their technology and especially those that want to use it but can’t due to disability, age or health and made a plea for tech innovators to hold this concept centrally during their design phase. You can follow Hannah here on twitter to hear more from her.
With this knowledge and inspiration now swirling in everyone’s heads, we broke out into groups where our wonderful guests were asked to reflect on how we can invoke these principles in what we do at Tech For Good Live. With some truly great feedback from our amazing community we look forward to sharing this feedback in our next blog post! Stay tuned to our newsletter and blogs to find out!
