Resources  ·  Posted July 15, 2024

Partnerships Update July 2024

Business Development Manager, Sam Ross, discusses the range of partnership opportunities here at The Melting Pot.

The interesting / glorious thing about partnerships is that they don’t have to mean the same thing to different people and organisations. Our approach in building our membership community has always been about understanding one another’s needs, the needs of society, and working together to achieve these.

We have been deliberate and careful in approaching partners, so if you do have an email from us, we’d really love to work with you! There are a lot of interesting conversations for us to have with organisations that are growing, share our values or are simply in places that we want to be.

Here are some new partnership examples that we’re excited to shout about…

Community Lab is a start-up that is “human-led and tech-powered”, meaning that their digital platform is designed to maximise engagement and connection before, during and after an event. After a successful trial at our Bridging Communities conference, Xabier, our Community Coordinator, and I have been working with Lewis and David at Community Lab to integrate the platform during all our public events. After each event, the four of us meet to explore the use of Community Lab: Can we mention it more often? Can we talk about it in a different way? Are there resources we should be sharing on Community Lab instead of over email? In this scenario, partnership is about sharing experiences and perspectives – and taking action together.

In other contexts, we can share experiences and perspectives, but maybe can’t take action straight away. For me, the most frustrating – and simultaneously, rewarding – part of developing partnerships is the long-term view we take. A few months ago, I had a really great chat with Jane Mackinnon from Breeze Digital, but it wasn’t really just a chat. I invited Jane into The Melting Pot to attend a Lunch and Learn with Ciaran Armstrong of Sustainable Pathways. These are traditionally members-only events, but we’re starting to open them up to the broader business community for a donation to our social innovation access fund (this is too exciting to cover in this blog, so more on this another time!). Over lunch, Jane and I discovered a shared interest in enhancing education around new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as an untapped partnership with the Scottish AI Alliance.

So, what did this lead to…? We’ll be collaborating on a bonus AI learning event in September! It’ll round off the series we have been running through April – July and the Scottish AI Alliance will join us too. What’s more, the alignment in our strategic values – particularly in stimulating learning around innovation and enabling social impact across the third sector – is a great fit for a longer-term project which brings together our Good Ideas incubator and a drive for digital inclusion across the generations.

Can you tell we have been busy having 100 new ideas a day? If you want to join our thriving community of social and environmental changemakers, explore different forms of social impact and co-pilot a journey facilitating innovation across Scotland, go ahead and reply to that partnership email 😉

You can also check out partnership opportunities here

Together, amazing things can happen and we can’t wait to work with you.