Hivestarter 2016: Collaborative Community Meet Up

One of the core beliefs of Hive Toronto is that collaboration is essential to creating an impact in our community. On September 22, we brought together 14 community organizations include representatives from Hive NYC and Hive Chicago to help lead our 2016 Hivestarter meet-up.

What is Hivestarter?

Utilized in 2014, Hivestarter is an opportunity to create real time partnerships and find support for upcoming member programming. It provides us the ability to surface our members full 2016-2017 programming calendar allowing for better promotion and outreach for events, funded projects and professional development opportunities.

We were incredibly fortunate to have Hana Sun, Portfolio Strategist from Hive NYC and Kenyatta Forbes, Community Manager from Hive Chicago attend to observe with the intention of bringing back the model to their Hive cities.

Overview of the Day:

Welcoming members, we started with outline new developments for Hive Toronto including a new membership structure that would allow for us to include more voices and diverse representation into the network. A blog post outlining the new structure which will debut in January 2017, will go live in December.

All attending members were asked to come prepared to discuss:

  1. A current program or funded project in which your organizations is looking for feedback or debrief a past program or event
  2. A specific need that could focus on technical or programmatic expertise, outreach or physical resources
  3. A expertise that you or your organization could provide to the membership to help support or move programming forward

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Members then posted on specific needs and requests and connected to those who could support. Feedback on a potential professional development opportunities including the development and growth of code clubs in the Greater Toronto Area, teaching opportunities, youth design opportunities and much more.

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Hana Sun described “Hivestarter was a great opportunity for long-term and our newer members to meet, share each other’s work, and identify opportunities for collaboration…We would love to institute this event for Hive NYC while collaboration and peer knowledge sharing is integrated into all of the work that we do at in New York. We don’t have a dedicated event that is specifically organized around this role, so it was exciting and informative to see Hive Toronto’s model for supporting this type of connection”.

As follow up to the event, members who were unable to attend will be given an opportunity to add to the 3 prompt areas and add to the public calendar which will be shared shortly.

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