What is IGNITE?
Creating an attractive environment with quality housing and business premises, and healthy, clean, safe, sustainable communities, is vital to the economic vitality and social well-being of the North East.
IGNITE, the Regional Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Communities in North East England, is tasked with enabling this to happen. It is one of nine similar Centres across England that forms The Excellence Network.
The business model for IGNITE is one which places value on knowledge retention and knowledge management; Collaborative working is the main mechanism for learning and building the region’s skills and capacity. Networks are an important feature for the business and your participation and collaboration will, in the longer term, build success.
IGNITEs’ aim is to raise standards of practice in sustainable regeneration by developing the skills and capacity of professionals and practitioners to work in partnership with communities to create, deliver and maintain great places.
We aim to ‘Inspire the passion for creating lasting places where people want to belong’- It will take the collaboration of those involved in the core occupations and the community to work together to create places in which people desire to live, work and spend their leisure time.
IGNITE, as its name suggests, aims to fire up your passion, pace and drive to become a leader within your organisation or community. By empowering the community of interest with the skills and knowledge needed you will be able to collaborate with others to create great places.
What makes IGNITE unique is that it has a knowledge portal and learning network that will enable you to quickly find relevant information and people with whom you can collaborate. There are over 280 relevant organisations in the North East, all of which connect to the map of activity for sustainable communities. The Knowledge Portal is an electronic resource created to support the development of skills and knowledge and the sharing of good practice - like a Google search engine, but where you can search for information and save it into a learning plan.
Launched in February 2006, IGNITE is a collaboration between English Partnerships, Government Office for the North East, and One NorthEast.