Heather Madden | Systems Change Facilitator
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What is my role?
I work as the Systems Change Facilitator for the Rochdale team. My role is to progress our approaches to enabling social change through partnerships and collaboration and I facilitate network meetings with various organisations and individuals around specific areas.
What most excites me about this role?
What excites me the most about this role is the potential to make meaningful change for the people of Rochdale. I'm excited to work with people who know the community best, to try to get to the bottom of deep rooted complex issues and start to try to unpick them. I’m excited about putting the community at the heart of decision making and shaping the future of Rochdale with the people who know it best driving that change.
What drew me to work at Action Together?
After nine years of working across the VCFSE sector, working in adult mental health, youth activism and social connection I started to see repeating patterns, brilliant work being done (often underfunded), things having to come to an end and then the issue that they were set up to address continues. This often led me to the question of ‘how do we make sustainable change?’; how do we embed brilliant work so it isn't at the whims of funding cycles and top down agendas? When I saw the Systems Change role come up at Action Together I knew this was the perfect opportunity to start looking into those questions, and taking action to achieve long term change.
My hopes for Rochdale are...
I don’t really know where to start! I hope Rochdale seizes a moment that offers a great opportunity for change and to do things differently. I hope Rochdale invests in what it already has - its' brilliant people and ideas. I hope that we start to see Rochdale on the news for the right reasons. I hope to continue to see the public sector and VCFSE's sectors relationship develop, and that both collaborate to create a borough where people can flourish.