Have you noticed, Cumbria has gone Global
We really noticed last week how global Cumbria has become. It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. We are getting used to global workers here at the Guild in Carlisle.
Last week just demonstrated the extent of the reach that businesses from our region have. What we are starting to see are more and more projects from our region that have a genuine national and global reach.
Our contribution
We are used to working with partners and this gives us opportunity to lever our impact beyond that of our own local network. A good example of this is our work with Lancaster University’s U Start program. U Start is designed to support Lancaster University’s students, post graduate students and ex students who want to start their own business. Thomas Jardine’s role is to run 1-2-1 sessions with these students. As we start our fourth cohort we are truly impressed with the width and depth of these businesses. From the Guild in Carlisle we are coaching students from across the UK, Europe, India and the Middle East. These students are starting businesses from creative industry to health to solving todays supply chain issues and everything in-between.
Businesses from Cumbria LEPs network
Again working with partners we have worked with Cumbria LEP for two years now delivering part of their Peer Network and 1-2-1 business support.
It is always surprising the modesty of the businesses we have met during these two years. From a global perspective some have the visible exports, some encourage global visitors and many just quietly work alongside national and global partners. Unless you talk to these folk you wouldn’t actually know they had national and global reach.
Moving the Cumbrian Carbon Foot Print Project on
Last year we helped run the pilot for ECOi in Cumbria. We were delighted to find out that this is been rolled out to Lancashire. It is also set to be expanded across the North West. It is extremely gratifying to see how a project tested in Cumbria is starting to move out nationally and results from this will help solve the global problems around carbon and the food sector. So the pilot from Cumbria is having an impact far outside our county.
It’s the odd conversations that really show Global Cumbria
Because of COVID , storms and everything else we had three social events this week at the Guild. This is not a problem, it just gave us a chance to catch up. This is when we realized how truly global Cumbria is becoming.
At a meal out we introduced our German Guilder to Lou who chatted about her plans to attend two animation conferences in the USA with her brilliant Plus 3K business.
After a round of crazy golf a few of us retired to Brewdogs. There we were part of a conversation between Ricky one of the Guilders who has just got a contract to run part of the cloud technology for a Princeton University Project. A Guilder who runs IT security for International companies then joined the conversation. We learned so much around internet security!
We finished the week off with a round of clay pigeon shooting at Westlands Country Park. Over lunch Dan from Sparrow Digital shared a story of how he won an all expenses snow board trip to the USA. He deserved it, he runs a brilliant web development and Shopify business.
We are global , we all just don’t know it yet.
Go on scratch the Cumbrian surface you will find so many global connections. By all means share your global stories with us . Cumbria is big and it is clever.
