The foundation’s Empowering… series of Work Conferences are ‘social conferences’ exploring topical work empowerment issues. The focus to the Empowering... series is to concentrate on exploring solutions to problems rather than simply concentrating on their cause.

Each conference brings together 150 – 300 people from a wide range of organisations, interested in exploring particular work issues. The conference format is a mixture of facilitated work, open space conversations and panel discussions.

Participants are invited to contribute on an online collaborative website for the conference provided by our event partners, Policy Unplugged. This website is used before the conference to explore with participants the design, agenda and speakers for the conference, as well as to start clarifying key issues in advance. After the conference, the website continues to be used by participants for ongoing conversations and for the facilitation of working groups that arise from the conference.

After each conference, it is intended that the foundation will run a series of monthly debate evenings to further explore the themes of the conference.