At the end of October, we were privileged to be able to bring almost all of our C4 team members together in Belfast for our annual all-team meeting as part of our efforts to visit each of our Community Catapult sites as a team!
Day one kicked off with two lively workshop sessions. In one workshop, our Community Catapult teams reflected on their experiences so far, sharing their successes and what they were excited for in the coming year. They also discussed their current action research projects and identified further opportunities for collaboration and knowledge exchange.
At the same time, our external evaluators, Dr Bridget Sealey and Dr Allice Hocking guided others through a short photo elicitation challenge, followed by a reflection exercise looking at our Theory of Change. Members of the team thought about our progress so far, as well as the things that we might want to consider more deeply moving forwards.
For the afternoon session, we all came together to hear updates from our different workstream and research leads, looking at everything they have achieved in the last year, and learning more about the exciting things to come! Following this, we took time to reflect in smaller groups about each of the presentations, discussing the things that we would like to focus on in the coming months.
To conclude day one (before a well-earned break for some lovely food!) the whole team were treated to a fascinating bus tour of Belfast’s murals, with our guide sharing his vast knowledge on the city’s history and context.
After a rainy start on day two, the team came together for a session facilitated by ABS from Socialudo, who gave us the opportunity to play one of their fantastic Serious Games as a way for us to start thinking about the co-creation process for our own game (watch this space!). It was great to see each member of the team engaging so enthusiastically with the roles they had been given, and we all came away with a lot to think about for our own iterations.
To bring the morning to a close, our wonderful Market Development Association partner Fionntán Hargey led us on a walking tour of the local area, sharing its history, telling us what they’ve been up to both in and outside of C4, and giving us an insight into what’s to come.
After all this fabulous work, we stopped off for a quick team lunch before battling the elements on our travels home (thanks Storm Austen!).
It’s so hard to summarise what an amazing time we had, so who better to hear it from than the team themselves!
‘I found it really valuable to see everyone and had many interesting conversations. I was really impacted by the two tours and really appreciated the context they gave to the work there. Oh, and the food was amazing.’ – Fiona Couper Kenney, Research Fellow.
‘Our time together strengthened us as a team and to build relationships across our different sites and strands of work. The conversations and tours highlighted some unexplored points of connection between the catapult sites, for example how murals represent local history and identity is something the Market and Brixton have in common.’ – Franca Roeschert, Brixton Embedded Researcher.
‘For a Centre about Connectedness, the value of being connected – with each other and the places we work – was never more obvious than it was in Belfast.’ – Jon Dean, Deputy Director.
Thank you to everyone who was involved in the planning and organisation of the trip, to our partners in Belfast, and to our fantastic external facilitators for all their efforts and hard work, we can’t wait to see you all together again next year!
Cite this Article:
Varley, C. (2026). Reflections from our annual team meeting: C4 in Belfast! The Centre for Collaboration in Community Connectedness. https://doi.org/10.7190/c4.2026.5814770567
