I’ve seen the future. And Regeneration is Real. And it Delivers – Jo Gumb, Director, White Label

Last month I travelled direct from London Gatwick, where the airport is leading a collaborative effort to develop an Economic Zone in the region, to Birmingham for a conference by the National Enterprise Agency. After just two and half hours by train I came out of Birmingham’s beautifully transformed New Street station into a vibrant, thriving metropolis. As I walked through the bustling streets, packed with busy shops and restaurants and passed a series of restored and perfectly lit heritage buildings, I remembered it wasn’t always like this.

I took a glass walkway across the canal and realised I was back in exactly the same spot I had last seen around 30 years ago, when Birmingham had sponsored the Society of Editors Annual Conference, keen to get 500+ journalists and editors to understand their regeneration ambitions.

They had shown us this tiny first piece of change – a small piece of restored canal way with a red brick shopping development, an almost empty Pitcher and Piano and a completely empty All Bar One. It hadn’t impressed the cynical journalists any more than the shiny pre-dinner presentation packed with facts, stats and CGIs which promised ‘a better future’ for the city.

But the Pitcher and Piano had defied expectation and was still there, as was the All Bar One. And they were humming. Behind them were dozens more thriving cafes and shops along with streets and squares full of families, early morning runners and office workers heading to the commercial sector.

The NEN Conference was in the heart of the commercial sector, hosted at Barclays’ Eagle Labs, x+why Foundry, an innovative and exciting co-working and flexible office space for entrepreneurs which describes itself as a representative hub of multi-cultural innovation. Birmingham has been crowned the UK’s regional startup capital for the seventh year running, making it an exceptionally appropriate venue for NEN’s Annual Conference – an international affair which brought representatives from the UK government together with small businesses and experts from enterprise support agencies across England, Ireland, Sweden and the Netherlands.

They took part in a series of debates which covered a range of topics from how to fix the  country’s fragmented business support system for pre-starts, start-ups and micro businesses –  essential to UK Growth – to enterprise support for refugee and migrant communities across the UK and the EU, where specialised support programmes have achieved outstanding success in supporting new arrivals into self-employment, creating new businesses and harnessing the power of these communities’ skills, knowledge, experience and sheer determination to survive and succeed in their new lives.

It was a welcome reminder of the power of interventions which deliver positive change. At White Label, we support cities and sub-regions across their UK in their ambitions to deliver ‘a better future’ for the people who live and work in their communities. And a part of that does involve creating change narratives and designing presentations with the facts, stats and CGIs to help audiences perceive the ‘better future’.

But regeneration does work – and when you see the catalytic change it delivers and the impact on people’s lives, the renewed life in a city, it reminds us all that the ‘better future’ remains worth the energy, effort and commitment needed to turn hope into reality.