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2 events – Manchester and London
30 funded partners
National and local organisations represented
Over 60 delegates across two events
Professionally facilitated
The Cadent Community Collaboration Forums took place in September and October 2026, in Manchester and London.
Building on the success of our previous conferences – a national event in 2024 and a series of regional conferences in 2025 – we wanted to bring partners together again but this time to develop the learnings, insights and relationships established over the previous two years.
A key piece of feedback we heard was that partners wanted more opportunity to work with other project providers. Partners felt that collaboration was the key to finding ways of, sharing best practice, reducing duplication and finding new ways to improve outcomes.
Taking the form of interactive workshops, the Forums brought together a selected group of funded partners to tackle four challenge statements linked to Cadent’s business commitments. Partners worked collaboratively throughout the day to develop innovative solutions aligned to the Vulnerability and Carbon Monoxide Initiative (VCMI) pillars: Priority Service Register (PSR), Carbon Monoxide, Energy Efficiency, and Net Zero & Fuel Poverty.
Now that the Forums have concluded, partners will be invited to submit proposals to run a pilot project to tackle one of the issues raised, with funding of up to £50,000 for two projects available (£100k in total). The two selected schemes will run over a six-month period.
The hope is that this approach will generate some strong collaborative bids and new ways of delivering impact for our customers and communities.
Following the pilot phase, the Cadent VCMI team will consider how the strongest ideas could be developed into longer-term programmes with existing partners.
