The Northern Echo’s new campaign for jobs and investment will hold its first event in a few weeks.
Run by the Echo’s business arm BUSINESSiQ, our Impact campaign is an expansion of the Level Up programme which has been running for the last three years in partnership with some of the most influential businesses in the North East - bp, believe housing, Cummins, Darlington Building Society, Durham County Council, North East Chamber of Commerce, razorblue, Tees Valley Combined Authority, Teesside International Airport and Womble Bond Dickinson.
Impact will take us towards 2025 with a live event at the Hopetown railway centre in Darlington on Thursday December 12, with refreshments to kickstart your day, a buffet lunch, a keynote presentation from heritage and history expert Chris Lloyd – The Northern Echo’s Chief Feature Writer – and a panel of business experts to look ahead at what the next year will have in store for the North East.
There are a limited number of tickets – all free – for the Hopetown event and you can reserve yours at bit.ly/HopetownImpact
There will also be a rare opportunity to go behind the scenes of one of the region’s most remarkable engineering feats, with access to the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust’s workshop to see at close quarters its project to build a Gresley Class P2 locomotive in a 15-year build that will cost around £6.5m.
Chris will take us on a journey through the remarkable bravery of local entrepreneurs whose innovations exactly 200 years ago gave birth to the railway that got the world on track and who created the foundations for today’s innovators to build on.
He said: “I’m really looking forward to this event, held at the heart of the town’s historic railway celebrations. I hope my look back at that heritage will help inspire the work that we need to do in 2025 and beyond.”
As guests of Darlington Building Society, the event will be held on the morning of Thursday December 12 in the amazing Carriageworks building at Hopetown - a £35million project that will be a centrepiece of S&DR200, an international festival taking place across County Durham and Tees Valley in 2025 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the first journey on the Stockton and Darlington Railway.
BUSINESSiQ Editor Mike Hughes said: “Our campaign has been growing each year, so we decided very early in our plans that from 2025 Impact was the perfect name for how it will be changing.
“We want to show how our business partners are having an Impact, how the Impact of the region is becoming a global force and how BUSINESSiQ and the Northern Echo itself are investing to make sure we do our bit and help make our own Impact alongside such powerful colleagues.
“Hopetown is the perfect setting – the birthplace of ingenuity as a venue for us to look ahead to a year like no other.”
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