Join the EMPOWERUS Exchange

A shared community space for Suffolk’s businesses, professionals, educators, communities and people who support them.

The EMPOWERUS Exchange is the community layer of EMPOWERUS. It’s a collection of connected spaces where people can meet, ask questions, share useful information, find expertise, discover events and opportunities, and help each other navigate what’s happening across Suffolk. Rather than one enormous conversation, the Exchange is made up of different rooms and interest groups. You can join the parts that are useful to you and ignore the ones that aren’t.

Some will be broad community spaces. Others will bring together people around particular subjects, sectors or interests from business and marketing to technology, learning, personal development and whatever else the community tells us it needs.

The idea is simple:

Make it easier for useful people, useful knowledge and useful opportunities to find each other.

Why are we building it?

Suffolk doesn’t lack networks, communities, business support or expertise, quite the opposite there is an enormous amount happening, but it can be difficult to know where to look, who to ask or even that something exists.

We don’t want EMPOWERUS to replace those communities.

We want the EMPOWERUS Exchange to help connect us all.

That means inviting people who already run networks, provide support, organise events, hold specialist knowledge or simply have useful experience to share.

Over time, we hope this creates a trusted layer between Suffolk’s existing communities helping information travel faster, increasing visibility for good work, making introductions easier and giving us a much better understanding of what people actually need.

A community we’re building together

This is deliberately early. We’re not opening the doors with a finished structure and a long list of things we’ve decided everybody needs. We’re bringing people together first so we can listen to what people ask for, watch which rooms are useful, create new ones where there is demand and change or remove things that aren’t working.

So joining the Exchange isn’t the same as formally joining EMPOWERUS or taking on a committee role (although we’d love that!).

You’re simply joining the visible and active community around it and, importantly, helping us shape what that community becomes.

Request access

The EMPOWERUS Exchange is a trusted community rather than a completely open public forum. We therefore ask everyone to tell us a little about themselves before joining. This helps us understand who’s in the community, introduce people more intelligently and keep the space useful and safe.

It only takes a couple of minutes.

[Request access to the Empower Us Exchange]

Request Access to the EMPOWERUS Exchange

Access won’t be immediate, please give us time, we want to do this well so we only have to do it once.