November 2023
It’s amazing how time flies when you’re having fun! This perfectly summarizes my first month as President. I had the opportunity to attend multiple events and I enjoyed every single one of them. Each event gave me a new perspective on the subject and allowed me to explore areas I had never considered before. Above all, I had a great time meeting and interacting with our members and guests.
I believe we have a unique offering. I see my role over the next two years as to work with all of you to continue to develop and improve our special contribution to the people of Manchester and beyond. To make sure the society is operating on firm foundations and build awareness of why we’re here and how people can get involved. What we have to offer is too good to keep to ourselves.
Please help me by talking about what we do, and inviting people to events, and for those of you who may not have been to an event in a while, have a look at the program. I am sure you will find something interesting.
The Environment – Our next theme
Following on from a review of our past programs, the trustees and sections have adopted a new framework for developing our event schedule. We will now be choosing a theme for each quarter and planning various events around a core idea.
We will build a series of events, including talks, debates, and visits creating a chance for our audiences to explore an idea more fully, together. We want our events to have broad appeal and core to that principle is the need to ensure we have space for education, exploration, and most of all entertainment.
We are now starting to release events around our current theme of the environment. Our first event will be an online talk on the use of microorganisms to help reduce plastic waste.
Manchester, the slave trade & the Manchester Lit & Phil
We had our second event in this current series, a guided tour of Manchester, exploring the cities links to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, its industrial expansion and later role in helping support the abolition movement. I was born in Manchester and worked in the mills. After those two hours, I will never look at the city in the same way again.
Our final event of 2023 will take place on the 12th December: Reparations for our slavery links – how might they work?
In parallel, the team behind this series of events is talking to community leaders to develop a plan for our response to the UCLan report and our future activities.
Preparing for the next 240 years
Our monthly newsletter is focused on giving an update to our members and wider mailing list. With that in mind, I have focused on subjects of general interest. There is, however, a huge amount of work required to prepare the society for the future. The trustees have committed to several workstreams to help address the challenges we face.
As this is more internally focused, communication on the details and how we would like members to contribute will be part of a members-centric communication. If you are not a member but would like to help shape the future, please join the Lit & Phil now. We’d love to hear your fresh ideas.
How you can help
This society is important to us all. I want to ask each of you to think about one action that you can do over the next month to help support our activities. They can be as simple as sharing this message, a conversation or attending an event. Every one of these small actions will make a difference.
Thank you for your time.
Peter Wright
President
