Every year LIN celebrates and promotes synergy across sectors through creating a unique platform for cross-sector partnership to bring about true and long-last social impacts. For 2020, LIN heralds elements of trust and innovation as the basis of impact-driven partnerships.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing order causing unprecedented challenges to the planning of LIN’s annual cross-sector conference, LIN was quick to adapt to the new normal by leveraging technologies to ensure the delivery of our goals on cross-sector events for the year.
This year’s conference was originally scheduled to take place in-person on 28th May for up to 300 people. However, the plan was disrupted with several delays before it was finally decided to go ahead on 27th August 2020. As an adaptive measure, the conference was held virtually, via Zoom, thanks to which LIN achieved approximately 500 participants and an extensive number of Livestream viewers via Facebook platform, going far beyond our initial expected reach.
For this year’s event, LIN chose to focus on Trust and Innovation, and looked to promote information exchange, stronger local voice, and diversified participation. We organized a total of 13 workshops with panel discussions on various topics and many local speakers , featuring stories of cross-sector partnerships. We were happy to see many of our participants who felt satisfied leaving the event. LIN takes pride in raising stronger and louder local voices, shown through the participants’ satisfaction with our conference speakers.
Ryan Leonhard from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam shared his overall thoughts on the Conference:
“Well-done to LIN and everyone involved with the cross-sector conference today. Every year I leave invigorated, inspired, and excited about the progress made since the previous year and for the progress to come. The caliber of the event was all the more impressive given the virtual format. Though I found the remote format harder to actively engage with, the topics and content still provide deep insight into the challenges facing stakeholders (and future stakeholders), as well as paths forward.”
On 30th September, LIN organized an Opportunity Networking event with the aim to create a platform for local nonprofits to make connections with companies, paving the way for partnerships for social impacts. The event was a huge success with 170 participants diversely coming from nonprofit, business sector, media, foreign governments and social enterprises. A majority of the event attendees said that they have connected with at least one potential partner after the event. We also found out that the event went beyond their expectation.
Lan Nguyen from the Library Project gave us an encouraging comment:
Thank you LIN Center for Community Development for such a fun networking event last night. It was our great pleasure to meet many inspiring individuals who share the same passion for children’s education. We are so excited to have these partners join the Library Project to improve rural education in the Mekong Delta. We believe that by promoting stronger partnerships between the nonprofits and stakeholders, we can reach out and help the most vulnerable communities in Vietnam.”
