What becomes possible when we stop working in our usual lanes?
Jeremy from Creative Waikato with Holly from Community Waikato
Creative Waikato and Community Waikato have been deliberately looking for reasons to work together.
Over the past couple of years, that has taken some wonderfully different forms. Our teams have stretched themselves through creative team-building experiences, including Charlotte Giblin’s memorable Push the Light. Creative Waikato guided the Auahatanga ki te Kainga programme alongside Community Waikato, local artists and four local community houses. We co-facilitated the recent Waikato Homelessness Hui, and Creative Waikato was a key partner in delivering Community Waikato’s 2025 conference.
We keep doing it for a simple reason: something different happens when we work with people who don't see the world exactly as we do.
Collaboration brings different ideas, skills, relationships, resources and ways of seeing things into the mix. It can help us make better use of what we already have, see possibilities we might otherwise miss and, sometimes, do something together that none of us could have done alone.
But good collaboration can also stretch us.
It asks us to be curious enough to question our own assumptions. Generous enough to share what we have. Open enough to let someone else shape our idea. And willing to work with people we might not naturally think to work with. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn't about finding more resources. It's about making different connections between the people, ideas and resources that are already here. And sometimes that means stepping outside what is familiar.
On 28 October 2026, Creative Waikato and Community Waikato are hosting The Collaboration Lab: A Waikato Hui for Collective Action.
It won't be a conventional conference. We're creating a working room: a highly participatory day designed to get people out of their usual lanes, make some unexpected connections and explore what might become possible when we combine our ideas, relationships, resources and strengths. We want the day to feel welcoming, creative and energising, but also, we want it to stretch people beyond the conversations, connections and ways of working that are already familiar.
Before you come, start looking beyond what your organisation already does. Think about:
What is an idea you haven't been able to achieve alone?
Is there something that could have greater impact if other people were involved?
Who could you work with that you haven't worked with before?
And if you already have the beginnings of an idea for a collaboration, bring it with you. Don't polish it too much. An unfinished idea gives other people somewhere to get involved.
Our Collaboration Marketplace will put some of those ideas into the room and invite others to get amongst them, ask questions, reshape them, add something unexpected, offer a relationship or resource, or put their hand up to be part of what happens next.
The goal is to discover what happens when we loosen our grip on an idea and give other people the opportunity to add to it. We'll bring together people from community organisations, local government, funders, business, the arts and beyond. Everyone arrives with something they can contribute. It might be an idea, knowledge or experience, a relationship, venue, resource, skill, influence or connection. It might simply be a completely different way of looking at something. Part of the challenge is noticing what you have that someone else might need and being curious enough to discover what they might bring to something you care about.
We're deliberately not telling you everything about the day just yet, partly because we want to leave room for surprise, but also because collaboration doesn't work particularly well when everything has already been decided. We want to create enough structure to help things happen, while leaving enough space for the people, ideas and conversations in the room to shape where we go.
So come ready to contribute, ready to listen and ready to have your thinking stretched. Come prepared to let go of an assumption or two and come willing to work with people outside your usual orbit. We want to move people away from: “What can my organisation do?” towards “What becomes possible if we do this together?”
Before registrations open, start looking around your organisation, your community and your networks and ask yourself what could we do together that we can't do alone?
