The Renaissance programme within Yorkshire and the Humber demonstrates a fundamental belief in the importance of place across the Region. The programme has delivered many successes and at the core of all these have been people.

Renaissance Friends is about people and their place. It is about bringing people together who have a shared belief in the value and importance of place.

The purpose of Renaissance Friends is to support place, and importantly, to support each other. The Renaissance programme acknowledges the primary importance of people in the creation of places. Our belief in the commitment of people to place has never been in doubt. Our challenge within our involvement within place has been to fill deficits – not to duplicate or displace the work of others – and this continues in the development of Renaissance Friends as a network to focus on place.

Renaissance Friends is a major commitment to the involvement of people in place. It will work on a number of different levels and the networks, contacts and friendships made within it will provide new directions and impetuses to ‘places’ across the Region.

Renaissance Friends will be a medium to exchange ideas, information, project details, processes, problems. Contacts will range from the necessity of funding, to the inspiration inherent in ideas to discussions on the relative merits of York Stone and Granite. But the truth is that we do not know what the contacts will be like or what they will generate, whether they will agree with our approach or generate dynamic leaders to work alongside ourselves, local councils and others.

Renaissance Friends will provide people across the region with a resource of enabling and support that will help them to shape and influence their own ‘places’ – leading, supporting and embedding Great Places across the Region.