Innovation Starts With Us: How Does Your Lived Experience Shape What You Build?
📅 Date: 15th September 2025
🕕 Time: 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM
📍 Location: Plus X Innovation, Brighton
🎟️ Tickets: £5 | 40 Max Capacity
Join YouthTheGap, Plus X Innovation, and Edge of Difference for an evening of honest conversation, community connection, and inclusive innovation whilst fundraising for The Hummingbird Project.
Innovation Starts With Us is the first event from Plus X Innovation and YouthTheGap’s “Impact Series” to explore how identity, background, and lived experience influence the ways we build — from creative projects and campaigns to community initiatives and startups.
Designed for entrepreneurs, creatives, change-makers and curious minds, this event blends informal connection with powerful conversation in order to:
Leave feeling confident, even in uncomfortable situations to innovate ideas that mitigate and challenge our biases.
Understand and define what equity, diversity and inclusion means in innovation.
Dispel myths and misconceptions around what inclusion is, and embedding what this actually looks like in practise.
Continue to make brave spaces to challenge injustice, discrimination and exclusionary practises and processes.
Create psychologically safe spaces to unpack our own influences, conditioning and bias, to embody the role models we wish to see and work with.
You’ll leave with fresh insights, meaningful connections, and practical ideas for building with fairness at the centre*
*fairness: adopting sustainable and long-term actions to ensure practices, processes and opportunities are truly equitable, accessible and encourage diversity first, not as an afterthought.
What to Expect
🤝 Connection Circles
Kick off the evening with rotating themed discussions designed to spark honest, informal conversations about different prompts related to identity, inclusion, and innovation — helping you reflect and connect before diving into the panel. Each station will have an open-ended question to mirror your own understanding, unveil what you don’t know and welcome different walks of life and foster deeper, and more meaningful, community connections. Real connections don’t bond on ‘sameness’, but strengthen through honest dialogues and sometimes, honouring disagreements.
🎤 Panel: Founding With Fairness
A live discussion with business and community leaders who are challenging exclusion and designing new ways of working.
Expect real talk on:
Building without a blueprint
Navigating systems not designed for you
Creating cultures of belonging from day one
The panel consists of:
Alex Young, Projects
Kerry Lockwood, Plus X Innovation
Meral Alizada, Results of Kindness
Calliope Wood, Spoonful of Laughter Podcast
Naqeeb Saide, Hummingbird Project Ambassdor & Specialist Support Worker
🧠 Reflection + Audience Q&A
Share your thoughts, write down a takeaway, or ask a question — all perspectives are welcome.
🌱 Belonging Wall + Open Networking
Wrap up the night with a relaxed networking session. Post your insights, connect with others, or browse printed resources to take your ideas further.
This event is designed to be inclusive, thought-provoking and energising — with space for honest reflection and collective inspiration so that as business founders and creatives, we can build not just with meaning, but with impact. It is not just about the “what”, but leading with, and embedding, our “why”.
🔗Secure your spot today and join a growing community building bold, inclusive futures — from the inside out.