LARIA held its away day on 11 April. Members old and new joined members of LARIA Council for a very open discussion about LARIA, its history and achievements, the challenges that LARIA faces, and most importantly where it needs to go next to best support LARIA members.

There were a number of key stands to the discussions and main actions to move LARIA and its member support forward.

• Continue and improve our training and development offer to members nationally and through the local networks.
• Differentiate the support that LARIA provides its members across different sectors, different organisation and at different levels of career, and to link where things are common and relevant to everyone.
• Maximising the opportunities from the forthcoming Intelligent Council work which is applicable to all organisations. There will be an update at the LARIA Conference 2018
• Enabling our members to engage with universities to provide capacity, support and expertise for local analytical projects.
• Developing a clearer offer of what LARIA does and the benefits that membership provides.
• Improving our communication channels for the benefit of current members and those who don’t know much about LARIA.
• And better use of those communication channels LARIA has available, which are the Knowledge Hub, Twitter and LinkedIn, so that members can be part of the LARIA community.

These actions should be key to us all to support us in our roles as researchers, analysts and intelligence professionals, but they won’t happen without the support of all members for the good of LARIA members. LARIA Council will be taking actions forward, but we continue to need your help.

You can find out more about taking a role, big or small, in LARIA here.