By Aleksandra Nenadic, Training Lead, The Software Sustainability Institute.

CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 (#CCMcr19) conference in June will be the key community-building and networking event for The Carpentries' community in the UK and Europe for 2019. It will be an opportunity to bring together newer and more experienced community members to share knowledge, network, develop new skills and strategies for training and building strong local training communities.

We would not have been able to deliver this event without the generosity of sponsors who support and share our vision. They help us keep registration costs low, maximise participation by people from diverse geographies and communities, and help us provide travel scholarships and childcare to allow as wide an audience as possible to attend.

First of all, a big thank you to The Software Sustainability Institute, who is supporting the whole project. Also to Prof Rachel Gibson, the Director of Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMI) in Manchester, who has been providing invaluable support and guidance for the conference since it inception and also provided the first sponsorship and helped secure two more – from Manchester's Data Science Institute (facilitating interactions between data science researchers and problem holders at the University of Manchester) and SAGE Ocean (an initiative from SAGE Publishing to help social scientists navigate vast data sets and work with new technologies).

Next, we received support from The Institute of Coding (a family of learners, businesses and educators creating a new way to develop the digital skills researchers will need at work); the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) (a UK government body that carries out civil research in science and engineering); ELIXIR (European life sciences consortium coordinating, integrating and sustaining bioinformatics resources and providing access to services vital for research); British Library (the UK’s national library and one of the world's greatest research libraries); and R Consortium (an open source governance and foundation group supporting the worldwide community of users, maintainers and developers of R software) .

Last but not least, we received generous personal sponsorships from Sean McGeever – Computing Manager at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, leading the Edinburgh Research Software Engineers and Edinburgh Carpentries communities –, who contributed from his personal research budget. Our keynote speaker Lex Nederbragt kindly donated the travel funds allocated to him to bring someone else to the conference. Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute's Community Officer and member of The Carpentries’ Executive Council, generously donated his instructor fee from one of the Carpentry workshops.

We are still looking for sponsors – if you are interested in supporting us, please can get in touch with Aleksandra Nenadic or check our sponsorship page for sponsorship options.

A big "Thank you!" to all of our sponsors!