The seventh annual Belfast International Homecoming – the largest gathering of the diaspora
in the north of Ireland – will take place Virtually on 1st & 2nd October 2020.

The purpose is to welcome back our global family to join in the discussion about building a better Belfast.

Covid-19 has turned the world — and the priceless connections between people —  upside down.

Where once we prized connectivity, interaction, travelling, sharing, partnership and public gatherings now the watchwords are isolation, travel bans, separation, distancing and sheltering.

At the Belfast International Homecoming 2020, therefore, we plan to build a bridge between those two parallel universes so that thepeople of Belfast and our global family can safely travel from one to the other.

Our job will be to reconnect Belfast with its far-flung diaspora so that we replace the lonlieness of lockdown with the warm, virtual embrace of friendship.

To do so will take innovation and new ways of doing things. That’s why at this year’s Homecoming we will showcase ten inspirational leaders who have pivoted through the pandemic to come up with innovative ways of moving the community forward.

And we will honor a new cohort of Belfast Ambassadors who, even if unable to travel to our city, have continued to keep the connections to Belfast alive in the conviction that better and brighter days lie ahead.

Our message at the Homecoming to the Irish and Scots-Irish disapora will be one of optimism and positivity in the knowledge, as Martin Luther King taught us, that while disappointment is finite, hope is infinite.

Come join us then — virtually — at the seventh annual Belfast International Homecoming.

This is Belfast Calling.