News from a fabulous community university partnership conference in Durham, England

Please could someone pick up Brighton and move it nearer to Durham. Or vice versa because we’re by the seaside and over the channel from France. This is what I felt after the two day ‘Community-University Collaborations: Exploring Models, Sharing Good Practice’ organised by one of the Beacons for Public Engagement (a programme funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England). Got back at 11.30pm yesterday after leaving Durham Uni at 3.15pm. But boy was it worth it. So worth it in fact, that I’m sitting here on a Saturday morning writing this blog instead of cleaning my kitchen so that I can share my joy with the world and set myself a few challenges whilst I’m still buzzing.

A few months ago I was invited by colleagues from Durham’s Centre for Social Justice and Community Action to kick off day two of the conference with a talk on the point of doing collaborative research in health and wellbeing. Looking at the draft conference programme I felt glum. It sounded like another gathering in which acadmics and university administrators from all corners of the UK pontificate about maximising academic recognition for getting the great British public up to speed with the vast brain power of university boffins.

I nearly made up an excuse not to bother going and cornered long suffering David Wolff to share my woes; ‘Dave, how rubbish is it to keep supporting conferences where community participation is so lame, and conversations are so narcissistic. Yeah, ok, it does get me out of looking after the kids for a few days, and I can sneak off for a wander around a posh cathedral, but even so..’. I started to dream of organising a demonstration outside the actual conference, with big placards announcing ‘NOTHING ABOUT US, WITHOUT US’ but didn’t think I could persuade a coach load of community partners from Brighton to come up with me. They are too busy saving the world, clinging on to their jobs and trying to convince someone to fund their vital services. Instead, I emailed the organisers with one of my soap box laments. They came back pronto, assuring me that there would be community partners involved. Wow, were they true to their word. So much so that the community partner who I bribbed to come with me from Brighton even whispered that there might have been a bit too much community participation. Never thought I’d hear that about a community university partnership conference. It was music to my ears.

Anyway, I’m not just saying all this because I’ve got a record stuck. The mix of participants really did the business. Great community activists, volunteers, service users and service providers who articulated the value to their causes of working with the university. Some seriously dedicated and undefensive scholars passionate about working with grassroots communities.Students up for engagement. A senior manager participating in the conference and making a great contribution – all that in between hospital appointments. And they’ve committed to providing every member of staff at Durham with five days off a year for volunteering. We have so much in common with our colleagues and friends up there. I’d love us to work in partnership and change the world. Yippee Dee Do Dah.

Their community university partnership projects are many and varied, with the portal ‘Durham Phoenix’ coordinating volunteering and engagement opprtunities for staff and community partners. One service that stood out was their Information Hotline. Community partners suffering from information overload can ring up library staff who will help them with finding the right information and helping with targeted literature searches. It has some parallels with our Helpdesk service.

Collaborative projects were showcased at the conference. These included projects involving young people and adults with learning disabilities, presented by the young people and adults themselves. We Brightonians got told off by a young person for not including young people themselves directly in our first Bouncing Back community of practice. I’ve always felt a bit rubbish about that, but know my limits – parents, practitioners, academics and students was enough of a cocktail. Thank goodness we’ve now been working closely with Brighton-based Experience in Mind over the last year or so – they are an inspiring group of young volunteers who all have experience of mental health issues. EIM have been learning about our resilience work and including it in some of their practices. And boy have I learnt a lot from them.

Of course we all know that the challenge will be sustaining all this important work and the spaces for collaborative conversations about it. If ever university bods needed ‘an inequalities imagination’ it is now.
At the Durham conference I reflected on the gap between some of our lifestyles, working conditions and wages and those of some community partners. I reckon this gap will increase, even though the government might really put the boot in for us too, a bit further down the line. I need to keep remembering the pressure that some of our friends and colleagues are under. For example, we might congratulate ourselves on providing free spaces for community colleagues at partnership conferences, and that’s certainly a start. But with funding squeezes and more work piling up as the recession bites further in, community partners will find it ever more difficult to release themselves from important work to come and sit in rooms chatting to us lot. However fab the conversation is. At the Durham conference, two participants from a refugee project explained to me just what they were missing by coming along instead of doing their day jobs. To hear about their community-university collaboration was inspiring, and the conference wouldn’t have been half as good without them. I’ll commit to doing my best to ensure that Cupp’s next conference in April 2012 has proper community participation, and no doubt my colleagues at Brighton will be with me on this one.

Anyway, back to the Durham event. I could say loads more about it. Ace Alison from the Coady Institute in Canada sharing insights from asset based community development, which, with a few tweaks I reckon, could be used for planning community university partnership work as we go further into the recession. But all the presentations are going to be up on the web soon – probably here: http://www.dur.ac.uk/beacon/socialjustice/. Take a look and bookmark the page for anything that’s coming up in the future. You won’t be disappointed.

And now I really must go and clean that kitchen…