Cupp Brighton Autumn Digest blog

Cupp’s Brighton Autumn Digest brought many people from university and community backgrounds together last week to celebrate and reflect on community-university partnerships. All were welcome to share and learn about current local partnerships – and the offer of cake obviously worked as the room was packed out!

The showcasing began with a fascinating tour of the Waste House led by Duncan Baker-Brown, who provided insights into how this partnership project has led to the opening of the first public building made out of waste in Europe. Prof Andrew Church then welcomed us and skilfully took us through a full line up of quick fire presentations from community and university partners.

First up was a focus on Taking Account, a series of reports into the local community voluntary sector (CVS) over the last 10 years, which has been enabled by the long-term partnership between the university and the local CVS infrastructure organisation, Community Works.  Interestingly, this highlighted the changing nature of the partnership, from an initial commissioning style arrangement with university researchers through to now CW leading on the research with academic steering (see presentation: 2_Taking%20Account%20%20a%20community%20university%20partnership%20…).

Next up was the screening of City Life, an episode of a soap opera made by film students with local children through a collaboration between creative education organisation, Little Green Pig and an Arts faculty optional module taught by Mick Hawksworth. It was great to hear about the benefit to all involved and also quite an eye opener to see what storylines 9 years olds can come up with if given the chance! Lastly in the showcasing, we heard about the positive impact a post-graduate community-based research project has had for both local charity, Emmaus and the student, Bruno De Oliveira. This collaborative approach from design to the final report has maximised the opportunity for student research for both sides.

The overarching theme for the day was ‘making things visible’. This threaded itself through the showcasing and then came out in full force in the ensuing discussion and second half looking at Cupp’s work to facilitate and develop partnerships. Two of the showcases have physical outputs – a film and a house – which led people to consider the nature of tangibility in impact and evidence. Ceri Davies’ interactive session took this into another realm getting us to make origami whilst considering the concept of ‘boundary objects’  (entities that can link communities together as they allow different groups to collaborate on a common task*)!

The launch of the publication 10 Down 10 To Go helped turn our attention to where next for community-university engagement. This future visioning work included a creative writing element which allowed different perspectives (academic, student, practitioner, community worker etc) to come up with what a day in the life of an engaged university 10 years from now could look like (soon to be on Cupp’s website). Offering up activities in the near future, we then heard about Community 21 – a new mapping tool being developed by Nick Gant and his team in the arts faculty. Cupp is going to be using this software to map community-university work across the campuses, which can allow people to easily  self-publish case studies (for more information: http://community21.org/). To round off the day, Mary Darking & Carl Walker (applied social sciences academics) tackled head on the issue of evaluation and impact. They reflected on a pilot called the Community Research & Evaluation Gateway, which allowed a group of adult education organisations to come together with Carl and Mary to work through a series of workshops on data, evaluation and impact. Currently the hope is to work with Community Works and others to take learning from this pilot forwards into long-term activity that can improve this aspect across the sector.

Overall it was a full programme bursting with exciting, inspiring and thought-provoking presentations…all well oiled with tea and cake, so I believe a success all round!

Thank you to all our speakers: Andrew Church, Duncan Baker-Brown, David Wolff, Sally Polanski, Julie Watson, Mick Hawksworth, Bruno De Oliveira, Christine Squince, Graham Davis, Ceri Davies, Simon Northmore, Sarah Lord, Mary Darking & Carl Walker.

Also thank you to the Cupp team for making this event possible and Verdict Café for the lovely cakes.

*Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press