Collaborative Futures: how to work together to create significant partnership and impact

On Monday 23^rd June, we hosted a workshop facilitated by National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) at City as Lab. This workshop brought together colleagues from University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, University of Derby and East Midlands Combined County Authority to think about how we can build successful partnerships, meet the needs of our communities and create stronger impact.

A welcome from NCCPE

Funded by Research England, NCCPE are an organisation with a vision of an ‘inclusive higher education sector where communities can contribute to, and benefit from, knowledge, teaching and research.’ [link to website here]

At the workshop, NCCPE shared their learning from the National Civic Impact Accelerator action learning programme and various resources that are available to universities to help build conversations. They then went on to lead and facilitate the conversations and discussions from the participants.

The NCCPE advocates for the role of public and community engagement in building a more inclusive higher education sector.

City as Lab

Hosted at City at Lab at the University of Nottingham's Castle Meadow Campus, the group also got the opportunity to explore the Projection Augmented Relief Model (PARM), a three-dimensional model, which can be adapted in a variety of ways through the overhead projection of map-based data.

City as Lab positions itself in the city centre to connect to local communities and be a space external and internal projects can use to facilitate conversations.

Using Nottingham as a dynamic living laboratory, City as Lab brings people together to create, co-produce and test new ideas, tools and technologies that put local challenges at the heart of activities

Our panel

Chaired by Gemma Adams, we invited key representatives to be a part of a panel in the afternoon, representing University of Nottingham, University of Derby, Nottingham Trent University and EMCCA who contributed their insights to the group.

The panel consisted of:

• Dr Rhiannon Jones (FRSA) – Head of Civic and Communities at University of Derby
• Dr Paul Grainge - Academic Director of City as Lab at University of Nottingham
• Rich Pickford - Nottingham Civic Exchange's Manager at Nottingham Trent University
• Dave Tuer - Innovation Lead at East Midlands Combined County Authority

The panel were asked to explain ‘how they approach working with partners in their engagement activity’ and took questions from other workshop participants.

Some of the conversations these questions triggered included ways to create open discussions to enable change in the local area and respond to partners concerns and questions with care.

They discussed how to continue to move forward, recognising strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and working towards changing perceptions of place and attitudes. It was also mentioned it would be worth looking at different ways to evaluate this practice and explore what we want to demonstrate with the information.

The discussion

While on break, the participants were asked to reflect on the following questions

• What do we already do in this area? What’s good about it?
• What are our areas of expertise?
• What are the opportunities within the East Midlands region?
• How could the East Midlands combined county authority, and the universities work together?

Based on these answers, the group then had deeper conversations-based sharing best practices and discussing the challenges centred around:

• Deep community listening
• Skills agenda
• Data analysis and insights

What emerged from these group discussions was a collective commitment to working collaboratively to strengthen community engagement and impact. Looking forward we hope to continue the conversation, fuelling positive action to build our networks and partnerships more effectively.