The Role of Partnership in Civic Engagement
Ceri Davies (University of Brighton)
Abstract
Aims:
To explore partnership as a mechanism for mutual civic engagement using illustrations from the Brighton & Sussex Knowledge Exchange programme in the Community University Partnership Programme at the University of Brighton.
For workshop participants to apply their knowledge of these examples to their own practice through setting personal action points from this session.
This workshop will illustrate the work of the Brighton & Sussex Community Knowledge Exchange (BSCKE) programme at the University of Brighton. Located within the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP), this groundbreaking initiative has been running since 2005 and aims to support and fund mutually beneficial partnerships between communities and universities that tackle real community problems and engage with socially excluded groups. Using BSCKE as a primary source of information, the workshop will explore some of the practical skills, approaches and principles that underpin the success of implementing a programme that realises collaborations between academic staff and local community groups based on knowledge exchange. It will also consider key dynamics of community-university partnership practice and areas of tension or limitation that have acted on individual partnerships such as power, capacity and perception. Turning academic expertise to applied social problems and sharing community partner expertise to bring real issues into teaching and research, BSCKE projects involve:
An innovative piece of work that addresses a significant issue of relevance to communities in Brighton, Hove or Coastal Sussex
Involvement of stakeholders and beneficiaries in project planning, development and evaluation
Commitment of time and expertise from an academic and a community partner to supervise the project worker/s
The development of sustainable partnerships between university and community partners, grounded in working on real problems and drawing on and developing the respective expertise and knowledge of each partner
However, this workshop will suggest that in order to create mutually beneficial and sustained relationships between communities and their local Higher Education institutions attention must be paid not merely to the ingredients of partnership but the relationship between the characteristics of partnership and its outcomes. Funding over 25 projects since its inception, BSCKE offers us a variety of examples with which to examine this. This interactive session will consider the deliberative processes partners go through on a BSCKE project through a series of exercises and case study examples will be presented and discussed to view the relationship between partnership characteristics and outcomes in furthering our understanding of how the mechanism of partnership might impact on community and university agendas for change.
