Professor Angie Hart has been awarded £32,000 by the AHRC to act as principal investigator on a 12 month research project into Community University Partnership Resilience. Her co-investigator is Professor Sarah Jane Banks of the University of Durham (S.J.Banks@durham.ac.uk) and together they will be working in close partnership with community partners, in particular with Ms Kim Aumann from Amaze and Boingboing.
The aim of this 12 month project is to set the foundation for a UK wide community partner network that will influence HE policy and practice and provide resources for improving community university partnerships focused on tackling inequalities.
The key objectives of the project are:
- To activate a network of experienced community partners to share their successes, address their challenges and identify promising practices that support partnership working to tackle social inequalities.
- to ensure that capacity built through this project is available to future CCPs and feeds into strategic developments at the level of individual universities, HEFCE and the Research Councils.
- To sustain and build the resilience of community partners so they feel fit to shape conversations and influence policy regarding issues of power, equity, shared decision making, funding and sustainability.
- To orientate to CCP research agenda by exploring past findings and fusing the learning from CCP, Beacons and SECC projects, to clarify common issues of concern.
- To establish community partner and CCP academic working groups to continue dialogue and action immediately after the initial summit to produce high quality outputs from a community perspective.
- To create a hub for a self sustaining community partner forum to collectively share and learn from the summit after this project funding ceases.
