Our community and partners

We are a twenty-first century civic university, nationally renowned for our engagement with the cultural, social and economic life of the communities in which we live, work and study, both locally and globally.

We believe in the power of education to regenerate communities and help with the economic, social and material development of those areas.

Being a good partner is extremely important to us, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. This means being responsive as well as proactive and delivering on what we say we will do.

Community university partnership programme

To reinforce our relationship with the local community, in 2003 we set up the community university partnership programme (CUPP), an initiative that has become central to the university's corporate mission.

We now have many years of experience creating, developing and nurturing mutually beneficial partnerships between the university and its local communities, with over 130 academics, 1,000 students and 500 community partners involved in the programme.

Community involvement isn't restricted to CUPP's work, however: it is crucial to many aspects of our teaching and research, from developing communications skills among our pharmacy students to investigating attitudes to sustainability among consumers. We refer to this concept of expanding the university's reach as our Community Knowledge Exchange.

You can read more about the history and nationally recognised impact of CUPP in this article on the Times Higher Education website: Brighton project’s template for community outreach.

You can also listen to CUPP’s Director David Wolff talking about the programme in this Times Higher Education produced podcast (slide to 9mins 24secs).

The Student Community Engagement project, part of CUPP, placed second in the MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship. This prize is awarded by the USA-based Talloires Network, an international association of institutions who work to strengthen the civic role of higher education of which the University of Brighton was the inaugural UK member.

Our students in the community

Many of our students undertake voluntary work as part of their accredited course curriculum, while others decide to volunteer purely through personal choice. In either case, volunteering helps students to add value to their degrees and apply their knowledge practically.

Our students have variously been involved in:

work experience at the East Sussex County Council
a community costume service
creative projects at Moulsecoomb Primary School.

One of the ways we encourage our students to volunteer is through the Active Student Volunteering Service.

Our staff in the community

The university is keen to promote a relationship between its staff and the local community. One of the ways it achieves this is through the trustee matching project.

The trustee matching project is designed to support staff as volunteer trustees in local organisations and community projects. It allows local communities to benefit from the experiences and knowledge of our staff and also provides an opportunity for the personal and professional development of our staff themselves.

Our research in the community

At Brighton, our focus is on applied research that makes a real difference to people's lives. Where appropriate, we conduct this research in collaboration with our neighbouring communities to foster shared learning and benefit from 'real-world' input.

Working in this way enables us to form 'communities of practice', which are groups of people from academic and non-academic backgrounds who have a common interest in a particular field. Our areas of expertise include health, families, older people and disabilities, as well as LGBTQ+ and ethnic minority communities.

By its very nature, our work starts at a local level. But due to the success of some of the models we have developed, these are now being used in many other parts of the world.