This year we’re kicking off our Project partnerships by delivering another project with Leeds Conservatoire. We got introduced to Leeds Conservatoire last year through GuildHE’s Knowledge Exchange Network, and we’re excited to be working with them again this year.
How this project follows on from our summer work
You can read more about our Summer Project from our Graduate Intern Iona who delivered the activities here, but in summary, our goals last year were to:
- Deliver a One Community Forum;
- Support Leeds Conservatoire to map stakeholders and connect with more local organisations in Leeds;
- Understand the needs and barriers faced by students and communities in participating in knowledge exchange activities.
We learnt a lot and had fantastic engagement and discussions with lots of organisations in Leeds and internally at the university. One area which we were keen to expand, and provided recommendations for in our final report, was engagement with students. As we were delivering the project during the summer, we couldn’t reach a bigger range of students through our activities, and felt there was lots still to understand about their needs and interests in this space.
Our Spring project this year is planning to continue this work and more.
Our Spring 2023 Project
We have recently recruited Sarah Baaghil as our Leeds Programme Manager to support us for 14 weeks in the delivery of our activities, working alongside our Partnerships and Development Director, Fiona Walsh.
Key goals for this year’s Project include:
- Delivering a one-off Charity Challenge event, supporting students to get involved in a free consultancy activity supporting local community organisations;
- Conducting research with students to understand more about their needs, barriers to opportunity, and interest areas in getting involved with knowledge exchange and volunteering in Leeds;
- Continuing our stakeholder mapping and community research to better understand local organisations’ needs for engaging with Leeds Conservatoire and their student body.
We’ll be delivering these activities until early May, so it will be a busy two terms as we work with Leeds Conservatoire to support the development, evidence-base, and scoping of their knowledge exchange activities locally.
Next steps
Sarah and Fiona will be working with Leeds Conservatoire to deliver activities, and Sarah will be reaching out to organisations and students in Leeds to collate the findings for our final recommendations and research report. You can expect an update about how our Project in Leeds is going in the next few months of 2023.
Projects are a fantastic opportunity for us to add capacity to university teams in a time-limited way, and support with key strategic goals, research and evidence-building. You can also read more about our Project with the Open University in Wales here, told by our Programme Manager for the project, Jay Chard.
If you have an idea for a project or partnership where Student Hubs’ expertise and capacity could be needed, get in touch with Fiona Walsh at fiona.walsh@studenthubs.org.