On the Decision to Close and Delivering On It: Student Hubs’ Experience and Reflections

Making the decision to close 

I’ve had the privilege of working at Student Hubs for eight and a half years. In this time I’ve seen the organisation move through a variety of challenges and obstacles, each time growing and changing. Sometimes these changes helped us better meet the needs of our students and community partners, but other times came at an expense to our funding, our staff team, or our impact and reach. When I stepped into the role of CEO in late 2020, there were several clear challenges to work through; not only had we reached the end of our previous strategy cycle, the pandemic had shaken up almost every facet of community and society. Whilst navigating government guidance, we were also faced with changing student and community needs and expectations, with no ‘return to normal’ in sight, and so our activities and delivery model needed to innovate. Though I was excited to be in a position to support the organisation with its next steps, like every senior leader, I kept in my mind the risks that would lead us to the outcome no-one wanted to speak about: closure. 

In higher education, a huge emphasis is placed on innovation, growth, and scale. As a sector, we do a fantastic job at creating new initiatives and piloting new programmes and activities, but the job of scaling these programmes to cover whole institutions is a bigger challenge. Over the past few years we’ve had many conversations with colleagues on the difficulties of achieving this, in particular in relation to community engaged learning, service learning, and civic practice such as volunteering. The sector has been in turmoil for many years now, even before the pandemic; a gulf was appearing between the activities we knew supported students and what institutions seemed likely to fund. 

From a charity perspective, the aim of a charitable organisation should be to put yourself out of a job, to complete your mission so that your services are no longer required. However we rarely see this happen – most charitable organisations see that the need for their services rise, or shifts in their charitable objects mean they continue to exist far beyond their original purpose. Often the decision to close is one that is taken from organisations by external factors. 

At Student Hubs, we have been fortunate to play an active role in making the decision to close, rather than it being done to us. As I mentioned above, as a senior leader, the outcome of closure was on my mind when hosting strategy conversations. I knew it was a possibility that we needed to be aware of so it didn’t catch us off guard. Early in the 2023-24 academic year, as we worked on our annual planning and next round of fundraising, I felt it was important for us to consider the future of the organisation in its totality and the idea of a potential closure came with this. Instead of avoiding this conversation, I shared it with the senior management team and trustee board, and together we decided to explore what it could mean with open minds. 

The main reasons we started to consider a closure were as follows: 

• Challenges across the higher education sector. As already alluded to, the higher education sector has been in turmoil for some time, but in 2024 we started to see a real mix of outcomes. Budget cuts, redundancies, significant changes to strategy (often with little external notice), and a general lack of clarity for internal university teams about what the 2024-25 year and beyond would look like, all added to our concern. As a charity that primarily delivers in partnerships with universities, we were not confident that the sector would stabilise in the short-term, and we didn’t know how long the long-term would be, and whether we could weather it. 
• Insufficient fundingfrom universities and trusts and foundations. We continue to believe that every student should have experience to tackle social and environmental challenges during their time at university, supporting them to become active citizens for life, and that this approach can help to address many of the current challenges we see facing students and communities. However this is not a funding priority for both universities or trusts and foundations who have previously supported our work.
  • From universities – with the above mentioned challenges, funding for this work has been limited, even though there has been a big emphasis and drive on civic engagement, funding hasn’t been forthcoming. We’ve seen multiple long-term university partnerships come to an end over the past two years from changes in strategy, and had no long-term partners in the pipeline to invest in our local Hubs. We had seen an increase in our project work, though this wasn’t significant enough to offset our costs and have the same impact reach as our local Hubs. The funding we were able to secure was shrinking, with more and more of it being supplemented through trusts and foundations, and other grants, which put a strain on our delivery capacity. 
  • From trusts and foundations, and other grant making bodies – there has been an increase in demand for funding across the sector, and many funders have paused or changed their funding priorities. Rightly so, we have seen more funding towards emergency support and relief for young people and families, however this has limited the funding available for long-term work. We’ve been lucky to be supported in the long-term by some fantastic funders who understand our needs and our impact, however the cost to deliver at scale meant that we needed to spend more and more time working on insecure funds from new funders each year, distracting us from delivering our programmes to the highest quality possible. 
• Changing national priorities. In the early 2010s there was a greater focus nationally on civic engagement, community service, and student leadership. We saw this through the formation of Step Up to Serve and #iWill. Now as we firmly sit over a decade away from those activities, the focus has shifted away from this, with a good example of this being the closure of the National Citizen Service (NCS) announced in November 2024. We believe that this shift isn’t right – participating in social action can have such a large positive impact on individuals and their communities, however we don’t have the capacity to be a policy organisation as well as deliver our activities. 
• Ensuring quality. Delivering our activities to the highest quality possible is very important to us, we understand that depth of experience has the most impact on an individual. As our funding streams reduced, our capacity for delivering the highest quality activities for our students would have become compromised. This would eventually lead to a version of Student Hubs in which we were no longer able to deliver to the standard we expect. This did not align with our values, nor did making our provision only accessible by higher education institutions who had the funds to support our work (and therefore making it the privilege of students at predominantly elite universities). This is not the future we wanted for Student Hubs. 

Taking all of this into consideration, the decision to close was ultimately about the effectiveness of achieving our social purpose. Are our activities as impactful as they could be, or could they be done differently? In considering a solution we focused on the following questions; 

• Are we doing right by our partnerships? We wanted to ensure that all of our partners were getting the most out of working with us. If we closed, we needed to ensure that we wrapped activities up well and created the right endings for the people who participated in our activities. We needed to explore that they were taken care of and that any provision we were providing didn’t come to an abrupt end. 
• Are we doing right by our students? Our mission is to support students, and considering the six key principles of youth social action, we had to decide if we could continue delivering without compromising on the experience students were having, and ensuring we were reaching the students who would most benefit from our work 
• Are we doing right by our staff team? There is so much uncertainty in the charity sector, it was imperative that we give staff clarity to ensure that there was no delay or concerns about their role and future and that we had sufficient time and space to support them on their own journeys as social action leaders. 

As a socially impactful organisation centring on the social purpose in your work, it’s important to look at yourself existentially and ask if it is doing right by others and the community, not just for itself. If an activity has served its purpose, run its course, or if another provision is better able to deliver, then the most impactful thing you can do is to make space. 

At Student Hubs, ultimately we felt that our approach to championing community-student-university partnerships had come a long way from when we started in 2007. Frameworks like the social purpose university and the Civic University Network being more widely recognised within institutions are prime examples of how far the sector has come in the past two decades to prioritising social action and purpose. We hadn’t quite met our mission statement, but taking into consideration all of the above, we realised that it was time to make space for something new. 

In having these conversations earlier than one would expect (we had funding confirmed until the end of the academic year and some reserves to support us), we were able to take a more considered approach to making the decision to close. Rather than having to disappear overnight, we were able to shift our focus to the next few months and think about how a closure could be done in a way that honoured the involvement of all the people over the past 16 years, and also provided a foundation for others to build on all that we had learned in this time. This is how our legacy work was collated. We wanted to bring together everything we’ve tested, failed, learned, implemented, and delivered in one place to share publicly and widely for others to use and build on. This felt like the best way to honour the organisation’s legacy and continue to meet our charitable objectives. 

Reflections on delivering in the closure period 

Since August 2024, Student Hubs has been run by a team of three, Sophie Payne – Network Director, Fiona Walsh McDonnell – Partnerships and Development Director, and Simran Dhanjal-Field – CEO. Together we’ve worked with the support of our trustee board to create a wide range of resources and deliver events focusing on the impact of Student Hubs. This was the first time working through a closure for all of us, so we’ve gathered some of our reflections on the past six months here. 

• Delivering the legacy work has helped us gain personal closure. Like many in the sector, we worked at Student Hubs because we passionately believed in its mission and vision, and the thought of closing was very difficult to consider to begin with. Over the past six months, our roles have been refocused on collating toolkits, resources, and reports. We’ve delivered a range of webinars and presentations, and had the opportunity to dig into historic documents, review old impact reports, and speak to alumni who have been impacted by our work over the past 16 years. This has been a privilege and has reminded us that the work of the organisation has been important and valuable, the closure doesn’t take any of that away. By having this legacy work to do, it’s allowed us the time to consider deeply the history of the organisation, and have clarity of what we want the lasting impact of the organisation to be. 
• Keeping delivery internal has kept Student Hubs’ mission at the core. The closure of an organisation will often come about in the middle of a crisis (or ten). It’s understandable that in such a time you may want to look around for support, and consider which external resources will help you get what you need done, done quicker. For example, commissioning a professional service to help write reports or additional capacity to help with archiving important resources. We didn’t take this route, instead, the entirety of the closure has been managed by three members of staff with the support of trustees. Though this means our output may have been limited, it has allowed us to have a real sense of clarity for our vision of the closure: keeping Student Hubs at our heart, and ensuring we’re representing the legacy of the organisation the way we want. Though other external services may be able to help, we felt that the time it would take to get them up to speed, and the ongoing management of ensuring everything was meeting our standards would create more administrative work, and lengthen the process.
• Getting the duration right was more important than we realised. Our closure period was settled to be six months as this felt like the right amount of time to achieve all the work we had set out to do. When deciding on this timeframe we had considered a shorter or longer period, from three to eight months. Looking back on it now, three months wouldn’t have been enough time for us to have all the conversations that needed to be had, meet with partners, deliver webinars, create resources, and do all the administrative work. We would have been rushed off our feet and likely burnout by the time the end of October rolled around. However, eight months would have been too long – you can keep making more work to do, but the value and quality of that work will hit a ceiling at some point. As we discuss in the next point, motivation can also become an issue – it would have been hard to sustain enthusiasm and motivation until the Spring. 
• In planning for the closure, we recognised that sustaining motivation was important for our team to achieve the goals we set. Six months felt like a long time to be working towards this goal, so before we started we sat together to consider how we could mitigate some of the impact this might have. This included:
  • Shifting our mindset – we found it beneficial to think of this time as a fixed six-month contract, honing in on what we can achieve in this time, and recognising how our original roles have needed to change to deliver the legacy activities. 
  • Overhauling the calendar – as a network organisation we had a range of processes and touchpoints built into our weekly/monthly calendars to support staff working remotely from each other. Now moving to a three person team, we recognised that this may increase the feelings of isolation within the team. To combat this, we set up new meeting spaces which best met the needs of the team; we had Monday team meetings, held space on Tuesdays to work together virtually on problem solving, and Wednesdays for social get togethers. Each of these spaces had agreed set agendas which allowed them to be self-chaired so all members of the team could participate. 
  • Moving to a four day week structure – one of the most significant changes we made was to move to a four day working week structure. This was built upon learnings from our nine-day fortnight trial in the 2023-24 academic year. Recognising the change in workload and the wellbeing support staff might need to navigate the six months of legacy work, we moved to working four days a week with a synchronous day off on Fridays. This move allowed us to prioritise and consider deeply the core value of what we wanted to share from Student Hubs, making sure the things that made our magic work was front and centre. It supported us to ensure the quality of these resources was high by reducing the overall output to focus on the depth of resources. Additionally it’s been key in supporting our wellbeing – as mentioned above, this has been a drastic change to our work lives. The four day week has given us time to process our work, allowing us to work in a more focused capacity in four days, and the flexibility to navigate personal priorities, such as finding new jobs, at the same time.
• We are most proud of prioritising staff. From the start, we wanted to make sure our staff team was supported. From how the decision was made, to how it was communicated, and the flexibility and support we provided in the summer to help our team members find new roles. We’re happy to say everyone has found new opportunities and have fed back to us how helpful the support we provided was. As we saw in the alumni active citizen report, the longevity of Student Hubs’ impact lives on in those who were impacted by our work first hand. The positive experience that staff had with us hopefully means they’ll continue to champion and share our legacy for many years to come.
  

Ultimately, at this stage, we feel very grateful to have had this opportunity. As difficult as it has been throughout, it has overall been interesting to work through such a multifaceted and complicated challenge. Learning about how to close an organisation well is not something you often get the opportunity to do, and we feel like we’ve done this in a way that champions Student Hub’s legacy. We feel positive about the approach we’ve taken throughout, and hope that others in a similar situation are able to do the same. 

What’s next

Friday 31st January is the last day for our remaining staff team, Fiona Walsh McDonnell, Sophie Payne and Simran Dhanjal-Field. From then on our trustees will be leading the formal, legal closure of the organisation. Should you need to get in touch, you can contact our chair at trustees@studenthubs.org. 

We’ve collated: 

All of these resources can be found on our own website till late into the 2025 year and are being generously hosted by the Civic University Network on their website under ‘legacy resources hub’. 
We hope you will find these resources useful in supporting your own activities and organisations. We still don’t know what the future holds for the sector, but as you take hold of opportunities as they come, we hope Student Hubs will be the voice in your head, reminding you that students are our partners and our neighbours.

It has been our privilege to champion students and highlight the magic that occurs when good, considered, and meaningful engagement is facilitated between students, the community, and universities.

Now that Student Hubs is closed, we pass that duty on to all of you.