As we wrap up the work of Student Hubs for our closure at the end of January 2025, we wanted to take this opportunity to recognise and thank the many funders who have worked with us throughout our journey and supported us across the years.
As a charity, navigating funding has always been a significant part of our work. In part, our closure, as outlined in the blog ‘On the decision to close’, has been due to the changing financial landscape of both the institutions we deliver with, and the availability of funding from trusts and foundations in support of our charitable objectives. Funders are being pulled in many directions, playing a vital role in supporting so many organisations and service users to meet their objectives and thrive.
At Student Hubs, over our 16 years of delivery, we’ve benefited from flexible funders who have taken the time to understand our mission and have trusted us to develop and deliver the right activities to meet our students’ and community partners’ needs. We have benefited from funders who have given us autonomy in how funding has been used. In doing so it has allowed us to:
- Be reactive to changing needs – highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs of your service users can change quickly. Funders with open doors to discuss challenges and who provide freedom in activities have allowed us to be responsive many times throughout our history, often allowing us to address challenges and trial new delivery methods ahead of the sector. During the pandemic, many funders relaxed their guidance on what funding could be used on and this supported many organisations to keep going – so we know it is possible!
- To innovate – flexibility in funding has allowed us to try new things and chase new opportunities. You don’t always know how something will play out when you first set out on a venture. Having flexibility has allowed us to pursue opportunities and try doing things differently, ultimately adding to our offering.
- Deepen the impact of programmes – much funding in the sector is for new initiatives and often only focuses on funding resources. The main resource often needed for delivery is staff costs, and we want to ensure our staff are fairly compensated. Flexible funding allowed us to invest in staff and ensure we were putting enough time into improving the design and delivery of our on-going programmes, improving their impact and reach, year after year.
We encourage all potential funders, be those trusts and foundations, corporate business, or universities funding the delivery of particular services, to consider how they can best support the overall impact of their partner organisations. We recommend IVAR’s open and trusting grant making call to action as a good place to start, and suggest using the eight commitments as a framework to see how you can support your partner organisations to thrive.
Strategic and long-term funders
We would like to thank the following funders who have had a significant impact on our strategic and long-term direction as an organisation.
We want to thank the Pears Foundation, who have been working with Student Hubs for over a decade to support our commitment to student social action. Alongside funding support, the Pears Foundation’s commitment as a funding partner have also provided excellent staff training and ad-hoc office and meeting spaces for our team. Their flexibility and guidance during various challenges have helped us deliver a wide range of activities over the years.
Barclays were an early funding partner of ours who supported Student Hubs to scale up our staff team, formalise our work as a charity, and involve ourselves with Student Volunteering Week on a national scale.
The Dulverton Trust have always championed our work within communities and particularly our intergenerational programme LinkAges, and have provided funding for this work earlier in our history as an organisation.
The UPP Foundation has been a strategic partner of ours since 2017, initially following the funding of our One Community Forums, which has seen us release a joint toolkit, and input into roundtables as part of their Student Futures Commission.
Garfield Weston funded our strategic work as we were undergoing a strategy change, which was vital for us to pivot our direction as an organisation during the pandemic and consider our next steps. During this time, with their support to our national capacity, we were able to explore new ways of working with universities.
Local Hub funders
We have had many local funders throughout our years which supported our local Hubs’ activities on the ground, but we wanted to specifically thank the funders who provided significant financial support or national-scale programmes we delivered across the years.
The National Lottery funded our five year partnership with Youth Options to deliver what we called ‘Plus Provision’, extending the reach of our youth programmes in Southampton in partnership with Youth Options and funding our Branch Up activities across the years.
Sport England provided funding and enhanced the impact of our ‘Active’ programmes, which saw us reach young people in Oxford, Southampton and Bristol and engage them in physical activities, sport and mentoring support.
Children in Need and The Blagrave Trust supported our team in Southampton across three years to expand and scale our youth provision within the city.
Our university partners
Of course, none of our place-based work would have been possible without the financial support of our university partners over the years. We would particularly like to thank the University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, Kingston University, University of Southampton and University of Winchester, as well as Leeds Conservatoire, the Open University and University College Birmingham, for their partnership over the past five years.
Corporate partners
Throughout our local Hubs, we have also been privileged to work with corporate partners through our activities:
- Burges Salmon has been a long-term funder and partner of the Social Innovation Programme in Bristol with Bristol Hub, and Cognizant also worked in partnership with Bristol Hub;
- Kingston Technology worked with Kingston Hub to deliver one-off activities and sponsorship;
- Ocean Infinity and DAC Beachcroft supported our work with young people in Southampton through Southampton Hub;
- McCarthy Stone supported our work with older residents in Hampshire through LinkAges at Winchester Hub.
Thank you to all of our funding and strategic partners across our 16 year history: this blog doesn’t recognise all of the funders we have had over our organisation’s history, but we couldn’t have done this work without you, and we recognise the immense role you have played in shaping our work and activities across the years.