Sustaining Community-University Collaborations The Durham University Model

Durham University has initiated a community outreach and engagement program based on an evolving multifaceted model. This article analyses the components of the model and looks at how our work at Durham has become increasingly embedded in the structures and processes of the university as it has developed. The strengths and weaknesses in what has been achieved are highlighted, as is the future vision for the further development of this innovative community-university program. 
 
Keywords 
Public engagement; community partnerships; employer supported volunteering; corporate social responsibility

the highest indicators of poverty and deprivation in the country, and the VCS has untapped potential to work on dealing with these issues.It was identified as the sector with the greatest potential for further university partnerships to develop.At the same time, the university commissioned an online survey of all of its staff to gain more data around the potential for university-supported staff volunteering and other voluntary activity.An excellent response was received, with a response rate of over 10 per cent of the university's 3500 staff.It was clear from the survey that there were committed individuals in the university who engaged in volunteering and other activities which could be classed as 'engagement' largely because they thought it was a good thing to do (Robinson & Hudson 2012).However, it was also clear that a groundswell of demand existed for the university to become better and more openly engaged in such activities and to take them on board as an institutional commitment.
Around the same time, Ray Hudson was redeployed from his previous post as Director of the Wolfson Research Institute (a major health and wellbeing research base in the north-east) to become Pro Vice-Chancellor for Queen's Campus and the region.
Queen's Campus, Stockton, is a satellite campus of the university, the site of the Wolfson Research Institute and some of the strongest existing community-university collaborations, primarily through the National Health Service (NHS), the local authority and the VCS.Taking on a regional responsibility meant that the work that had been started at Queen's Campus could be extended throughout the university's hinterland and beyond.
Crucial to the development of our program was access to funding over and above the core resource the university could offer.
Fortunately, One North East, with its remit of development and regeneration, had been looking to fund projects in County Durham as a means of fulfilling its agenda.Our program could be seen as a complementary activity to those being funded by ONE in the Newcastle/Gateshead area, particularly large-scale initiatives such as Science City, within which Newcastle University is significantly embedded.County Durham is a slightly 'betwixt and between' county, lying as it does between the large conurbations of Tyneside (Newcastle/Gateshead) and Teesside, and many of the health and economic indicators that were moving in positive directions north and south of the county appeared to be stagnating or even heading negative within it.One North East was looking for new drivers to start to bring County Durham back 'on track' and the university, the third largest employer in the county after the County Council and the NHS, was seen as a key economic engine (as well as knowledge broker) to achieve this.Therefore, funding from ONE, for the first year of our work, and set about authorising our staff volunteering scheme through the University Executive Committee (UEC).Taking our cue from previous examples of 'good practice' in this field (Bussell & Forbes 2008), we proposed (and it was accepted) that staff should be able to take up to five days per year as time off from their normal work, without losing pay, to engage in approved activities that would be of mutual benefit to the community and the university.Staff were able to propose their own volunteering work, or choose from a range of alternatives posted on the Phoenix website.Any charitable cause was acceptable, although animal welfare groups and political and exclusionary religious organisations were not, as these were seen as sources of potential controversy.
We also spent a lot of time developing the Phoenix Challenge work, under the aegis of a Community Partners scheme, which was intended to formalise partnerships with known and new community groups and organisations operating in the region.The idea with this scheme was to bring together in a more coherent fashion the various 'offers' the university was tendering to particular organisations.Our publicity leaflet indicated how we were able to give partners access not only to our staff volunteering scheme but also to information professionals, student societies, training and development opportunities, student placements, research and the 'knowledge economy', and facilities and events that they might find useful.We soon had over 100 such groups registered.Our long-term goal was to provide a 'one-stop shop' to make it easier for community groups and organisations to access the university and for members of the university to access the community.We secured an email address (community.engagement@durham.ac.uk) as a first measure in enabling this to happen.
As well as Phoenix, the university was also in partnership with Newcastle University and the Centre for Life on another public engagement project, BeaconNE, through which £1. -Empowerment.The most effective way to tackle disadvantage is to empower people to help themselves, through providing the support and resources which enable them to do so.Such bottom-up 'action research' allows solutions to be customised to local conditions and needs as perceived by local communities.
-Partnership.Community support can be best provided via networks of trusted and independent partners, some regional and some extra-regional, working with local people and communities.Putting the two funding streams together meant that we were able to use the strengths of each in sometimes synergistic ways.Phoenix ran workshops bringing together university academics and community representatives to discuss potential collaboration and common ground.These links could then be capitalised upon by BeaconNE.We remained open to the possible lines of development that our community partners raised in either forum.For example, one issue that arose at an early stage in a BeaconNE-hosted meeting was that of library access and provision.
Community groups expressed a desire for easier access to the university in order to find out what information was available based on previous research in the community or on a particular topic.Through discussions with the university library staff, led by Phoenix, we were able to set up a 'hotline' that community partners could use to seek this information.Similarly, some organisations brought up issues to do with procurement and how to do better at obtaining university contracts.While there are EU and national regulations that have to be upheld, the Procurement Office is very favourably disposed to awarding contracts to local suppliers, but realised that the 'Meet the Buyer' events might be too intimidating for representatives from social enterprises to attend.
After some discussion, arrangements were made for bespoke training events for community partners wanting to find out how to succeed in tendering for contracts.Rather than foreclosing possibilities at the start by too rigid a focus on pre-designated aims and outcomes, we were thus able to develop a model that was organic in its potential for growth and development.
A second characteristic of the Durham Model is its multifaceted nature.We had prioritised staff volunteering and community and voluntary sector partnerships as the main planks of our initial work, but it became evident that there were possibilities beyond these discrete areas that needed to be developed.Sometimes this was through thinking creatively about how to deal with needs that could not be catered for through one medium.For example, many community groups and organisations expressed a desire for assistance with Information Technology problems.Initially we targeted the IT service in the university for staff volunteer help, but it was apparent that there was never going to be IT-skilled staff volunteers available to cope with the demand.Nor did we feel it was fair to 'pigeon-hole' someone with a particular skill as the volunteering scheme was designed to enable people to undertake something totally different from their normal line of work if they wished.Hence, we established a dialogue with staff in the Computer Sciences and Engineering Department, who saw possibilities for second-year students to undertake placement work in small groups with our community partners as part of a professionalism strand.This was taken up with alacrity and in the first year students worked with nine organisations in this way.Similar initiatives were set up with MBA students at the Business School, and students taking the MSc in Marketing.The development of links with the Third Sector for undergraduate and postgraduate programs builds on previous work with students in other disciplines such as Medicine (Russell 2011) and has been of significant benefit to the program as a whole.We have been clear about not trying to create new programs, at least at first, but to offer real-life alternatives for courses which usually only offer theoretical projects.What we have developed is a model which delivers tangible benefits for all involved: the students get to work on real challenges and interact with groups and areas which they would not normally have been able to do.Project management, interpersonal and logistical skills are all developed through this model.In the case of the computer science students, the community organisations were all able to secure a professional service for which they would have previously had to pay (at an estimated value of about £1400 per organisation).Finally, the department was able to offer a more challenging and diverse set of student projects.
A third characteristic of the model is its focus on the whole university, not just academics.Our initial survey revealed many staff in administrative and ancillary roles working or having links with groups and organisations outside the university.They have been some of the most enthusiastic champions of the staff volunteering scheme.
Another characteristic that everyone would subscribe to is the responsiveness of what we do, both to the needs of the communities we work with and to the opportunities that arise both within and outside a large university like Durham.For example, discussions with the university's staff development and training units (in response to requests from community partner organisations for bespoke training in certain areas such as leadership) revealed some appropriate courses taking place regularly with spare capacity that could be made available, free of charge, to outside organisations.This has become a regular subject of our email correspondence with community partners; we can usually inform people about a week beforehand if there are going to be places available in a particular course.Another example is when we were approached by the County Council's Youth Offending Service (YOS) looking for staff volunteers able to work on its review panels and in other capacities.While we did not feel there was much likelihood of strong uptake from staff for such an endeavour, we were able to put the YOS in contact with the Law Department's pro bono service which is intended to give students practical (and useful) experience in legal settings.The first meeting between the YOS volunteer coordinator and the service yielded 12 students willing and able to take up the challenge of working with young people who had brushed with the law.
The final characteristic we would identify as having been crucial to our development is our focus on becoming sustainable once the funding streams from which we have benefited so greatly during their existence come to an end.The economic downturn, fiscal debt crisis and change in political leadership in the UK between 2007 and 2010 have made such a characteristic crucial.
One North East, for example, is due to disappear as our regional development agency in March 2012, the victim of a government that is seeking to make radical infrastructural cuts and feels that regional thinking must give way to localism or nationalism in terms of agenda-setting.

ENSURING SUSTAINABILITY
The first pillar of sustainability that is a crucial element in institutional terms is embedding what we do within strategy documents.Durham University's 2010-2020 strategy has been produced during the lifetime of the Phoenix and BeaconNE projects, and has community outreach and engagement embedded at several points.For example, Durham aspires to be a 'socially responsible institution, working with partners to enhance economic and social development internationally, nationally and locally'.A strong steer towards greater corporate social responsibility is indicated in its research goal to deliver 'research in every discipline that addresses questions and issues with the potential to make significant impact on knowledge, people, the economy, or to enhance or change society for the better'.The retitling of Ray Hudson's Pro Vice-Chancellor role to that of 'Partnerships and Engagement' could be seen as a signal, symbolic of the changes that were taking place in terms of institutional commitment.
In setting out to fulfil these strategic aspirations at the practical level, we have moved away from 'buying out' staff from other duties to ensuring some permanent members of staff are fully deployed on community outreach and engagement activities, sometimes supported by contract staff.The final round of money from One North East was not used to further fund bought-out staff, but to buy in services from a community supplier based outside the university (Sharon Gollan Associates) with the aim of training up full-time members of staff to undertake the further development of the staff volunteering scheme both within and outside the university.Other money from One North East was used to provide seedcorn funding for groups and organisations that we had identified in Phase I as being worthy of support for the mutual benefit of themselves and the university.
In order to ensure this embedding took place in a strong institutional context, the work of Team Durham (which had been tangentially part of Phoenix through the moniker 'Phoenix Sport') was enlarged and diversified under its Director, Peter Warburton, to encompass many other aspects of university life, under the umbrella title 'Experience Durham'.This brings together Sport, Music, Arts and Outreach activities across the university under the banner of extracurricular experience for students and staff.
At one level this could be seen as reversing the outward engagement focus which has been the core of the Phoenix program to date.However, with the current fiscal austerity and the need and desire to ensure our activities become embedded within core university provision, it was perhaps inevitable that some retrenchment would take place.Phoenix is now refocusing its activities to deliver in two key areas.There are now about 230 staff volunteers, part of an achievable target of 10 per cent of staff registered as volunteers this academic year.As the program has become increasingly sophisticated, different profiles of volunteer can now be identified: -existing volunteers who use Phoenix to make their volunteering more flexible -new volunteers seeking placement -team challenge events -there are now two of these every month -advocates -special projects, for example the Queen's Campus Adult Work Experience Programme which involves community members seeking work experience working alongside mentors within the university administration.Thus, while the structures and mechanisms may have changed, they have enabled a certain degree of confidence that what we do will sustain itself.However, we are mindful that in consolidating activities in this way, certain areas that were able to be incorporated in our organic and responsive model are left out of the frame.This is where what we see as the second key means of developing sustainability comes into the picture, namely establishing advocates throughout the university who can maintain an 'ear to the ground'.These are people to whom core community outreach and engagement staff may turn when a request from outside is made which seems appropriately referred to a particular department or support unit.They can also recruit members of staff to engage in community outreach and engagement activities of all types.The advocates are particularly crucial to embedding our community outreach and engagement work, as people who can not only generate and disseminate volunteering opportunities, but can potentially broker research relationships and perpetuate a wider social responsibility agenda.
We now have over 60 named advocates in nearly every academic or support department/unit within the university.
We are still far from achieving a 'one-stop shop' where voluntary and community sector organisations seeking to work with the university in whatever capacity can come and be referred to one or more of a range of university facilities, resources or personnel.However, in terms of embedding the research themes and approaches of BeaconNE, there is more to report.Sarah

LESSONS LEARNED
Not all of the initiatives that have taken place have been successful, and some, such as the community-based, 'one-stop shop' concept outlined in the original Phoenix bid, have yet to be realised.This is only to be expected in schemes based on ambitious long-term visions (five years in the original Phoenix scoping study, a period which, at time of writing, we are only halfway through).
We have not been able to respond to every request made by community partners, at least not initially.For example, several community partner organisations made the point that they needed work experience opportunities for some of their clients or community members.However, the university also has a duty to provide its own students with such opportunities if and when they are available, and the scope for involving more people from outside is somewhat limited.That said, in the third year one of our Queen's Campus champions, who was also the main office manager, set up a mentoring scheme bringing people from outside the university seeking work experience together with staff working in her office in order for them to develop new skills and experience workplace culture.This has become a pilot scheme that we hope to champion and use as a model for other departments within the university.
In terms of work at the student level, while our student placement work has gone very well, other initiatives we have attempted involving students have yet to bear fruit.Perhaps this is because they have responded to needs within the university (such as the development of the student employability agenda) rather than needs identified by partner organisations outside, but our efforts to set up employment experience initiatives for students in areas such as local government and health have not yet worked.
Rather like student interns, the former of these initiatives was for students to become attached to a council member, perhaps at cabinet level, to find out about their work and offer assistance where possible (for example, in researching particular areas).
One of our most obvious and active links, with Stockton Borough Council, was deemed unsuitable because of impending local elections, and the Association of North East Councils expressed concern about being seen to be partisan in 'doing business' with Durham University rather than all five universities in the NE region.Similarly, a plan to provide each of the 10 Regional Advisory Groups that were providing support for the regional health strategy, 'Better Health, Fairer Health', with student 'lay' members fell on stony ground (even though we could have initiated this through collaboration with the student employment service leads in the five universities across the region).We have not ventured into the area of student volunteering per se, recognising that student volunteering is already very broadly covered through the student-run Student Community Action, the DUCK (Durham University Charities Commission) and work going on in colleges (Gregory 2010).
From the list of original Phoenix strands, it will be apparent that Phoenix Places is the one about which we have least to say at the moment.This is because this particular initiative was predicated on robust delivery mechanisms such as the staff volunteering and community partners schemes for its success.
We have identified those communities with which the university has strong links already and envisage building on these in the future.Just as Queen's Campus, Stockton, has become a satellite of the main university campus, we could envisage the same thing happening, on a much smaller scale, with bases in other non-university locations.The Academies scheme, the plan to inject private finance into schools to raise standards and increase autonomy, was something that the university was committed to at two sites in County Durham and which might have become bases for further work of this nature.However, at the time of writing, the new government has put further development of the Academies on hold and we wait to see whether the university's initiative in this area will be realised.
Another change which has taken place during the lifetime of the projects which has not been overly helpful is the shift away from thinking regionally.This has happened both within the university and within the body politic at national level.Our Vice-Chancellor has indicated that he sees Durham University as a 'world class' university and expects its horizons to be international rather than regional ones.The focus of our community outreach and engagement work to date has inevitably been regional, in part simply because our funding derived in part from a regional development agency but also because we felt keenly the moral obligation for the university to honour its civic responsibilities within the region of which it is a part.However, we certainly recognise that community engagement can take place at any level, and are actively developing initiatives with people in countries as diverse as France, Zambia, Sri Lanka and Uruguay.This reflects our

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
As well as our aspirations for a one-stop shop and to develop our international links, we are keen to establish a community engagement federation with the other four campus-based universities in our region.Durham, of course, already has Newcastle University as a partner through BeaconNE, but there are a number of other successful partnership models involving all five universities that we can follow, such as the Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Health Care Professionals (CETL4HealthNE), the NE Teaching Public Health Network (soon to be renamed Public Health Futures, by government decree), and particularly the Sports Universities NE model which was championed by Peter Warburton and his counterpart directors of sport at the other universities in the north-east.We recognise the need for this in practical terms as well as strategically and ideologically.Some public sector organisations, such as the Probation Service, are prohibited from entering into servicelevel agreements with individual higher education institutions because of the risk of favouritism and exclusion.However, they can engage with pan-regional bodies such as Sports Universities North East.We would like to see what has happened for sport in this regard extended to community outreach and engagement in general, and are already making links with our counterparts in other universities.We have also used internet technologies to streamline our staff volunteering scheme, but there is a lot more we can do in this regard to make registration, matching and delivery of volunteering and other opportunities easier, and to make it easier for outside organisations to find out more about what the university has to offer.
Finally, however, we hope to do more to change how the university is perceived by the people and communities beyond its boundaries.While we feel we have done a lot to change perceptions already, there is a lot more we can do.In this we can draw strength from the links we have been able to make with parallel developments in other parts of the country and the world (for example, Brighton University - Hart & Wolff 2006;Hart, Madison & Wolff 2007).At our Community-University Collaborations conference held in Durham in September 2010, the first national and internationally focused conference we have held since we started, one delegate brought up the issue of access.Members of some deprived communities in the Durham area felt that the university was not just a few miles away but on another planet.Yet it was their taxes that funded its establishment and perpetuation.
The current strapline used by our media and communications department in its work with the press and other local media is 'So Much More'.We hope in the future that this might change to something along the lines of 'Durham: It's Your University'.
from the initial scoping study through two different funding tranches to 2011, underpinned the development of our project.The proposed project, Phoenix, had four parts: -Phoenix Volunteers -developing the opportunities for staff volunteering work in the region -Phoenix Challenge -working on joint development and research projects with key organisations and groups, many of them in the voluntary and community sector -Phoenix Places -establishing community engagement opportunities within specific areas in County Durham and the Tees Valley -Phoenix Sport -building on the work of Durham's sport-in-thecommunity program.We were thus fortunate in securing the first tranche of funding from ONE, which would underpin our work until October 2009, on the basis of which we were able to engage two community engagement consultants and 'buy out' the time of other university staff to work on program development.Phoenix Volunteers was perhaps the most radical part of the bid, since the university had no track record whatsoever of officially sanctioned staff volunteering outside its portals.We set ourselves a target of 175 (approximately 5 per cent of the total university workforce) 2 million had been secured over a five-year period.Funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Wales (HEFCE) as one of six 'Beacons for Public Engagement' around the country, the aims of BeaconNE were somewhat different to those of Phoenix, focusing primarily on academic staff, the development of collaborative and sometimes power-reversing research initiatives with 'experts through experience' beyond the university, and on culture change within it.The structure of BeaconNE was quite complex, and also changed during the lifetime of the project as staff changed.Durham had an academic engagement lead (Andrew Russell) working with three academic theme leaders, one for each of the following key areas: social justice and social exclusion; health, wellbeing and the life course; and energy and the environment.BeaconNE was charged with organising a Fellowship scheme and a small grants scheme to help university staff initiate and run public engagement activities.It also worked in close collaboration with the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement which was responsible for monitoring the work of the individual Beacons and advocating public engagement on the national stage.DEVELOPING THE DURHAM MODEL The original articulation of Phoenix in delivering the initial components of the Durham Model was to bring the outreach programs and research expertise of Durham University to bear on a collaborative and community-based program for the regeneration of County Durham.The program would provide innovative and evidence-based approaches which could be rolled out to communities across the north-east, the UK and beyond.The program aspired to combine new approaches to community regeneration with research to monitor outcomes aimed at developing a more general model with national impact.The university would take a lead role in a creative partnership to help local people tackle problems as they saw them.Four principles underlay the proposed community initiative: empowerment, partnership, education, and leadership.These were elaborated on as follows: Multiple partners can best identify and define problems through their different approaches to communication with communities, and bring different views on how similar problems have been successfully tackled in other communities and lessons to be learned.-Education.No community can regenerate without education and the raising of aspirations, which must begin early in the lives of children.Universities, leaders in education for centuries, are currently focused on 18-21 year olds.Widening of their role to a cradle-to-grave approach has endless possibilities for community development and regeneration.-Leadership.Durham University is one of the leading research-led universities in the UK and a node in global networks, attracting international thinkers and innovative ideas to the region.Staff in the university would work collaboratively with local people, communities and partners in an innovative and exciting new approach to community regeneration and renewal.A key component of this plan would involve the establishment of university 'one-stop shops' in selected local communities, through which local people could find out about the resources available through the university and could communicate the sorts of help and support that they needed.
Banks (School of Applied Social Sciences), the theme leader for Social Justice and Social Exclusion, teamed up with Rachel Pain (Geography) to establish a Centre for Social Justice and Community Action (CSJCA) as a means of embedding the work of that theme in a more sustainable university structure.The theme leader for Energy and the Environment, Tom Henfrey, used the development of a new Durham Energy Institute as the place in which to nest a Low Carbon Communities program, involving outreach and engagement activities with Transitions Durham, Climate Change Durham and the UK Permaculture Association.The CSJCA is a research centre made up of academic researchers and community partners which aims to promote and develop research, teaching, public/community engagement and staff development (both within and outside the university) around the broad theme of social justice.Its specific focus is on participatory action research (for example, Greenwood & Levin 2001; IIED 2008; Kindon, Pain & Kesby 2007).It has been offering short training courses that are made available to university staff, students and community groups, research projects organised in partnership with community organisations, seminars and conferences, and university-based teaching modules and programs on community development.The CSJCA has been particularly active in establishing long-term relationships with particular groups and organisations with which it has shared values and goals.One of these is Thrive, a Church Action on Poverty-funded project based in Thornaby, Teesside.Thrive's focus is on enabling people in deprived settings to deal with debt and livelihood issues and to organise themselves for community activism.The relationship began when Greg Brown, the Director, invited Sarah Banks and Andrew Russell to meet him.From this initial meeting, a small grant from the Wolfson Research Institute enabled a consultant to work with the organisation for a few days over the course of a year, co-designing the research framework for a sustainable livelihoods project.Then the organisation took on some undergraduate medical students in the community placement scheme to work alongside residents as volunteer mentors on the sustainable livelihoods work.Following some mentoring training provided by the organisation and ongoing support while they went about their work, the students conducted one-to-one mentoring support for residents in their own homes.Thrive supplied practical support as well, in terms of mobile phone cards and a taxi account.The students were, in the Director's words, 'very good and proactive'.Following on from these inputs, the need was identified for an action research worker (Andrea Armstrong) to work part time with Thrive over a six-month period from September 2009 to March 2010.Andrea provided research support on the sustainable livelihoods project, funded by a BeaconNE small grant.Her work involved helping Thrive wrap up some previous projects, setting up research monitoring systems (spreadsheets, word folders, wall charts, etc.), anonymising data sets, assessing and reviewing interview transcripts, as well as one-to-one mentor support with residents.Sarah Banks and Andrew Russell then secured a parttime interdisciplinary practitioner research studentship through the university for a PhD researcher to commence working with Thrive.Thus a multifaceted and strong relationship has been established which promises to continue well into the future.
continuing focus on responsiveness to change within the university as well as beyond.The BeaconNE and Phoenix projects have coexisted in similar timeframes and political/social environments -their aims often misunderstood and substituted for each other's in people's minds.One characterisation is that Phoenix is about service and service learning, and BeaconNE is about culture change and the development of a partnership or co-productive research model.Yet culture change can also be seen to have occurred through Phoenix, as evidenced through senior management buy in and in the attitudes of communities and staff who see what they are involved in as valuable, important and a 'good' thing to do.BeaconNE has also involved service elements, such that Newcastle University BeaconNE staff are now in discussion with Phoenix staff at Durham concerning the possible development of a staff volunteering scheme in our BeaconNE partner university!The coexistence of the two projects has led to confusion in terms of public (and staff) perceptions, yet their potential to integrate and encapsulate common themes and practices remains -but has still to be fully exploited.