policy & reform
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black, residents with its property expansion. However, faced with
a growing crime problem in the ’80s and ’90s, Penn decided
to invest massively in its local community. Penn invested in
affordable housing, built a public school, rebuilt the local retail
strip and implemented economic inclusion strategies for local and
minority-owned businesses.
This model, and versions of it, are playing out on other campuses
across the US and Canada.
Globally, universities are increasingly recognising their role as
convenors and contributors to the ‘building of social infrastructure’
beyond their local communities. Nineteen Canadian universities
recently held a roundtable event to collectively focus on the
question of how universities can better work together to build
social infrastructure and unlock and maximise capacity both inside
and outside their institutions.
What’s happening in Australia? I am pleased to report that the
answer is positive. Universities increasingly understand that to
stay relevant they need to have relevance. Peak bodies such as
Engagement Australia exist to promote university-community
engagement and practice, and many universities are hosting
events such as the University of Melbourne’s Global University
Engagement Summit last year, which brought together all of the
G8 universities to consider engagement strategies.
Universities are increasingly recognising that there is a need to
make some deliberate strategic decisions regarding how they best
maximise their public benefit. A public benefit and social impact
focus needs to be intentionally and systemically supported across
the university. There needs to be a shared vision among staff,
both professional and academic, and among faculty and senior
executive leadership.
At UTS, we’ve just completed what we believe to be the first
project by a university to benchmark and demonstrate its ‘social
impact’ as an institution. The Social Impact Framework arose out
of a desire to develop a holistic roadmap for our institution to
enhance our social impact and to reward and incentivise social
impact activity across the university.
Starting more than a year ago and employing ‘appreciative
inquiry’ techniques (Whitney et al, 2018) and ‘theory of change’
methodologies (Funnell and Rogers, 2011), over 130 UTS staff
and students began work on the university-wide framework.
This framework encapsulates the university’s entire current social
justice profile and effort, from the backgrounds of students and
how they succeed at university, through to recruitment diversity,
investments, procurement processes, the choice of research
and its social impact, and the contribution UTS makes locally
and globally.
The framework allows the university to map a trajectory towards
greater social impact and contribution to its communities. It
also allows the university to internally incentivise and reward
social impact activity, to enhance existing efforts and identity
opportunities for innovation and fresh contributions.
UTS is by no means alone in thinking about how it maximises
its public benefit. Griffith University has been intimately involved
with the Logan Together collective impact project since
its inception, with the ‘backbone’ team hosted at Griffith’s
Logan campus. Charles Sturt University has a widely revered
Indigenous engagement program; the University of Melbourne’s
engagement strategy is “united by a shared purpose of creating
public value”; and the University of Sydney has recently
established a Policy Lab to bring people together to “spark
new ideas, reframe issues and transform the policy options on
the table”.
However, rather than each university orchestrating individual
projects, we should be building a public-purpose vision for
the Australian higher education sector, seeking to share and
benchmark best practice, drive greater engagement and
demonstrate our impact as a collective whole.
There are examples of this collective approach internationally.
The Carnegie Community Engagement Classification is a
US‑based elective classification that involves data collection and
documentation of important aspects of institutional mission,
identity and commitments. It is recognised as the US gold standard
for higher education community engagement and is widely
understood internationally as a leading evaluation framework.
A small number of Australian universities are joining a pilot
project to participate in a national learning community around
best practices in university-community engagement, and to use
the learnings from this process to collectively forge an Australian
community engagement classification. The aim is to be able
to launch an Australian framework by July 2020, based on the
findings of the pilot.
The rollout of this classification will be a game changer for
Australian higher education. Adoption of the classification will
enable Australian universities to benchmark, reward, incentivise and
achieve scaled impact across the sector.
Professor Sharon Bell from Western Sydney University recently
wrote that the challenge for higher education leaders is to
rebuild relationships of trust both within the university and in our
communities in order to reflect “authenticity and responsibility and
the public good”.
To quote Bell: “[This] will only be achieved if we promote equality
as a core responsibility; involve colleagues in institutional and
policy decision-making; liberate the talents and uplift the horizons
of those who currently constitute our marginalised and contingent
workforces; and in so doing redefine our relationship with those
whom we currently interact as clients and customers. We need
to become genuine participants in complex institutions that
collectively seek to understand and change our ‘ways of being’.”
With the 21st century upon us, it is up to individuals and
institutions to lead processes that encourage the building of shared
agendas for change. Social challenges are increasingly porous
– seeping across different domains and impacting communities
in interrelated ways. Addressing complex problems requires the
connecting of people across sectors and disciplines, so a range
of experiences and expertise are harnessed towards collective
problem solving and improved practice. It requires university
community engagement and sector-wide commitment. Most
of all, universities need to throw off the shackles of competitive
behaviour and boldly unite for greater social impact. ■
Verity Firth is executive director (social justice) at the
Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion, at the University
of Technology Sydney.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in
Issue 3 of Transform: the Journal of Engaged Scholarship and
is reproduced with permission.
References at campusreview.com.au
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