The South East Coastal Communities Programme (SECC): Improving health and wellbeing through partnership working between universities and communities
Angie Hart (University of Brighton), Elizabeth Hoult (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Abstract
The South East Coastal Communities Programme (SECC) is an innovative attempt to develop community-based knowledge exchange in the UK. Funded by the Higher Education Funding Council, it brings together nine institutions across South East England. SECC works across an area whose coastal resorts and ports are characterised by economic decline and social disadvantage. The programme develops strategic partnerships between universities and their local communities. The programme is intended to be a demonstrator model of university-community partnership building in the UK. It represents an attempt to develop a radical approach to knowledge exchange in which the focus on social justice is the main priority. The necessary intense collaboration between university partners (which might otherwise be regarded as competitors) also represents a departure from the market-driven approach to higher education that tends to dominate the current discourse about institutional relationships. New, creative partnerships between academic and community groups across the region are also rupturing the ‘natural’ hierarchies between traditional and new universities.
The speakers will consider the transformational potential of the programme in the light of these observed effects. This paper will outline the Communities of Practice approach to improving health and well-being adopted by the Universities of Brighton, Sussex and Canterbury Christ Church University, including an evaluation model which captures outcomes for both university and community partners. The paper will pose a number of key challenges: How do we develop and maintain unity in different universities and community contexts across a regional programme while also being sensitive to the contextual specificity of the sub-regions involved; how do we create a viable and sustainable joint funding model that maintains the core ambitions of the original programme; and how do we provide evidence for added value to the university and the value added to the communities involved in the partnership? Participants will be invited to share their experiences of tackling these challenges and to contribute to our thoughts on developing innovative strategies to address them.
The goals of this session are to:
Goal 1:
To explore ways in which community university partnerships can be sustained within the wider context of higher education, including university consortia working together to address common interests
Goal 2:
To better understand the essential inputs, outputs and outcomes for both University and Community partners and ways of measuring these
Goal 3:
To enable participants to begin to develop new strategies to apply within their own institutions
After attending this session, participants will be able to:
Learning Objective 1:
Apply their knowledge of a UK example of collaborative university-community partnership working to their own practice
Learning Objective 2:
Develop links with members of the UK team and deepen their understanding of university-community work in an international context through discussion with them
Learning Objective 3:
Reflect on the complexities involved in collaboration between universities and communities and between university partners, including specific policy contexts and geographical/historical dimensions
