{"id":40,"date":"2020-11-05T11:14:41","date_gmt":"2020-11-05T11:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/?p=40"},"modified":"2020-11-05T11:16:44","modified_gmt":"2020-11-05T11:16:44","slug":"advisory-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/2020\/11\/05\/advisory-group\/","title":{"rendered":"First CUA Advisory Group sets pace for civic work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Last week we brought together the Advisory Group for our Civic University Agreement for the first time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Advising and guiding<\/span><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Advisory Group is made up of expertise drawn from across the University. As part of our project, we wanted to draw on the experience of colleagues from across the University. The Advisory Group exists to support the development of our Civic University Agreement, providing high-level operational insight to inform the work of us as the project team, and acting as critical friends, helping to test emerging ideas.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The session was chaired by Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost Professor Bernie Morley, who opened by outlining the way in which our civic work will contribute to the emerging University strategy. He highlighted the commitment the University is making to the local region, and how the Civic University Agreement, along with the University\u2019s local engagement strategy, is key to delivering on this.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Understanding our current civic engagement experiences<\/span><\/span><b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although this event took place in the digital space as required by Covid guidelines, we still wanted to make it as engaging as possible and therefore explored the use of new techniques to get input from attendees.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first of these was to create a digital post-it note board, on which two prompts were posted - \u2018My wish is that we do...\u2019 and \u2018We make a difference by...\u2019. Each participant was asked to add their own thoughts on these prompts using digital post-it notes, which resulted in us identifying some common themes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Themes captured included:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We need to join up existing work and thinking with a coherent strategy for civic engagement\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sustainability and climate change are important issues locally and for staff\/students\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Equality, diversity and inclusion must be core to our approach, empowering our staff and students to help support and create an inclusive society\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We need to improve our communications both internally and externally about our local and civic activities.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Where we should focus our efforts?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As part of its report Truly Civic, the UPP Foundation outlined how the civic engagement work of a university can speak to a number of national policy areas that universities are required to meet. These include polices that relate to access and participation, teaching and learning, research and innovation, health and wellbeing, culture, local economic development, and local government &amp; leadership of place.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We wanted to understand what our Advisory Group thought should be a priority for the CUA project. We moved into breakout rooms to allow smaller numbers of people to discuss these areas, asking them which they felt were most and least relevant, and whether any areas were missing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A discussion ensued regarding the relevance of each area, with more agreement on those that should be prioritised than those that might be less important. The local government and leadership of place theme was given high priority, due to the situation we find ourselves in as a result of the Covid pandemic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was also highlighted that while we need to play to our strengths as a University, we also need to consider the strengths of our partners and what they\u2019re able to bring to the table. A discussion regarding the suggested partners for the Civic University Agreement resulted in a request for the project team to develop criteria for selecting partners and a way to establish which should be primary partners, and which should be stakeholders.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Evaluating our civic engagement work<\/span><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, we threw our last digital activity at the group - a self-assessment of our current situation using the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicengagement.ac.uk\/support-engagement\/strategy-and-planning\/edge-tool\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">NCCPE EDGE tool<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. This allowed us to ask each member of the Advisory Group to map their thoughts on where we stand in terms of our civic engagement right now and will give us a benchmark to assess our progress against in the future.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">We will be providing regular updates about the progress of our Civic University Agreement here on our blog over the coming months. To be kept in the loop, please do subscribe, or sign up to our <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bath.ac.uk\/services\/sign-up-to-our-community-enewsletter\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">community enewsletter<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b><i>Katrina Kelly is Head of Community Engagement at the University of Bath\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week we brought together the Advisory Group for our Civic University Agreement for the first time.\u00a0\u00a0 Advising and guiding\u00a0 The Advisory Group is made up of expertise drawn from across the University. As part of our project, we wanted...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":42,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civic-university-agreement"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/176\/2020\/11\/advisory-group.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4PCw-E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/291"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/civic-engagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}