As part of our work to inform emerging government strategies around place and levelling up, we are aiming to get a richer picture of how universities fund civic activities, as well as help to identify barriers and blind spots in the system.
In our December roundtable we heard about various institutions’ approach to funding civic activities and discussed the overall funding landscape. We drew on this discussion to inform a second roundtable which we ran earlier this month, involving funders from UKRI and the UK HE Funding Councils. We used this as an opportunity to brief them about the work of the Civic Network, and also to trigger discussion of how funding for university civic engagement might evolve in future, to maximise the contribution of the sector to our locations across the UK.
To focus this discussion, we prepared a briefing paper which provided a very useful platform for discussion, and we will be holding a number of follow up conversations with funders over the next few months to build on this.