I became a professional community builder, initially, by accident. I was at Goldsmiths’ Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (MCCS), working as Assistant Department Business Manager (Communications and Publicity). When I got the job, it was a new post and unlike my job title, my job description was very short, but the intention was that I would focus on external comms, publicity, and supporting recruitment, with internal comms being secondary.
Enter MCCS’ governance system. They have a system of rotating leadership, with two Heads of Department (HoD), each one serving for 3-4 years before being replaced by another senior academic and rewarded with a year-long sabbatical. I liked this system because it meant that I got to know several of the senior academics really well, and it was always interesting to see what each HoD would focus on during their tenure, and how it would shape my work. They always had different priorities, whether actively chosen or forced upon them by circumstances.
Community building became part of my job when one HoD chose, as a priority, developing a sense of community in the department, and I was asked to support this.
Beginning where we were
At first I started to work with what we had, and what I was already good at – getting students to come to the extra/co-curricular events organised by staff. For a while, all that happened is that I got even better at getting students to come to these events. I did some research. I surveyed students about their communications preferences. They said they wanted to hear about events from teaching staff and Instagram, so I thought about how to make it easier for staff to tell students about these events during teaching and tried a couple of things that worked really well. I started an Instagram account and grew it one follower at a time by searching the Goldsmiths location tag for posts that mentioned studying one of the programmes we taught. I used Eventbrite for department event registrations so that students would get calendar items and email reminders. I persuaded the careers team to give me access to their system so I could track sign-ups and target promotions for the most relevant events.
But although it was fantastic to have more students attending the events we already put on, it wasn’t creating a community. Some colleagues thought that this would be resolved if there was a media society at the Students’ Union. The problem was that the students we spoke to with the capacity and interest to start a society (our student reps) were already on the committees for several, and didn’t have the time to do more. Twice over my four and a half years in that job, a group of students enthusiastically agreed that there should be a media society, and it never got off the ground.
The Students’ Union also tried several different initiatives. There was an attempt to create a supported ‘community’ for each department, with student community leaders who would organise events, but it ended up being the SU who did all the organisation for the one event they put on.
First steps
In the end, after having done my best to support other people’s ideas, only to see them come to nothing, and with Covid-19 chucking all the usual stuff out of the window, I decided it was time I took matters into my own hands.
There is nothing I love more, professionally, than launching myself at a really difficult and complex problem, and I took to this one with my usual zeal.
I agreed with colleagues that the solution was student-led activity. It was the only practical course of action. Academics and other teaching staff just had too much to do already. Their workloads were off the chart, especially with all the adjustments to be made for teaching online, and the Students Union staff were similarly overworked – or furloughed.
Yet students were clearly not going to do it without support. We needed to create opportunities for them to bond with each other and feel motivated to run collaborative activities.
It was clear to me that this was what was missing. At staff-led events, there was little to no attempt to facilitate conversation amongst students. We weren’t putting them into situations designed to provoke discussion or to let them share their own ideas. Even pre-Covid, we were always doing talk, Q&A, drinks, or worse, just talk and Q&A. The events also tended to have an academic focus – the talk usually related to careers or was delivered by a guest speaker. The students just weren’t on an equal footing. A community requires, if not absolute equality, then for your community members to know that they have a valued voice and the ability to organise things too.
It’s funny looking back on this now, because after a year at UAL, my ideas on community facilitation have matured massively and I would have done things totally differently at Goldsmiths. At that point, I hadn’t read a single book on community development. I hadn’t turned my critical eye on my own experience as a member of various communities. And crucially, I was still labouring under the belief that I was new to community facilitation and that it wasn’t something I’d been working on my whole life!
But there I was, staring down the problem, with an inkling of the solution. Next I needed to get some students involved, and for that I needed funding.
Goldsmiths’ Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre (TaLIC) offered grants every year for staff to do action research projects to improve the student experience, and they were open to professional services staff as well as academics.
As it was 2020 and most people were a bit distracted, I figured I wouldn’t have that much competition from academics, so I rocked up to one of the Teams meetings about the grants with a couple of ideas. The TaLIC facilitator liked my most community-focused one and helped me write the proposal. My manager and the HoDs let me do whatever I thought was a good idea so they signed off on it happily.
I got the grant, and my fate was sealed. I’ll write more about the project itself in future posts, but suffice it to say that although I did support some great student ideas, make some progress in my thinking, and win a Student-Led Teaching Award, I did not solve the problems of community building in HE within one year and a budget of £1,500. As time went on I became even more interested in it, so much so that I decided my time as a communications specialist had ended and student engagement was the way forward.
But let’s rewind slightly, back to the start of my project at Goldsmiths. In the early stages, when researching other institutions’ student community-building projects, I came across UAL’s Post-Grad Community. It was totally unique. No other student engagement project that I’d learned about in the process of my research came anywhere close to offering what PGC does. I remember looking at the website and watching some of the YouTube videos and thinking, ‘I’d love to be part of something like this.’
And then one day, I saw the job ad for the manager maternity cover post. My heart raced as I clicked through. I got the job, and it was a whirlwind of a year.
And here we are. But why do I love this work so much? That’ll be the subject of the next post.