Update on progress against the University of Edinburgh's 2019 Pledges
/In this progress update, the University of Edinburgh describes how it has made a difference to people and communities through its 2019 Social Impact Pledge, which made commitments around homelessness, poverty, art and providing meeting spaces.
The Social Impact Pledge asks public sector organisations across Scotland to commit to increasing their social impact by making up to three simple changes to their current operations or policies.
You can read more about the Social Impact Pledge here, and see the University of Edinburgh’s 2019 pledge here.
1st commitment: The Centre for Homelessness and Inclusion Health will extend its educational outreach and partnership-working in support of effective practice
In the three years since the University made this Pledge, it has seen progress in many intended areas and also some not anticipated.
Accessible professional development for homelessness practitioners
The Centre now offers a stand-alone Homeless and Inclusion Health CPD course annually and has provided full bursaries for people working in the homelessness sector. This course is delivered online over 10 weeks and is SCQF level 11.
Using art to improve lives
From autumn 2019 until the first Covid-19 lockdown, the Centre ran an art project with people experiencing homelessness with colleagues from Edinburgh’s Streetwork and Salvation Army. The project was funded by a generous donation from the Binks Trust and enabled the project to employ a professional artist, Karen Kirkwood – a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art – to work with people experiencing homelessness using art as a therapeutic process.
Visual from ‘Living Through Covid’
Visual from ‘Living Through Covid’
Through the pandemic, the Living Through Covid research project documented howhomelessness frontline workers and homeless people experienced the first wave of the virus. Using participatory arts methods, the project explored how people in the homelessness sector, including those with lived experience of homelessness, experienced the initial phase of the Covid-19 crisis and how street-level action and understanding affected ongoing intervention and support. The project report and online exhibition were launched with Cyrenians in February 2022. The project was funded by the Lankelly Chase Foundation, which supports initiatives that are tackling hidden or neglected forms of disadvantage and harm
Practical support for people experiencing homelessness
Working with its community partners, the Centre was able to launch the Street Support app in the winter of 20/21. The app connects people experiencing homelessness with local help available, with local organisations able to register the help they can offer that is then easily findable using the app.
The pandemic was obviously not foreseen when the University made its last Pledges in 2019 but we were pleased that some of our students were able to be part of the crisis response. Medical students volunteered at Edinburgh’s GP Access Practice to deliver prescriptions and health interventions to people with experience of homelessness. Medical students who spent time in the Access Practice were also the authors of the award-winning and very popular ‘Cooking Without a Cooker’ kettle recipe book.
2nd commitment: We will launch phase 1 of the 'Understanding Place Project', a research programme aimed at tackling multiple deprivation and empowering and giving a voice to hard-to-reach and marginalised groups.
Since the summer of 2019, many of the objectives of our second commitment have been met, albeit in a different way to how was originally conceived in part due to the impact of Covid-19. However, Covid-19 has also been the source of storytelling projects that serendipitously gave voice to marginalised and place-specific groups and thus helped meet the detail of this commitment. These projects include the Living Through Covid engaged research project that also contributed to progress against our first pledge, plus two other projects: Lothian Lockdown and Heart & Home.
Lothian Lockdown: The Lothian Diary Project investigated how Covid-19 affected the lives of individual people living in Edinburgh and the Lothians. Individual members of the public kept video and audio diaries which were analysed from the perspective of public health, mental health, hardship, anxiety and stigma. Recordings were made between 1st May 2020 and 15th July 2021. Proactive outreach was done in a part of the city with higher levels of deprivation, Leith, via a recurring physical presence at Leith Walk Police Box. The project team also worked with a whole range of local charities (e.g. West Lothian Financial Inclusion Network) to reach more marginalised members of the public. The findings of this mass observation study have been presented to the Scottish Parliament, with recommendations for future public health emergencies that could mitigate the greater negative impact on marginalised groups seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Heart & Home
Heart & Home was a community outreach project led by the Edinburgh International Festival, with additional community engagement support from the University’s Community Team. It was a series of events inspired by composer Aidan O’Rourke’s experience of lockdown living on the Cowgate, and the area’s history as a centre of Irish migration: Little Ireland. Community events took place in different districts of Edinburgh and invited everyone living in those areas – both long-term residents, recently-arrived migrants and anyone in between – to share what ‘home’ meant to them. The events include music and food representative of the mix of cultures, e.g. East African food, Scottish traditional music and songs of Poland, Ukraine and Russia.* The community event in Edinburgh’s Old Town also showcased the Living Through Covid exhibition, and thus the stories from the homelessness front line. Taking place over the winter of 2021 and early 2022, the events brought together individuals after 18 months of social isolation and celebrated the potential of their past, present and future very local communities of place.
* Events took place before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
3rd commitment: We will develop and pilot a scheme to allow local community organisations to make use of the University's rooms
The pilot scheme to enable local community groups to make use of the University’s rooms was almost ready to launch when the first Covid-19 lockdown began. The initial prohibition on social contact and later the wider impact of Covid-19 on the University’s Estates colleagues and operations meant that this project was unavoidably on pause until the start of 2022. Happily, as of January 2022, it has been possible to re-start this project, and the University will welcome its first official bookings under the Community Access to Rooms pilot scheme from mid-September 2023.
For the pilot, rooms are being offered to a limited but fairly large list of local community organisations with which the University already has a positive relationship (either via its community grant scheme or another route). The rooms offered will initially be small and medium-sized meeting rooms that are available on weekday evenings during the University semester. Some scoping of community organisation needs has already been done and these will be further explored during the pilot.
