As a university, we recognise that we don’t exist in isolation. Every university has a place where it is rooted, and there are communities who live and work around that university. Those communities are impacted by their university neighbours economically, socially, culturally and environmentally.
Increasingly, universities are being called upon to recognise their place and role within the local society in which they reside. Queen Mary has always been proud to be part of east London, committed to being a good neighbour and playing an active role in society. To reaffirm this commitment, we developed our Civic University Agreement and we are a founding member of the Civic University Network – bringing universities across the UK together to share best practice
Our Civic University Agreement was co-created with local partners in response to the needs and opportunities of those living and working in east London. It acts as a civic strategy for the work of Queen Mary in the future—outlining our plans for working with and for the local area.
To ensure that we developed an agreement that meets the needs of our east London communities, we undertook several phases of work focusing on listening and collaboration.
Queen Mary carried out a community listening campaign in 2020-21 to seek the views of residents, communities and organisations across east London as to the pressures they are facing, gather insights into how Queen Mary could help address these societal challenges, and identify opportunities for working together.
This campaign was a collaboration between Queen Mary's Centre for Public Engagement and London Citizens and gathered views through:
We commissioned an analysis of Queen Mary’s local economic and social impact, which was carried out by Hatch Regeneris.
We brought the insights from this analysis together with the insights generated by the Community Listening Campaign to identify key 'areas' where people felt that the biggest societal challenges and opportunities for collaborative working are currently.
Using these key 'areas' we ran a series of priority setting workshops with stakeholders from across Queen Mary and east London in the Spring and Summer of 2021.
In the Summer and Autumn of 2021, Queen Mary worked with the residents, businesses and organisations who shared their insights in the Listening Campaign, and teams within Queen Mary, to determine the commitments Queen Mary should make within the Agreement.
We launched Queen Mary’s co-created Civic University Agreement in May 2022.