Summer round-up

We’re celebrating our 17,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students who have shown extraordinary resilience to graduate during such a disrupted period for them, our university and our country. 45% of these graduates remain and work in the north-west, contributing to our public services and helping communities to thrive. We are therefore featuring their contributions in building a greater Manchester across health, education and the environment through a new partnership with the Manchester Evening News over the coming months.

On environmental sustainability, our Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub recently launched a new website to support local SMEs to be more sustainable in their use of plastics. Experts from our University are partnering with Cardiff University, Johnson Matthey and bp on a new catalyst technology project to help achieve net zero. The University of Manchester Botanical Grounds has been holding volunteering gardening sessions, helping prepare the botanical garden for outreach activities, promoting wellbeing and supporting biodiversity on campus. And as we recap the winners of our Making a Difference Awards, we’re recognising the outstanding contribution to environmental sustainability from the student team, Want Not Waste.

On better health, we’ve been commending our student volunteers who have given over 1,000 hours of their time to support the COVID-19 vaccination programme. Manchester Outreach Dentists have successfully created a widening participation project that helps disadvantaged sixth form students with their application to Dental School. And we’ve been highlighting our impact on better health at a local, national and global scale through our 2021 Making a Difference Awards winning and highly commended projects such as NHS Voices of Covid-19, and solving Africa’s healthcare challenges.

On cultural engagement, our Manchester Museum celebrated South Asian Heritage Month from 18 July – 17 August, with a number of online activities. And MA students from the University’s Institute of Cultural Practices have worked in collaboration with the Manchester Art Gallery, Central Library’s Archives department, the People’s History Museum, the National Football Museum and mural commissioners at the Withington Walls project to preserve the tributes on Marcus Rashford’s mural, ensuring these messages of solidarity are not lost.

On social inclusion, we’ve been awarded £500,000 of funding from Wellcome, which will be matched with University funds to provide £1M to accelerate and embed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) throughout our research and discovery approach. Harriet Larrington-Spencer, from our Geography Department, has been shortlisted for the 2021 Shaw Trust Disability Power 100. The University of Manchester Initial Teacher Training (ITT) programme has presented this year’s Social Responsibility award to a group of PGCE trainees for their online maths classes for refugees. And a University researcher has recently won the Collaboration Labs Project Excellence Award 2021 for her research supporting the personal and professional development of neurodiverse young people.

We hope you have been enjoying the, sometimes, great weather, the lifting of further restrictions and the opportunity for some leisure or vacation time. For those in Manchester during our summer remember that you can visit our Manchester Museum, the Whitworth and Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre and the John Rylands Library.

Dr Julian Skyrme, Director of Social Responsibility

Summer round up

We hope all of you have had an enjoyable summer period. Whilst the University is usually quieter in July and August, with many staff and students taking vacation, much has happened around social responsibility. First, we are delighted to announce that Professor James Thompson, who has been our Associate Vice-President for Social Responsibility for the past three years, has gained promotion to a new position as Vice-President for Social Responsibility. James will now sit on the University’s senior leadership team, have oversight of the University’s cultural institutions, and have senior accountability for the social responsibility agenda, including public engagement, responsible processes and equality, diversity and inclusion and environmental sustainability.

In July our University’s Jodrell Bank in Cheshire welcomed thousands of festival goers to Bluedot, our annual celebration of science, discovery, live music, and cosmic culture. The award-winning event is the UK’s only music festival run by a University. If you missed out, you can see what happened in this short video and even reserve tickets now for July 2018. In June we ran our first Community Festival and were pleased to discover that more than 60% of the 2,000 attendees were Manchester residents, with nearly a half coming from the ten most local wards close to our teaching and residential campuses. Our School of Education, Environment and Development funded local residents to improve some unloved green space as part of our wider University-Ardwick Partnership. And we were pleased to report that two local people who have experienced homelessness have secured employment at the University. Supporting our pledge to the city’s Homelessness Charter, the story and a short film was picked up by the national press.

Some significant awards and achievements were announced over the summer. Our Library’s ‘My Learning Essentials’ resources were recognised with a global award for Community Engagement for innovative work in support of widening participation activities such as our Manchester Access Programme (MAP), Manchester Distance Access Scheme and Extended Project Qualification. Following independent verification we are the UK’s first University to attain the highest Level 5 in the Flexible Framework for responsible procurement. Our Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health won a national Health Education England Widening Participation Award for Research and Evaluation for research into the performance and experience of widening participation students compared to others. Our Stellify campaign to enable students to ‘do more and be more’ during their time at university took the Silver in the Best Innovation In Education Marketing category. Our Food In Residence team have won The University Catering Organisation’s (TUCO) prestigious award for being the most sustainable University caterers of the year. And our Food In Residence team also achieved a rating of 3 out of 3 stars across all catered halls of residence from the Sustainable Restaurant Association.

Since Andy Burnham’s election as the first mayor of Greater Manchester, our Manchester Urban Institute’s Devo Manc Hub has been experiencing heightened activity. As well as a website and newsletter four times per year, a new podcast series has been launched highlighting Devolution-related research from across the University of Manchester. Another of our Institutes, the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing (MICRA), held an event to launch an influential new report, ‘The Golden Generation?’, which examined wellbeing and inequalities in later life.

We’re committed to identifying students from the widest range of social backgrounds and give students the chance to broaden horizons, understand the issues that matter and step up to make a difference to the local and global community. As part of this, all 8,000 new students are soon to take part in our Sustainability Challenge which will be their first step towards achieving the prestigious Manchester Leadership Award. New students joining any of our Alliance Manchester Business School undergraduate degree programmes are eligible to apply for a social responsibility scholarship, which awards academic attainment alongside involvement in, for example, charity work, community-based projects, volunteering opportunities and/or fundraising activities. And we have also been pleased to launch a new Insight event in partnership with KPMG for local first-generation students who have progressed to the University through our Manchester Access Programme, which is demystifying what its like to work in the corporate world.

Across environmental sustainability we were excited to unveil our first campus living wall, (also known as a ‘vertical garden’). As part of our Brunswick Park development – which when finished will be the largest green space on campus with tree and wildflower planting, seating areas, pedestrian and cycle paths – the 50m2 wall has plants specifically chosen to attract pollinators. Our undergraduate student residents leaving halls donated 6,125 bags of unwanted items and 2,300 meals for charity as part of our annual ‘Give It Don’t Bin It’ end of year campaign, which also diverts significant tonnes of waste from landfill. We also recently announced the commissioning of City of Trees to bring their expertise on urban tree planting to our Campus Tree Planting Plan, which aims to replace and plant trees as part of our Campus Masterplan development.

We have a wide range of events, tours, conferences and exhibitions for the public taking place across campus in the next few months. Examples include a SEEChangemakers: HE Social Enterprise & Innovation Conference that will be examining the role of Universities as anchor institutions for social innovation in their communities, a new exhibition Memories of Partition at our Manchester Museum and an upcoming public lecture by the journalist and author Gary Younge. You can explore these and other events on our dedicated pages.

Dr Julian Skyrme

Director of Social Responsibility