To welcome us into 2025 Nalin Thakkar, the Vice-President for Social Responsibility at The University of Manchester, provides a brief overview of some of our priorities for the coming year.

Our first priority is our work towards developing a new strategy for the University. Advancing social responsibility is one of the key themes of our strategy consultation. Over the past few months, we have heard many excellent ideas from our staff, students and external communities that will help shape the development of the Manchester 2035 strategy and I’d like to say thank you to everybody who’s contributed to this.

We are now entering the test and develop phase of the strategy where we will be examining all this feedback to understand what transformational ideas are needed to take social responsibility forward.

One thing we’ve heard loud and clear in the feedback, is the message that we can achieve much more if we ensure that our students as well as staff are fully engaged in the social responsibility agenda. We will be looking closely at how we can achieve this, so look out for ways you can engage with this work as it progresses.

Alongside our 2035 strategy, we are starting to develop an infrastructure strategy for the University. One of the key challenges we need to consider is how we decarbonise heating across campus over the next 10 years. This is no small task and will require major investment and transformation across the campus.

A third significant priority for us is ensuring we can continue to make our campus an inclusive campus environment. This will involve continuing to ensure our student and staff populations better represent wider society. And it also means ensuring our campus is somewhere where people can freely express their views, listen to each other and disagree in a way that is always inclusive.

There are going to be lots of opportunities to engage with myself and other senior leaders as we develop the strategy, and I encourage you to keep up with what we do each month in our social responsibility newsletter.

Thank you for everything you do to contribute to our social responsibility work and may I wish you a peaceful and prosperous year ahead.

Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility.