Queen’s Communities and Place: towards the alignment of higher education place-based strategy with local need

Serving as a key delivery mechanism for Queen’s University Belfast’s (UK) strategic commitment to social and civic responsibility and economic prosperity, Queen’s Communities and Place is a research initiative based on engagement and partnership between communities, policy makers and academics. Combining academic expertise and experiential knowledge from the community, Queen’s Communities and Place uses a ‘place-based’ approach to co-create new solutions to address persistent physical, economic and social challenges, as well as to strengthen the engagement between Queen’s University and its surrounding communities. Queen’s Communities and Place launched in November 2021 with our anchor partner in the Market community in inner south Belfast. We are also working collaboratively with projects and communities in the north, west and east of Belfast across a range of sectors and academic disciplines. We have sought to challenge existing frameworks, with evidence-led, data-driven approaches to build interventions and practices together to identify what might work better here for communities to thrive. Capturing three perspectives – academic, community and local government – this co-written reflective article details the experience of establishing a working partnership with our pilot community, and provides some examples of how our approach is working to address the challenges on the ground to date.