(0:00) Making the most of the expertise of academics and helping when it comes to real world need.
(0:09) That's the aim of a programme which has seen collaborations formed, 
(0:14) linking Lancaster University with organisations as varied, 
(0:17) as charities working to improve health in East Africa to the NHS, 
(0:22) here designed Hospitals of the Future. 
(0:24) Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account, 
(0:29) coming up we'll hear how, in just two years, 
(0:32) the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Social Enterprise in Residence programme 
(0:36) has made a big impact.
(0:38) You can end up going off course, so it was just really, 
(0:41) really valuable to just start, plan and think,
(0:44) how do we want to go about this in the way that we want to do it?
(0:47) And it's so interesting to see how other people work,
(0:50) lots of like little niche areas of study and thinking about how that all links in. 
(0:54) It's really, you know, it's amazing. 
(0:55) Well, actually, why don't we start from the idea that a hospital might not be 
(0:59) a site of dread and of discomfort, 
(1:02) something we associate with or so often associate with all of those things.
(1:09) Epilepsy did some good research on epilepsy and also our work 
(1:13) to help young people with learning disabilities to make the transition 
(1:17) from school to their adult lives and the whole sort of world of work. 
(1:22) We wouldn't have been able to recruit such good people without that partnership. 
(1:26) Andrew Betts is the Director of Advantage Africa, 
(1:30) the first of six social enterprises that have been hosted by the Faculty.
(1:34) The charity supports people affected by poverty, disability and HIV 
(1:38) to improve their education, health and income. 
(1:41) It just cemented our relationship with Lancaster University. 
(1:45) We've had a number of collaborations on a few projects now, 
(1:48) ranging from albinism to preventing sexual abuse 
(1:52) and more recently on autism as well.
(1:54) So it was lovely. It was lovely to meet people, spend time with Charlotte Baker. 
(2:00) Charlotte appreciates how Advantage Africa is able to work with people at the grassroots.
(2:07) It's a two-way link.
(2:09) Advantage Africa will also host a Lancaster student intern
(2:13) and have led a workshop for students interested in working in the third sector. 
(2:18) This kind of collaboration means access to research and engagement with academics 
(2:23) across the university is possible, leading to opportunities which may otherwise be overlooked.
(2:28) You don't stop and think and then you apply to the fund, 
(2:31) but sometimes that can mean it takes you away 
(2:33) from what you're actually trying to do or your ethos as an organisation, your direction. 
(2:38) And that's especially true in anti-racism work. 
(2:40) Meg Guy from Anti-Racist Cumbria, a charitable incorporated organisation 
(2:45) which aims to tackle and end racism through action and education.
(2:49) Some forms of racism have been in the news more, 
(2:53) but the understanding of what anti-racism is, which is actually an approach to understanding racism 
(2:59) and to tackling it, which is different to the mainstream understanding, isn't really there. 
(3:04) So that then trickles down into the funding bodies often don't have that knowledge as well. 
(3:10) So yeah, you can end up going off course.
(3:13) So it was just really, really valuable to just stop, plan and think, 
(3:17) how do we want to go about this in the way that we want to do it, 
(3:21) before we then jump into bigger pots of funding? 
(3:24) Because otherwise you could just end up being five years down the line and thinking, 
(3:29) oh, we're just, we're totally different. We're not doing what we set out to do. 
(3:32) We do live in a world where we need the money.
(3:34) So it's really, really difficult balance to make, which is great. 
(3:38) And that this opportunity was, it's a small period of time, 
(3:41) but it was funded and that made all the difference. 
(3:43) At a time when funding is hard to come by, every piece of advice or insight is welcome.
(3:49) For Meg, meeting and working with Dr Dayo Sonno, 
(3:52) a lecturer in politics and policy at Lancaster, has proved vital. 
(3:56) I joined the university in 2023. As soon as I joined, it brought with me my interest in 
(4:02) racial equity and racial justice and how that links to policy work.
(4:06) And I was supported by the university to start the network in 2024. 
(4:12) So the racial equity and policy network has been going on since 2024. 
(4:16) And that sort of serves as the cover or the dissemination channel through which 
(4:23) I disseminate my research on racial equity.
(4:26) I really kind of like social enterprises and I have worked with social enterprises in the past, 
(4:31) in the sense that they are not charities and they're also not private organisations, 
(4:39) entities, they are for a particular social good. 
(4:43) And so the idea of social enterprises as an entity, 
(4:48) and I've supported social enterprises in Greater Manchester in the past, 
(4:51) so it felt quite natural and I was excited that this was happening at Lancaster University. 
(4:56) I definitely think academia can be, well, is an ivory tower.
(5:01) And there are more and more people like me who are trying to 
(5:05) connect, particularly within the civic university agenda, 
(5:10) ensuring that the university is anchored in the places that it is in locally. 
(5:15) And so this residency programme, again, is another great example of that, of how to, 
(5:22) I guess, implement that civic university agenda that Lancaster University has signed up to. 
(5:26) We're about five years old, we've just celebrated our fifth anniversary and we've got 
(5:29) quite a few different pillars of work.
(5:32) And one of them was already impacting leadership and we've worked with the NHS, 
(5:36) we've worked with a lot of different high-profile businesses, 
(5:39) but we didn't have a policy aspect of trying to influence government, 
(5:45) because until you influence the policies there or the law or the guidelines that a lot of places 
(5:51) like the NHS have to abide by, it's very difficult to make change because that becomes a barrier. 
(5:57) So we've been trying to build that up and we were just trying to work out how we were going to do 
(6:00) that and we really wanted to link in with academia, with researchers and this idea of 
(6:07) the might of the university to help us. So that's how I got introduced.
It was just really, 
(6:12) really valuable to just have some funded time and set aside time, a couple of months, 
(6:18) where we could just sit down together and talk about it and really plan 
(6:21) what working together could look like, what it could achieve. 
(6:26) For me, I've been to university, but I don't work in the academic space, 
(6:30) so understanding how that works, how do you get funding? It's very difficult to access 
(6:35) knowledge about, not even accessing the academic papers, say, but also just how that whole world 
(6:42) works when you're a charity. So that was really valuable and then just talking about what research 
(6:49) could look like and also how we can do it in a new way.
We're trying to make an anti-racist 
(6:53) county and an anti-racist country and anti-racist world all be part of that. 
(6:57) So we don't want to be replicating harmful ways of doing things that harms black and brown people. 
(7:02) And we do get a lot of requests from universities and researchers to do work, but sometimes it can 
(7:09) feel quite extractive. It's often unpaid and they're contacting us to get access to our 
(7:16) community because we have a lot of volunteers and we're embedded in that black and brown 
(7:20) community in Cumbria. But we often turn it down because when we're not paid, the people 
(7:26) they're trying to reach through us are not paid and it can be very harmful because they're asking 
(7:30) for lived experiences that kind of compound the racial trauma that they're being asked to tell. 
(7:38) So me and Daya have just been exploring how we can do things differently and I think that's really 
(7:42) been exciting for both of us and something that we want to share later on once we've 
(7:47) done more of the work.
And the collaboration has paid off. Anti-racism Cumbria is celebrating 
(7:57) receiving funding to continue and expand their work. But while the project is helping with day-to-day 
(8:03) and short-term need, the social enterprise in residence programme is also supporting longer-term 
(8:09) initiatives. Work to make sure the hospitals of tomorrow are able to meet the needs of patients 
(8:14) and the people who will work there is underway. My name's Emma Stockton. I'm a consultant anaesthetist 
(8:20) at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
I work with a group of colleagues. We've got a little 
(8:24) company called Made for Health, which is medical architecture, design and education. And we're a 
(8:29) mixture of doctors, architects, people who come from academia and have project management 
(8:36) backgrounds. So we're a diverse group of people, but we've got this kind of common aim, I guess, 
(8:41) which is to improve the quality of healthcare buildings in the UK. And I guess our common 
(8:50) thing that brings us together is this belief that we could be using buildings as a strategic 
(8:56) tool to improve health outcomes and lives of patients and staff. And we kind of believe that 
(9:03) the only way to do that really well is by involving the people that use those buildings in their 
(9:10) design, I guess. We met Ben when we ran a course for Lancaster University and Hospital because
(9:16) there was a plan to sort of rebuild Lancaster Hospital. And that's part of the thing called the 
(9:23) New Hospitals Programme. And Ben came on the course and I thought that's a bit unusual, 
(9:28) someone doing French philosophy, but actually he's amazing. And he has this completely different 
(9:33) perspective on healthcare, both as a sort of having been a patient, but also from his academic 
(9:40) studies. And he really challenged us to think differently. And so when it is in a way that you 
(9:46) normally wouldn't be, because we're quite in our boxes, we're really super siloed, I think, (9:51) maybe in life, definitely in medicine, even between specialties, there's not huge collaboration 
(9:57) really. You think you know it, you think you're the expert. So he really challenged that.
(10:02) Dr Benjamin Dalton is a lecturer in French studies. And while the link between this subject 
(10:08) and hospital architecture may seem obscure, it is very relevant to the way wards and clinics 
(10:14) are planned. Yeah, so all of my research is about hospitals and how to reimagine hospitals and how to 
(10:21) do something differently with the hospitals of the future, basically. And a lot of people find 
(10:28) it quite strange that I'm doing this as a lecturer in French studies.
And they think that, you know, 
(10:33) I'll be drilling verbs or, you know, doing vocab lists or something like that. But actually,
(10:41) kind of French literature, film theory have very intimate relationships with healthcare, medicine, 
(10:48) and clinical spaces. Many French philosophers have themselves been doctors or involved in 
(10:54) healthcare and healthcare spaces in some way.
And so kind of art, for me, offers this space of 
(11:02) kind of reinvention and reimagining a creative space to think differently about hospitals. So 
(11:09) it's not just about representing hospitals, but about reimagining them and thinking about what 
(11:14) they could be in the future. So I guess I'm kind of working away on all of this type of research.
(11:22) But I also want to find ways to kind of actually make a difference in the world and see how 
(11:29) this research can kind of jump off the page and might actually be able to influence hospital 
(11:35) design or the way we think about hospitals. And so for me, engagement has played a really important 
(11:42) part right from the beginning of the project, engaging with people beyond the walls of the 
(11:47) university to be in a room with all of these people was absolutely incredible. And again, 
(11:52) very, very weird to introduce myself as a lecturer in French studies within that space, because I 
(11:58) think at first people didn't understand what I was really doing there.
But made for health was so 
(12:04) welcoming and encouraging and really open to hearing what I had to say at that event. And 
(12:10) that really kind of got the got the collaboration off the ground, I think. And we found out that 
(12:16) there were lots of crossovers and lots of things we wanted to continue working on with each other.
(12:22) Then he suggested that we collaborate on some stuff. And he told us about this social enterprise 
(12:26) in residency at Lancaster University, which is what we came up to do. And it was just this 
(12:33) amazing opportunity because it was time to think.
Normally, when you apply for anything, 
(12:38) you have to write a report and you have to have to be some output. But this was like completely 
(12:45) amazing because it was this almost free time. But we're structured. Ben had 
(12:50) organized lots of events. We watched like quite niche French films about hospitals. 
(12:55) We spoke to loads of people. We went to visit some amazing sort of health care places 
(13:01) and community places in your neck of the woods. So sort of Morecambe, Lancaster. I mean, amazing.
(13:07) I guess we're mostly sort of London based. One of my colleagues, Ali's from Glasgow. But we have 
(13:12) this quite London centric view of the world. So I mean, on every level, it was just amazing. 
(13:17) And it really gave us a space away from our respective kind of day jobs and inboxes, 
(13:25) just to kind of be together and go and see lots of different health care environments and 
(13:31) architectures across Lancaster, Morecambe Bay and the surrounding areas, speak to so many different 
(13:38) people and have that critical time for reflection and thinking and planning. 
(13:45) He has a really different way of thinking about things. He talks about this panoptic view of the 
(13:50) hospital and this kind of the whole construct of the hospital. So he sort of challenged for me, 
(13:56) he sort of challenged the whole roots of how hospitals are designed, the whole ethos of 
(14:01) medical care. We build stuff that we've built again, and we tend to just repeat the same pattern 
(14:06) and it goes really unchallenged. I think that's a thing that sort of very much is what the new 
(14:11) hospitals programme is doing is trying to recreate what we've already got, but a bit cheaper. 
(14:16) Fundamentally rethinking that is probably what we need to do and very much getting out of silos 
(14:23) and having a broader perspective on it rather than just the narrow perspective of some clinicians 
(14:29) and some architects and some projects. You know, actually, the broader you can go, the further you 
(14:34) can sort of push things and improve care of people and how we interact with each other.
(14:40) From Africa to closer to home, challenges now and in the future. The social enterprise and residence 
(14:52) programme has already made a mark. It's hoped this kind of collaboration will pay off both for the 
(14:58) university and its partners for many years to come. I think the fact that we had the interns 
(15:05) who were paid as well by the university, very enthusiastic people. Why wouldn't you? If you're 
(15:13) particularly for a small organization, small charity with lacking capacity, why wouldn't you 
(15:18) have a bright young mind working with you? We can't do things in isolation. If we can build 
(15:23) partnerships and build our range of influence and our range of collaborators, why wouldn't we? 
(15:31) If we don't, we're going under. Lots more charities are going under and maybe they 
(15:37) haven't pursued those kind of partnerships. It gives you enthusiasm and you meet all these 
(15:41) amazing people. And it really is a time to think, which is something we have so little of 
(15:46) in our society. We're on screens, we're like constantly looking at output and, 
(15:51) you know, metrics for that kind of thing. And just some time to think is amazing. There's so much 
(15:56) theory behind it and new ways of doing things. But sometimes in the charity sector, we can always be 
(16:02) a step behind because we don't have access to the new approaches that are coming out that people 
(16:07) like Dayo are working on. That's really good as well. And that's going to feed into all the different 
(16:11) aspects of our work. So the impact is really big. So if you're thinking about it, 
(16:15) I would just say go for it.