Sussex Co-Lab

Introducing the Sussex Co-Lab

• Video transcript

  Video clip of University of Sussex campus from the air with Brighton in the distance.

  Video clip of a busy urban street.

  Voiceover of Professor Debbie Keeling with video clips of towns, villages, countryside and coastal scenes in Sussex.

  Debbie Keeling: The world is a complex and difficult to comprehend place  and it's changing more rapidly than ever.

  Climate change questions our very existence and the gap between those that have and those that don't is accelerating, and some communities are feeling very left behind.

  We need to find new ways of connecting people to the place where they live and they work and to make our communities a starting point for finding innovative solutions to imagining a different future.

  Sussex Co-Lab is a programme of work designed to improve local communities in Sussex by building collaboration between universities, local governments, health partners, businesses, artists, researchers and community members.

  It focuses on addressing community challenges and making local policies more effective using creative and participatory methods that enable true, inclusive decision-making.

  It aims to improve outcomes for the people of Sussex and beyond by testing new ways of working that help all people to flourish and to understand and evidence the impact of this.

  This knowledge base will help policymakers, planners and the commissioners of services understand the value and the importance of making people the starting point for change.

  Sussex Co-Lab operates as a virtual lab that invites and welcomes in a wide range of contributors to share their knowledge and experience and to get involved in the work of the lab.

  It recognises that we're all experts in the place where we live, that we all bring something valuable into the process of understanding people and the conditions that we all need to live full and happy lives. 

  Video clip of Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters.

  End card of the University of Sussex logo.

Building connection and belonging, across generations to improve wellbeing

• Video transcript

  Emilia: We arranged to meet in Shoreham, it was in a lovely little cafe, and I was looking at my WhatsApp being like, "Okay, this is what Diane looks like." I was walking and I was looking, she was reading the newspaper, and I thought, "Oh, okay, that's a good sign."

  Diane: I think that gave her an idea that we might get on, which is interesting. So yeah, we talked about what her course was mainly to start with, and being history politics that really piqued my interest.

  Jessica: So the Intergenerational Exchange Programme is a programme that started about two and a half years ago at the University of Sussex and what it is is essentially a befriending programme with students that are based at Sussex and older people in the community of Brighton and Hove.

  What we're doing is we're connecting them to talk about whatever they like to talk about and they essentially become friends but it's more than that. There are research objectives behind it as as well that align with UK national priorities, which is combating loneliness, healthy aging, well-being, mental health. 

  Emilia: We've met quite regularly, probably about every couple of weeks or so. We went bird watching, we had pancakes. We've done loads, it's been really exciting.

  Diane: It's always handy to have a youngster to help you with phone. I needed to do a screenshot of something this morning, no idea how to do it. Emilia had googled it and done it within 30 seconds, and that would have taken me two days. So all the usual stuff. So it's been great fun.

  Jessica: Where it's a little bit different from some of the other befriending programmes that you already have is that we're really putting a sense of purpose on both. So it's not about ongoing and volunteering. It's really about that sense of purpose that older people can also give back to youth. And then equally students are finding that they have a platform in which that they can feel like it's a safe space in exchange for the generation that they would not necessarily organically find out in the community. 

  So there's a research element to the programme in that we are trying to look at the bigger picture. We're trying to look at the holistic picture of things and how it can feed back into some of the UK national priorities.

  We also have workshops. So we would have some that are on campus at the University of Sussex. And those are for new participants that want to sign up. You know, what the objectives of the programme are, why it's important to befriend with older people. That's sort of like the intro workshop.

  Ecem: It was really important for me as an international student. I'm coming from Turkey and I have a big family and I have really good relationships with my grandparents. And I felt a need to connect again. So I saw this project and then I became the research assistant.

  The project is based on combating the loneliness among the older participants, and then we came up with the idea that actually younger generations are feeling lonely as well. T

  Jessica: The second iteration of the workshops is going into the community, so this is something we've just recently started with Hop 50+ Cafe, and they have access to a client base and customer base of older people already.

  Vicky: The workshops have been really interesting, you know, we've had two here now.

  The topics that we choose are topics that are going to increase meaningful conversation. So the first workshop was about interconnectedness and what that means to people.

  The second workshop was focused on well-being in general, and of course these two things very much interlinked. As we know interconnectedness really increases well-being.

  People are getting so much out of the conversations, you know, they really report back that, you know, it's meant a lot to them to have these conversations and to mix with people from different generations. 

  One participant summed it up for me when she said, 'The environment might change over the years, but essentially people remain the same', and it can be easy to forget that across the generations, but we are just that, we're all the same.

  Jessica: The amount of knowledge that you can understand and can gain from speaking to someone who's been through it is so important and so we're seeing that for a lot of the students there's that value of going, 'Wow this person has lived', so the learning from that has been exceptional I think.

  And then equally for older people to understand and be connected to that generation, that might be their grandchildren's generation, to understand what they're going through from their perspective is I think really, really important.

  Ecem: This project of course helped me professionally but at the same time I think it touched me personally on a deeper level because now when I'm back into my home country I'm more connected than my grandparents than before because now I am aware of how would they feel. It's more like I share my stories that I'm going through in my life and they share their stories back then and we have this mutual friendship I would say.

  Jessica: Being able to be in this safe space, we're speaking to some of that was a stranger just a few months ago, they've created such a relationship where they feel very safe and to talk about things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to speak with with their family and that goes for both generations.

  Diane: Well I think reconnecting with someone who's academically active in their 20s has been really stimulating for me and that makes me feel younger and more involved in things. Plus it's been really nice to hear Emilia's journey through university and the more we've got to know each other, the more we've learned about each other's families as well, it's been really enlightening.

  Emilia: We were having a chat about mental health and how she was quite worried about one of her great nieces being on antidepressants at 16. And I said, 'I was there four years ago and now I have different ways to manage my anxiety and here I am making new friends in a project that I never would have done four years ago'. 

  Jessica: So for me, the takeaway has been really interesting because it does make you want to get involved in the programme. You actually do want to speak with these older people that have this wealth of knowledge, but equally for older people, it's rejuvenating as well. So I think it's been really exciting to see that come out of the programme that we've created this, you know, from this little programme we've created so many meaningful connections. And I think that for next steps for the project, we'd like to scale beyond the University of Sussex, so if we can take this project to other universities, but also in terms of bringing more older people potentially onto campus. So it's really exciting to see where we've come so far and where we could potentially go.

Using community research to understand local development in Brighton and Hove

• Video transcript

  [Intro MUSIC - pizzicato strings]

  [TITLE: Who Owns Brighton? Community Research Project]

  [Video footage of drone flying over the centre of Brighton and residential areas in the city]

  [Martyn Holmes, Project Lead, Who Owns Brighton?] Who Owns Brighton? is  a community research project looking at what's happening in the city around development, who's it for, who wins, who loses, where does does the money come from, and where does it go? And very importantly what can we as citizens do about changing some of those outcomes?

  [Video footage of Helen and Martin working on laptops on the Who Owns Brighton project]

  [Helen Bartlett, Project Lead, Who Owns Brighton?] Our aim was to develop a community-led research methodology which would give people tools, knowledge, and skills to kind of look at and scrutinise different aspects of the planning and development process and different points at which they could intervene and mobilise.

  [Video footage of drone flying over Circus Street development in Brighton and ground level shots]

  [Professor Anke Schwittay, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Steering Group Member for Who Owns Brighton? and Director, Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust] So we decided it was really important to try out our methodology in a particular site, and the site that was chosen is Circus Street, which is a development in the centre of Brighton. There were lots of promises and lots of kind of ideas around Circus Street as becoming a very lively neighbourhood. It's really anything but that.

  [Shaulan Chanlewis, Community Researcher, Who Owns Brighton?] I feel like there's a lot of potential but it didn't blossom, it hasn't blossomed. It's not vibrant. The units are empty, the retail units, which is a real shame.

  [Video footage of the Who Owns Brighton Workshops]

  [Martyn Holmes] We ran a series of workshops  where we had experts come along to talk about the different aspects of the development process to sort of demystify those, essentially and so that people could learn, like how does planning work, how does development finance work? How do the decisions get made in the local authority, for example? How can you go online and find out who owns things, you know, where does the money come from? Where does it go? And then we kind of, people got interested in various bits of that and then they formed groups together, and then we sort of oversaw that process as they went away and investigated those parts of the development process.

  [Shaulan Chanlewis] The project was just run in such a kind of friendly way. It was really easy to be involved. It kind of started with workshops. So kind of giving everyone a chance to get to know each other and to get a feel for what being a community researcher would be like.

  [Video footage of Anke Schwittay working on campus at University of Sussex]

  [Professor Anke Schwittay] The involvement of the University of Sussex was very much facilitated through the Sussex Co-Lab. The Co-Lab is all about developing these kind of participatory methodologies that bring university actors together with community groups, with residents around different topics that are of resonance to local people.

  [Video footage of drone flying over the centre of Brighton and Circus Street development and ground level shots]

  [Martyn Holmes] For most people in Brighton, there is an acute housing crisis. It's an expensive place to buy. It's a very expensive place to rent. There's lots of people on the housing register so there's a shortage of supply of social housing, and really, housing is a key, fundamental thing for so many people's lives, and people are being pushed out.

  [Professor Anke Schwittay] The commercial housing in Circus Street was through shared ownership schemes which are meant to be affordable housing schemes and the things that we learned, they absolutely aren't. And there's a large debate, especially around kind of service fees and the way that service fees are not capped and have been massively increasing, really trapping people in these properties.

  [Helen Bartlett] We had councils that were committed to affordable housing. They talked about the importance of affordable housing. There are policies that say, you know, it needs to be affordable. And yet every single new development in the city was not producing that policy compliant issue, let alone more.

  [Professor Anke Schwittay] One of the things that really emerged from the research was the gap between what is being promised by developers and architects with their fantastic drawings before any development happens and the reality, which really is quite different. We have quite empty commercial spaces that are not contributing to the economic regeneration of the area. We have public spaces that are really quite lifeless and empty. 

  [MUSIC change - more upbeat pizzicato strings and guitar]

  [Professor Anke Schwittay] So one of the things we have been thinking about and want to propose is some kind of a post development assessment and audit that really the council looks like what's the difference between what is being promised and what is being delivered and what can be done if that gap is really big to make sure that developments are really delivering on the promises they are making.

  [Video footage of the Who Owns Brighton Workshops] 

  [Martyn Holmes] I think it's created solidarities between people which is really important, and it's kind of inspired people to go on and want to focus around a certain things so mobilise maybe around a certain site or around policy change or around, you know, all the different ways that change can kind of be enacted on the ground.

  [Video footage of Helen and Martin working on laptops on the Who Owns Brighton project]

  [Helen Bartlett] Well, we very much have come from the position that actually in order to change this, and in order to change this within our city we need to be having those, sometimes difficult, sometimes critical but constructive conversations across different sectors and different industries. But also bringing in some of the other bodies some of the other kind of stakeholders in that aspect of development in the city. So obviously, we've got the two universities who are support supporting the project.

  [Video footage of Anke Schwittay working on campus and general shots of the campus at University of Sussex]

  [Professor Anke Schwittay] It really made me realise the contribution that universities can have in their local communities producing these tools, empowering people to learn about what's happening to unpack some of these really complicated processes, and then to take action on that.

  [Professor Anke Schwittay] Through the University of Brighton, we have actually submitted a large research grant to the ESRC to scale the project across all of Brighton to also put together a website to share the findings much more, much more widely beyond Brighton. So the hope is that this is really something that can be of help to people in other cities, to similarly want to understand what's happening there.

  [Video footage of drone flying over the centre of Brighton and residential areas in the city]

  [END LOGOS - University of Sussex]

The Sussex Co-Lab

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