“There is so much out there that can be improved and we have the means to do it”

Careers in the third sector are notoriously competitive. What if there was a way to satisfy Oxford University students’ desire to gain practical experience of the third sector at the same time as meeting the needs of the local community?

Our Social Action Labs, carried out in collaboration with the Careers Service and made possible through the Van Houten fund, have aimed to do just that.

So how have they worked? Running over four weekends and accompanied by a Careers Service speaker series called ‘The Only Way is Ethics’, Oxford Hub has trained 55 participants in four key areas: Campaigning, Fundraising, Creating Policy and Delivering Projects. Once equipped with training, each student was placed in a team and tasked with working on a brief provided by a local community partner. At the end of the weekend, the winning response to the brief was chosen and the victorious team were awarded the prize of working with the community partner on implementing their ideas in the real world. Due to the restrictions in place due to Covid-19, all interactions, including the training, took place via Zoom, adding an extra dimension of challenge to the weekend.

Crucially, all the briefs that participants worked on had a local community focus, meaning that they also learnt about the challenges and opportunities of Oxford. For the Creating Policy brief provided by the City Council, students researched the experiences of Syrian families in Oxford, as they sought to answer the question of whether it is feasible for the Council to sign up to the Syrian Resettlement Programme. Meanwhile, for the Fundraising brief, each team learnt about health inequalities in Oxford as they planned a fundraising campaign for Ready Set Go, which seeks to ensure that all children in the city are able to learn to swim and ride a bike.

While Oxford Hub has always championed the talent of students, we have been particularly impressed with the creative variety of work that has emerged from the Labs. At the Campaigning Lab, for example, a group of students proposed that Oxford City Council create a website and bank of volunteer translators so that public health advice could be quickly translated into a range of languages for the local community. Rather than waiting for the Council to set this up, the student team, aptly named ‘We Speak Your Language’, are currently working on implementing their idea in practice. Here’s what Alexandra, a member of the ‘We Speak Your Language’ team, had to say about the Social Action Labs…

“The Social Action Lab was the catalyst for our project. While we all had an interest in equitable information access and cross-cultural communication, We Speak Your Language would not exist without us meeting each other and brainstorming a project that could have an immediate positive impact.”

For Ellie, another ‘We Speak Your Language’ team member, the Labs provided an opportunity for social connection. After being put in a group with three strangers, “we very quickly created a bond through the lab exercises and realised that we were a fantastic team”. This feeling of connection was reflected by other attendees at the Labs, with 90% of participants reporting that the programme has improved their ability to collaborate with others to drive change.

So what did other participants gain from the Social Action Labs? For MariaLuisa, who attended all four of the weekend sessions, the Labs “took me out of my daily comfort zone and helped me to discover a bit more about Oxford as a city (not just a University town)”. Indeed, 75% of participants reported that taking part in the programme has made them feel better connected to Oxford as a city.

The last word belongs to a student who wrote of the Labs: “if anything, the training has made me more aware of this gap [between city and University residents] and willing to get more involved with the community”. For us at Oxford Hub, the Social Action Labs have only strengthened our determination to continue addressing this gap.

Read the full report here.

Visit the We Speak Your Language website.