The Nottingham Civic Exchange offers

Programme development and delivery

• Project: Mapping the Health and Wellbeing Across the Firefighting Career and Assessing the Current Demands
• Partners: National Fire Chiefs Council, Fire Fighters Charity, Home Office
• Time: 12 months

Working with Professor Rowena Hill we developed and delivered a research project and connected engagement programme to understand the wellbeing needs of staff and volunteers across the UK’s Fire and Rescue Sector in 2022. The required the management of six researchers and multiple stakeholders to deliver the work once we had secured funding for the proposal we created. The development of the next wellbeing strategy is now our ongoing priority for this work and we are tracking the impact of this research and engagement work to ensure it makes a positive difference for staff and volunteers in the sector.

Policy engagement and delivery

• Project: Work, Informalisation and Place research centre policy engagement / UPEN ARI Sub-Committee work
• Partners: GLAA, ODLME, Police Forces + NBS and CCJ/ UPEN and Government Departments
• Time: Ongoing

NCE has worked with WIP colleagues in an integrated manner to support the work they are doing to influence policy with Office of the Director of Labour Market Enforcement, Department for Business, Energy, Industrial Strategy, Gangmaster Labour Abuse Authority, Responsible Car Wash Scheme, and others around the development of the Single Enforcement Body and new approaches to tackle non-compliant labour market practices. This requires understanding and showcasing research insights and expertise and supporting the engagement of policy makers and practitioners in this location to influence policy change. By understanding and balancing the needs of colleagues and policy and practice professionals we are charting a way forward to ensure our knowledge and skills informs current and future policy decisions.

UPEN Areas of Research Interest (ARI) Engagement

NCE has worked with the ARI sub-committee of the University Policy Engagement Network (UPEN) to support the development and production of Government Departments Areas for Research Interest documents and promotion. Through this work we have helped to shape, promote and host ARIs for academic and professional services colleagues at NTU and across the HEI sector of the UK.

Stakeholder identification and engagement

• Project: Financial Resilience with Groups, Identities and Health research group
• Partners: Local stakeholders including the city and county council + Psych
• Time: 1 month

NCE has a network of contacts and partners alongside a set of approaches to help identify and engage stakeholders for projects we work on. We have done this for all our projects and for projects with partners like the GIH research group. When they were exploring opportunities to develop partners for funding applications that wanted to explore the role social prescribing could play to enhance financial resilience, we helped them to network into local groups and the government’s Money and Pensions Service. See one of their recent journal papers which includes details on our support for a workshop we helped host.

Communication planning and delivery

• Project: Unfulfilled – Amazon Fulfilment Centre project
• Partners: SPS
• Time: 6 months

Ensuring your projects insights are shared with the most useful people and organisations is a continual challenge. NCE has worked across a range of platforms and sectors to help as a knowledge exchange conduit. We are currently developing a programme to support the sharing of insights from a new research project that has explored the work conditions in Amazon Fulfilment Centres. This entails the development of a comms strategy, web and print assets and a set of events and engagement opportunities. We will be launching this project report on Black Friday and are in the process of designing the event and communications material to support the report.

Student Placements / Internships

• Project: NCE Graduate Intern
• Partners: NCE
• Time: 1.2 months

NCE was set up with an intention to engage our students wherever possible. Following NCE's development we have now committed to offer graduate internship, work-based dissertation, and SPUR opportunities for 2021/22 onwards. We have a strong track record of delivering valuable SPUR placements linked to our projects and in the summer of 2021, we hosted our first graduate intern who produced a valuable report on one of our themes. We will look to roll this model out to future projects and programmes with our partners.