Role
Carolin Hess is a 0.6 FTE research fellow in Social Policy at the Department of Social Work, Care, and Community at NTU.
Career overview
Carolin holds a Master’s degree in International Social and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has previously worked as a research assistant at the London Business School, and as a graduate teaching assistant at the University College London, until she joined Nottingham Trent University as a research associate in social policy in March 2021. Her research has covered areas such as digital and social exclusion, educational intergenerational mobility, and migration, and more recently homelessness and multiple exclusion.
Since 2023, Carolin is also a PhD student at the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce at King's College Lonon (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/carolin-hess) and has been awarded Doctoral funding from the NIHR School for Social Care Research. Her PhD investigates access to and support for women experiences homelessness and multiple exclusion.
Research areas
Carolin has been involved several policy-informing research projects, primarily in the areas of social exclusion, poverty and multiple exclusion homelessness.
Carolin is currently supporting the local evaluation of the government-led ‘Changing Futures programme’ in Nottingham. This programme delivers frontline and strategic system-change work for single adults facing homelessness and multiple disadvantages (referring to a combination of drug and alcohol dependency, mental ill-health, criminality, and experiences of domestic abuse and violence).
The Changing Futures programme builds on the successes of Framework's Opportunity Nottingham programme which was funded by the Big Lottery’s national programme, ‘Fulfilling Lives: Supporting Adults with Multiple Needs’. NTU’s engagement with Changing Futures is part of a long-standing relationship between Framework and NTU. Led by Dr Graham Bowpitt, this relationship has previously provided numerous insights into addressing multiple exclusion homelessness through various evaluation projects and an eight-year local evaluation contract (2014-22), worth £280,000, with Opportunity Nottingham.
Carolin has continued this legacy by exploring opportunities and barriers for single adults experiences homelessness in Nottingham and assessing the impact of Changing Futures in addressing multiple exclusion homelessness. As part of this role, Carolin has led studies on gender-specific and intersectional barriers faced by women experiencing multiple disadvantage in their access to appropriate health and housing services in Nottingham. She also investigated the value and impact of the Changing Futures wrap-around multi-disciplinary team, partnership working, and community engagement and assessed the implementation of ‘co-production’ in Changing Futures’ service delivery. The outcomes of this work and the full reports can be viewed at https://www.changingfuturesnottingham.co.uk/learning/.
External activity
From 2021-2023, Carolin was co-convening a module for social work students on “Social Sciences Research Methods” at Akkon-Hochschule Berlin.
Publications
Carolin Publication