Globalisation is firmly embedded in the University’s strategy and major achievements have been made against strategic targets, with the University of Warwick now in the top 50 ranking of world universities. The University has links with universities overseas; it has a growing population of alumni living around the world; it has international volunteering programmes helping educate children in India and Africa.

On campus, Warwick recognises and celebrates its cultural diversity. This has been developing for some time. Almost 20 years ago the then Chancellor, Sir Shridath (Sonny) Ramphal addressed the Student’s Union at a fledgling One World Week with a speech entitled ‘One Earth, One World: The Perversion of “Otherness"'. Today, we have the Go Global programme, a collaboration between the International Office and the Students’ Union to signpost students to opportunities for global experiences, both by going abroad and here on the University campus.

So, how does globalisation fit into a commission to investigate the future role of the University of Warwick in the local region?

Warwick Volunteers believes that ‘charity begins at home’. We aim to enable people from the University to volunteer in Coventry, Kenilworth, Leamington Spa and Warwick. We believe that global volunteering does not have to take place overseas; there are opportunities for students to develop cultural competences by volunteering alongside people from other cultures locally. The opportunities for cultural exchanges are many and varied. Last year we had 83 student volunteer project leaders and over 2000 registered volunteers. Student volunteers from many countries and cultures work together through projects which they lead and develop, forming friendships and sharing ideas on how their project can best benefit local people. Statistics gathered from the 2014/15 academic year showed that:

• 43% of Warwick Volunteers members were international students.
• 68% ‘strongly agree’ or ‘agree’ that volunteering has given them more opportunities to work and socialise with people from other cultures.
• 80% ‘strongly agree’ or ‘agree’ that volunteering has increased their sense of community or their place within the local area.

The number of people who benefit from the enthusiasm, dedication and desire of students can be demonstrated by the number of organisations we work with in Coventry and Warwickshire. In 2014/15, students volunteered through Warwick Volunteers with 99 charities and community organisations and 48 schools. Volunteers in schools listen to primary children read and help them with English pronunciation; they support with language tuition enabling children to benefit from learning the language from native speakers; volunteers are sometimes asked to support children who do not speak English to help them settle into the school by communicating with them in their own language. The need for this type of support varies tremendously in this region. In the Coventry schools we work with, on average 25% of children do not speak English as their first language. In Leamington, the average is 17%. However, in a primary school in the north of Coventry, 83% of pupils’ first language is not English. Volunteers spend time in after-school clubs and youth clubs on a wide variety of projects, which may involve some form of cultural exchange and potentially raise children’s aspirations to travel, or their knowledge of other countries and cultures. Local people, therefore, benefit from the diverse cultural mix of students volunteering in their community.

High on the list of projects which interest student volunteers are those which involve justice and human rights. Warwick Volunteers has offered pro-bono legal advice for many years, working with student societies, local advice centres and supported by local solicitors. This year, the project has grown in popularity and has split into two groups to incorporate an increase in students who want to become involved. The pro-bono advice centres are run in areas of Coventry and Leamington Spa where there is a multi-cultural population. This year, we are also supporting the Islamic Society with a new volunteering project idea. Their project aims to welcome migrants to Coventry and help them settle into the city. Islamic Society members have told us they empathise with what immigrants may be facing, as at some point in history many of their own families experienced similar issues.

I have given above some examples of the type of volunteering which Warwick Volunteers undertake in the community to illustrate the cultural exchange between Warwick’s multi-racial community and the multi-racial communities of Coventry and Warwickshire. However, I have refrained from including many statistics for two reasons:

Firstly, it is seemingly impossible for us to measure the impact of cultural exchange and indeed, the whole point about community volunteering is that it is inclusive.

Secondly, our KPIs usually include numbers of volunteers and number of community partners. BiGGAR Economics have gathered numbers from Warwick Volunteers to assess economic impact of volunteering in the community. Whilst I understand the need to have numerical data, it is not an indicator of the impact of student volunteering in the community, or indeed, the value of volunteering in the local community to the students themselves.

In 2011, a report by the New Economics Foundation challenged the assumption that university performance should be evaluated according to financial returns and impact on economic growth as these ‘valuations ignore the role universities play in building a stronger and more tolerant society – both directly through public outreach and indirectly through the student university experience.’ The report recommended that ‘Universities should seek to maximise their public value and impact. For example, by making the most of activities such as student volunteering…and bringing together individuals from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.’¹

More recent research by Warwick’s Professor Helen Spencer-Oatey and Dr Daniel Dauber also challenges traditional methods of measuring internationalisation and argues that gathering numbers is not a useful or sufficient measure. A far more valuable measure is to ask students to reflect on what they have learned from volunteering, about themselves, their own attitudes to cultural differences, their ability to hold multi-cultural perspectives.² The University has been developing tools and training to support students to understand their personal growth in this area. Student Careers and Skills are developing a Warwick Graduate Attributes Profile to give direction to students’ development and enable the articulation of the value of their unique University experience. ‘Global’ is one of the attributes being proposed. The Office for Global Engagement and staff in Applied Linguistics have collaborated to produce a GoGlobal training module. This was originally designed for students who are going abroad but has been used for volunteers on campus and is currently being adjusted for ‘Internationalisation at home’. Running alongside this module, staff in Applied Linguistics have developed a GoGET evaluation tool (Go Global Evaluation Tool), with 3 different stages, to help students reflect on their GoGlobal journey and acquire a feedback report on their growth at the end of the 3rd stage. Student Careers and Skills also provide the tools for students to record their volunteering experience and reflect on the skills they have learnt. MyPortfolio (Mahara) has a volunteering template to encourage students to record their experiences and skills developed through volunteering and this could be developed further to incorporate reflection on international and cultural skills gained from volunteering in the community.

However, how do we measure the qualitative impact of ‘global’ volunteering on the local community? How do we know what difference we have made by sharing cultures and being welcoming and inclusive to all irrespective of their nationality? How does the local community find out about the benefits of the global mix of University students and residents? How do we maximise their public value and impact?

And finally – how do we come together as a University so we can maximise the public value and impact of all volunteering in the local community? At present, we have disparate groups of students, staff and individuals volunteering through student societies and departments or on a personal level. If the University were to collate this information into one place, and find ways to address the questions posed above, the University’s global reach might be more clearly illustrated in Coventry and Warwickshire alongside the international league tables.

Helen Blunt
Manager - Warwick Volunteers

October 2015

 

¹ Degrees of Value, New Economics Foundation, 2011, http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/degrees-of-value

² Spencer-Oatey, H. and Dauber, D., How internationalised is your university?, ‘Working Papers’, http://www.warwick.ac.uk/globalpadintercultural