Building links between town and gown

Vice-Chancellor Robert Van de Noort has a monthly column with Reading Today and Wokingham Today, in which he shares University news and updates with the local community. This is his October 2022 column. 

Last week, we hosted our first Community Forum event since before the pandemic. It was a real pleasure to welcome local people onto campus for an open and honest discussion about the University, its presence in the area and its links with the local community.

The forum brought together more than 50 local people and 20 University staff and student colleagues.

We aim to be a university that is engaged with the world around us, and this was a great example of that.

Since becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University, it has been important to me that we further build on the already strong links between town and gown.

We want to be a University for Reading, not just the University of Reading.

The Community Forum gave attendees the opportunity to hear about our recent review of community resource and the proposed new model for engagement.

The recommendations include increasing the resource, driving support for students living off campus through a welfare-led approach and establishing an internal Engaged University Steering Group to provide better strategic coordination with the local community.

There was interesting discussion about what mattered most to the local community that the University could support.

The group shared some strong ideas about how to continue to build positive relationships with students. Feedback from community members ranged from requests for better joint working on sustainability and climate change, improved communication around University activity in the local community, and tackling parking problems. We also had the suggestion of holding a local community day, and improved access to rooms and buildings on campus for people to hold local community events.

There were detailed conversations around students living off campus, sustainability and climate change, and community events on campus. This enabled some more targeted discussion on these specific areas and generated some great ideas.

Overall, the event was incredibly positive with some fantastic ideas raised and discussed. I would like to thank all of those who took the time to attend and engage in these important discussions, on which we will now reflect, and where possible, take action.

This is just one step in our commitment to working more closely with the community, listening and responding to needs and ideas, and improving opportunities to speak face to face with members of the University. Initial feedback from the attendees was that the evening was very useful and informative, and a step towards better collaboration.

We will continue to engage with our local community and if you have any thoughts, ideas or questions about this work we would love to hear from you.

You can get in touch by emailing community@reading.ac.uk