Susan Grant and Karen Coyle with GCU staff, student and
community partners and volunteers at 2019 Citizen Science Day.
and are focused on reducing inequalities
and improving health and wellbeing
in Glasgow.
Since 2012 and the strategic development
of Community and Public Engagement at
GCU, CPE has worked with 601 internal and
external partners to deliver 232 projects
and events involving 1,199 members of
staf and 1,428 students from across the
university and engaged 22,197 members
of the public. Twitter, the main tool for
sharing stories of this engagement via
@GCUEngagement has built up
2,680 followers.CPE 2019-20
In 2019-20, due to the Coronavirus 19
pandemic, 11 CPE activities had to be
cancelled from March 2020 –
June 2020 (expected combined audience
of over 1000 people). This impacted mostly
on CPE’s Glasgow Science Festival activities
which had been months in the planning
in the local community and on campus.
However, under the GCU Engagement and
GCU STEM brands, CPE still engaged 940
members of the public across 34 activities
involving 109 members of staf (53 unique)
from across all academic schools and
several support professional departments
at GCU’s Glasgow campus, 195 GCU
students and 66 internal and external
partners (23 diferent external partners).
This included activity prior to Scottish
Government social distancing restrictions
but also online engagement after;
something that is likely to form the main
strategy for CPE in 2020-21.
CPE People
CPE is hosted within the Community
Engagement Ofce in the William Harley
Building (H219) alongside the Scottish
Government funded Skills Recognition
Hub project to recognise and accredit
knowledge and experience of migrants
to Scotland run by Dr Ima Jackson and
Breda Moran from The School of Health
and Life Sciences.
The Executive Lead for CPE at GCU
is Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Learning,
Teaching and Student Experience,
Professor Valerie Webster. CPE is
managed by 0.8FTE CPE Coordinator,
Susan Grant who works with a range
of external and internal partners to
develop and deliver the portfolio
including Assistant Vice-Principal CPE
Professor Stephen Webb and Lecturer
Dr Heather Lynch from GCU Social
Work; Gillian McCallum, Research
Impact and Knowledge Exchange;
Carol McCallum, GCU Archivist and
her team in Archives and Special
Collections; colleagues from GCU
Outreach and works closely with
Karen Coyle and Ivana Covic as part
of the CPE & Graduate School
partnership.Susan also works with
Cricket Scotland’s Community
Engagement Coordinator, Ammar Ashraf
part-funded by GCU. Through the work
of Ammar and his team, for the last
three years, GCU has supported the
engagement of hundreds of children
and adults from Black and minority
ethnic communities in Glasgow through
grassroots cricket in addition to the
numbers quoted above.
CPE is made possible because of
these collaborations and the in-kind
contributions from community partners
and staf and student volunteers.Strategic Importance of CPE
CPE is regularly asked to contribute
evidence and narrative to strategic
returns such as the Times Higher
Education Impact Rankings where GCU
was ranked 43rd in the world for social
innovation in 2020; GCU’s Outcomes
CPE 2019-20 4