Embracing the challenge to resurrect community support for universities, Griffith University has developed a clear evidence-based approach to grab attention.
The University is committing to contributing a quarter of a million hours of free or low-cost services to Queenslanders, demonstrating relevant contributions to the community, Vice-Chancellor Carolyn Evans told Future Campus.
While the University will continue to focus operations on education and research metrics, Professor Evans noticed that communities really valued small acts of community service carried out by students and staff – which in aggregate, added up to a huge direct contribution to services for the communities in and around the university’s campuses.
“The Griffith Community Hours Program will commit 250,000 hours of free or low cost hours of service to the communities that we serve, providing health, dental and psychology clinics, free legal and tax advice, free music and creative arts instruction and direct voluntary services, such as cleaning up areas of the beach or bush,” Professor Evans said.
“At our dental clinic, we will see 250 or 350 patients a day and they are almost all on health cards. So it’s almost all free or at reduced cost. That has radically reduced the wait time for people needing dentistry treatment.
“That’s an unambiguously good thing. And then I see a tax clinic that is helping people in Logan, one of Australia’s lowest SES communities, with a lot of small businesses.
“When we started adding it up, it was huge – but we had not seen that ourselves until we asked the question. I realised that if we could communicate that better to the public, it might give them a real sense of what is going on, not just a good thing here or a good thing there, that they might see in a newspaper article or social media post.
“We are pulling it together in a really visible way to say to the people of Queensland, we are going to give you a quarter of a million hours or more – and we think we will be able to do that for every year of our new strategy.”
Professor Evans said initiatives that cut through to the community, demonstrating impact in areas that really mattered to community were important to rebuild social licence.
“I do think the sector probably needed to come together and speak with a more united, more principled voice to assist individual universities not being picked off one by one on some of these issues and also sometimes to have had a stronger and faster response to genuine and serious concerns in areas like sexual assault and sexual harassment,” Professor Evans said.
“We perhaps need to be more united as a sector, more responsive and listen a little bit more carefully and thoughtfully to what our critics say.”
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