Learning for the Greater Good: The Citizens UK Partnership

What was the collaboration?

Experiential learning that serves students and society alike.

Citizens UK is a civil society organisation built on community organising, bringing local groups together to campaign on issues such as fair pay, housing and immigration. Its partnership with Northeastern University London stands alongside the University’s partnerships large commercial corporations, but with a different centre of gravity. Where those partnerships prepare students for corporate careers, Citizens UK gives students the chance to put their learning directly in the service of community organisations and the people they represent, so the benefit runs in two directions at once: students gain real experiential learning, and the skills they build, from manifesto writing to stakeholder communication, are put to work on causes with a genuine public benefit.

What was involved?

Citizens UK is built directly into taught curriculum through the political science course Political Arguments in Action. Here, the collaboration takes the form of an impact challenge centred on manifesto writing, a skill that is widely used in political practice but underdeveloped and understudied in formal research. Students begin by analysing real Citizens UK manifestos in class, using that analysis to build their own guidelines, before writing manifestos of their own, a flipped learning approach that puts practitioner material, and a practitioner’s sense of what serves the public good, at the centre of the module rather than at its edges.

The collaboration has required active shaping by the course team to keep both the student learning and the civic purpose intact. Citizens UK’s own method for developing manifesto “asks” relies on listening campaigns, in which member organisations hold one-to-one conversations with a sample of their constituents, a method rooted in genuinely hearing what a community needs. That approach is not straightforward to replicate in a classroom, since students do not have access to real constituents and formal listening campaigns would require ethics approval. Dr Dimova built additional scaffolding so students could produce manifestos without that step, giving them an approach closer to that used by political consultancies working for parties, alongside direct exposure to Citizens UK’s own grassroots method. Rather than a weakness, this gave students a way to compare a consultancy approach against one built around genuine community voice.

The partnership’s second strand runs through co-op placements and the In-the-Field Experiential Project, a credit-bearing course that runs alongside a placement with a partner organisation. The module meets once every two weeks rather than on the usual weekly timetable, which eases the workload of a full academic course so that students can give their best to the placement itself. Sessions prepare students for professional environments and bring cohorts together to share experiences across their different placements, alongside a final presentation in which each student explains and reflects on their placement.