A strategic approach led by our communities

Backed by a strong mandate from senior leadership following a review of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF), we have co-developed our strategic direction for Public and Community Engagement with Research (P&CER) at King’s with researchers, professional service staff and local communities.

A core priority was to ensure our strategic direction reflected and responded to the needs, interests and concerns of the external communities that engage with King’s research and who stand to benefit from it.

To develop our strategic approach, we therefore:

1. Interviewed and ran workshops with local community organisations, their members and lived experience advocates.

Find out more about this approach and subsequent recommendations.

2. Surveyed our research community across King’s to understand their current needs, barriers, and thoughts around P&CER.

3. Commissioned an external evaluation of our public engagement support to understand what works, what needs to be improved and how to build on success.

This work informed a set of objectives and principles to guide our approach.

• Develop a King’s approach for delivering Public and Community Engagement across all of our strategic priorities
• Build on and nurture our existing expertise and use our long-term partnerships with local, national and international communities and organisations
• Provide support for the range of engagement activities we do, building capacity to meet the different needs of our communities internally and externally
• Become a more open and accessible institution for our external communities
• Build monitoring and evaluation into our activities with opportunities to reflect on, learn and improve our practice
• Communicate our successes with our internal and external communities, sharing best practice and celebrating our mutual achievements
• Nominate a senior champion to support and oversee the growth of a college-wide network of engaged researchers, ambassadors and public engagement professionals
• Establish and promote reward and recognition measures to celebrate public and community engagement, aligned with impact, as a core research support activity

• Recognise and develop existing support – do no harm to what already works well and enhance it
• Be truly inclusive to promote an appreciation of diversity and the diverse viewpoints that will improve research. Be responsive to the needs and interests of our communities
• Demonstrate values of collegiality, respect, accountability, fairness and trust
• Embed properly resourced two-way engagement throughout the research cycle and ensure all researchers have access to support to achieve this
• Become reflective practitioners to support best practice and shared learnings