Community organising – part of a renewed vision for higher education?

Posted on: 26 June 2025 by Catherine Durose and Belinda Tyrrell in Blog

Just over six months on from Liverpool Citizens’ Founding Assembly, this week we joined over fifty delegates from health, community, housing and education organisations from across Liverpool to hear about the progress made across towards change.

Being part of an alliance seeking to improve the lives of people across Liverpool made us think about the future priorities of higher education as a sector.

Liverpool Citizens is the local chapter of the national charity, Citizens UK, who use community organising to build power to drive community change. Their broad-based approach rests on a commitment to the principle that we have ‘more in common’ than divides us. By listening to people about the issues that matter in their lives and building relationships of trust between people from different walks of life, community organising works to build ‘people power’.

The Founding Assembly brought together over 500 people from across the chapter’s member institutions with decision-makers including the leader of Liverpool City Council, Cllr Liam Robinson and Steve Rotheram, Mayor of Liverpool City Region, along with Arriva and Mersey Rail, to make asks for change to improve people’s lives from extending free school meals to improving public transport. This approach aims to get local people a seat at the decision-making table, recognising ‘if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’.

In today’s Assembly, we heard updates on progress towards meeting those asks, and the work of action groups on housing, transport, health and the cost of living. We spoke with school children, health workers, religious leaders, refugees and asylum seekers, all committed to working together to build change. We listened to powerful stories of the devastating realities of living in temporary accommodation, being unable to access healthcare and travel reliably to school and work. And we made pledges on how to take forward organising across our communities.

The Heseltine Institute is one of the founding members of Liverpool Citizens and we join over twenty universities across the UK who are part of their local chapter. As made clear in UK Secretary of State for Education Bridget Philipson’s recent letter to UK Vice Chancellors, universities are expected to play a greater civic role in their communities, and ensure they benefit from our work. Community organising has a crucial part to play in ensuring a renewed vision for the sector is grounded locally and supports wider social and economic change. As a significant community anchor institution in the city, community organising places the University of Liverpool at the heart of its local communities and offers a route to fulfilling our ambitions across research, education, and place.

From our work so far, we have already identified synergies between the issues coming up in the listening campaigns across Liverpool Citizens and the University’s priorities. These range from a lack of access to dental care in the city and the School of Dentistry’s vision for community outreach, the Guild’s campaigning on accessible and affordable public transport which aligns with the needs of many communities who are part of Liverpool Citizens, and the founding partnership between Liverpool Citizens and the University’s new Centre for People’s Justice driving social justice through legal practice. There is so much potential in this relationship.

Supported by a Creating Opportunities through Local Innovation Fellowship, the Heseltine Institute are now conducting relational conversations across the University forging new connections with Liverpool Citizens, contact us to find out more.

Community organising offers a means to enrich our relationships with local communities, working with rather than doing to. This is surely a crucial part of the future of our higher education sector.

Image credit: Timur Shakerzianov on Unsplash