Knowledge Broker Stories: Knowledge Broker Through Partnership Working

In the summer of 2009 I presented my Inaugural lecture to mark being made Professor of Child, Family and Community Health at the University of Brighton. Often an Inaugural traces the intellectual roots of professorial achievement and is aimed at a university audience. But for me it provided a unique opportunity to talk about working with the community on issues that are important to them. The title of my talk? ‘What makes us resilient?’ Determined that this presentation should be fully accessible to the public, I worked hard to make it part of the Brighton Fringe Festival. Astonishingly my talk was so oversubscribed that I’ve now had to deliver it several times in different locations. My kids are getting very bored of turning up for it, and soon I’ll have to bribe them to come. My inaugural tells the story of how, from a background of poverty and disadvantage, I ended up doing a doctorate at the University of Oxford, adopting three children with special needs from the care system, training to be a practitioner working directly with disadvantaged children and families myself, and researching practical approaches to resilience.


I’ve always tried to live by the now famous slogan ‘the personal is political’, and intellectually understand my career narrative to be embedded in this term. Throughout my life I’ve worked closely with those whose lives are barely – or perhaps invisibly – touched by the concerns of the university. Moving on from a research investigation into what was wanted by parents and carers in the way of fostering and adoption support services, I began working as a psychotherapist in the child and adolescent mental health services, becoming increasingly interested in practical ways to work with children with complex needs. And, with the emphasis on practice, my research work relates the findings of hard research to practical interventions, feeding back into the research process knowledge of the needs, the practicalities, and the effectiveness of resilience work. I am working through several ‘Resilient Therapy Communities of Practice’ (RT CoPs) set up on the south coast of England. Communities of practices are groups of people who join together with a passion for a shared interest. Ours is helping children with complex needs to bounce back through applying the resilience evidence base to practice and to family life. The term RT CoPs is a bit of a mouthful, but what we do is very practical. These RT CoPs are composed of parents, carers, students, health and social care practitioners and researchers. We meet together once a month in a facilitated space to apply RT to our different settings and co-create books, training materials, etc. to support the development of RT. CoPs are a template for other social concern groups, not just to be a sounding board, but to be active investigators in their own right.


Luckily, the University of Brighton has always been supportive of a ‘partnership’ approach to my research, and over the last few years the University’s Community-University Partnership Programme (Cupp) has been able to expand its own work substantially, along with an overall shift in emphasis at the Corporate level towards partnership and collaborative working http://www.brighton.ac.uk/cupp/. In an ambitious collaboration, 40 community members and academics produced a ‘warts-and-all’ book on our collective experiences in community-university partnership development.


As Academic Director of the Community University Partnership Programme, I have learnt a great deal about developing mutually beneficial partnerships with communities and their organisations, and about incentivising other academics to become involved in this type of scholarship. Over the past year, I have been invited to Canada, Sweden, Germany and Australia to talk about, and to talk to, those involved in the practice of exchanging ideas. I never lose an opportunity to stress how important it is to draw strength and knowledge from the local community, and how community partners need to lead developments too, otherwise we academics are in danger of finding ourselves talking only to each other. I stress that partnership working is a two-way process that can, and should, transform not just what work is selected for investigation, but the manner in which it is undertaken, and the processes by which it is made available more widely.

All of this quite a lot to juggle, but at the same time, is immensely rewarding. If there is one sticking point to pick out, it is not the common narrative about recognition of my work in tenure and promotion etc. Rather, it is a disappointment that I do not always succeed in persuading academics and university establishments to put the kind of hard work necessary into including community members and their organisations in ‘meta-level’ conversations and decisions about community-university partnerships (for example at conferences, seminars and working groups). Time and time again community university partnership conferences take place with but a smattering of community participants present. I know from my own experience, that capacity building in this area is very complicated and time-consuming. Simply inviting people to attend events isn’t enough. It involves meticulous, long-term relational work, the imagination to recognise the barriers to community participation (funds, time, inaccessibility of academic discourse, perceived strategic relevance etc.), and the determination to overcome them. Hard work and a tall order on top of everything else I know. Yet, if those of us with leadership roles in universities don’t put the work in here, we risk community members and their organisations forever being peripheral players, rather than co-producers of knowledge. All this strongly reminds me of the mental health service user slogan ‘Nothing about us without us.’ Would that this were true in the world of community-university partnerships.


As my colleagues and collaborators would be the first to point out, these kinds of partnerships are not easy – power dynamics are rife as the literature in this area discusses at length. Also, I have enough self-knowledge from years of lying on a couch whilst training to be a psychotherapist to realise that I can be a right pain to work with at times. But at least life is never dull in our world of community university partnerships, and there are always spaces to be found in which we genuinely deliver on mutually beneficial work. I firmly believe that when we get it right, working together produces better practice and better scholarship. Putting people in touch with one another for mutual benefit is a privilege, as is listening to the stories people tell us about their concerns. Making my own, albeit it sometimes bungled attempts to develop a career within this paradigm, is a clear priority for me. Equally valuable is the opportunity this kind of knowledge brokering presents to evidence that universities can and do offer their services to others, for the greater benefit of all, not just for those lucky enough to be ‘ivory tower’ educated.


Resources referred to:

Aumann, K., and Hart, A. 2009 Helping children with complex needs bounce back: Resilient Therapy for parents and professionals. Jessica Kingsley: London ISBN 978-1-84310-948-8


Hart, A., Maddison, E., and Wolff, D.(eds) 2007 Community-university partnerships in practice. Niace:Leicester ISBN 978-1-86201-317-9


Hart, A. and Blincow, D. with Thomas, H. 2007 Resilient Therapy with children and families. Brunner Routledge: London ISBN 978-0-415-40384-9


Personal profile: http://www.brighton.ac.uk/snm/contact/details.php?uid=ah111

Angie Hart

To cite:


MLA format

Hart, Angie, "Knowledge broker stories: Knowledge Broker through partnership working." Weblog Entry. Knowledge Mobilization Works Blog. Posted November 10, 2009. Accessed (enter date). http://bit.ly/33ZW1t

APA format

Hart, A. Knowledge broker stories: Knowledge Broker through partnership working. Retrieved (enter date) from http://www.knowledgemobilization.net [http://bit.ly/33ZW1t]

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