By Hartwig Pautz, Greig Inglis, Colin Clark and Julie Clark. A Social Policy Association Opportunity Grants Project Report.
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The Paisley campus of the University of the West of Scotland was the locale for six workshops, between October 2024 and May 2025, which were dedicated to five different policy problems: housing; care and caring; cost-of-living crisis; training and employment; and health and wellbeing. The sixth workshop was used to identify what were the key ‘crosscutting’ policy problems and how action towards positive change should be undertaken on them.
Invited by the UWS-Oxfam Partnership and the University’s Sustainable Policy Analysis Research Centre, workshop participants came from a wide range of organisations. In particular third sector and public sector organisations sent representatives along, but the campus also welcomed representatives of private sector organisations. What united them all was that they had their bases in the local authority of Renfrewshire, with Paisley as its biggest town, and a keen interest to see Renfrewshire and its citizens ‘do better’.
True to the intent of the Opportunity Grant, the workshops brought together these different organisations to discuss how the five aforementioned policy problems play out in Renfrewshire, what should be done about them, and how action on the policy problems could be enabled or spurred on. While problem identification, through facilitated discussions, was relatively easy, establishing ‘best practice’ or ‘ways forward’ was, naturally, much more difficult. What became clearer with each workshop was that each of the five policy problems was connected to the other. This meant that there were also common roots to the problems – and that these roots should be tackled first and foremost. Key for many participants was the notion of ‘partnership’ and ‘communication’ as means to generate positive change. Here, the workshops contributed to how organisations in Renfrewshire are networked, as workshop participants exchanged contacts to explore whether cooperation between their organisations could be instigated or deepened and generally appreciated the opportunity to informally network.
A total of 80 people participated in the workshops, many participants attended more than one or two workshops. Each workshop was summarised immediately after the event and summaries were sent to workshop participants. The workshops were facilitated by senior academics and doctoral students alike. The latter were also involved in producing the summaries. Invites were sent widely to networks and individual organisations from the public, private and third sector. Here, a specially established contact database was of great help.
The workshop series may have come to an end, but the plan is to use the series and the University’s central location, its ambition to be an ‘anchor institution, and its standing in Renfrewshire, to facilitate a larger event in order to explore – and possibly even to found – a ‘Renfrewshire Network’. This event will take place in September; at the moment, this idea is explored with the University itself in order to see how far it can be the ‘hub’ for such a network.
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Image credit: Hartwig Pautz