Can universities use their spending power to deliver social change?
When you’re living through an era of austerity, proving your economic worth at every opportunity plays a vital part in everyone’s survival strategy.
Charities, Whitehall departments, local government… they all need to crunch the numbers to make their case.
Faced with the double whammy of government funding cutbacks and falling student numbers, universities are no different. Any opportunity to demonstrate impact will be taken, whether it’s the value of hosting a conference or the contribution of international students to a city economy.
But are our universities doing as much as they could to deliver economic and social impact, particularly when you consider their considerable spending power? In recent years I’ve helped Liverpool John Moores and Liverpool Hope universities to push more spend through fair trade organisations and social enterprises. I’m now in the process of doing the same at the University of York.
New Start readers will be well aware of the broader benefits this can bring, particularly when it’s targeted at local organisations. It creates job and training opportunities, helps recycle money within the local economy and enables universities to act as business incubators – nurturing enterprises with so much more added value. For example, York already has 12 social enterprises run by either staff or graduates.
Universities are uniquely positioned to take the lead on this agenda, both as academic thinkers and by putting their money where their mouth is. Aside from the moral imperative, it makes business sense. There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that a university’s stance on fair trade and social enterprise is an important factor for students and their parents, employers and other stakeholders.
The UK University Central Admission Service (UCAS) for undergraduate applicants surveyed its applicants on attitudes towards business responsibility and sustainability. Some 42% of student applicants said ‘teaching sustainable development on my course will help me to secure the job I want’ and 57% want to hear more in prospectuses about the institutions approach to sustainability. Similarly, a recent survey of graduate trainees working in business showed that 70% agreed sustainability is important to business and can create new opportunities and jobs. However, only 35% of them felt they had received sufficient training in sustainability from their universities.
There are also a number of emerging league tables which rank both universities and programmes with regard to their performance in these areas. The People and Planet Green League ranks UK institutions by their sustainability performance with a key measure being to what extent sustainability is embedded in the curriculum. Also the Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey provides an alternative ranking of business school MBAs based on the integration of responsible management education in the curriculum.
There are currently 140 Fairtrade universities in the UK, while 25 institutions have secured funding from UnLtd to help create start-up social enterprises. In the increasingly competitive world of higher education – where most students, whether home-grown or international, are fee-paying – it’s a way to stand out from the crowd. The University of York was an early mover in achieving Fairtrade University status and provides an excellent selection of Fairtrade-certified products available right across the campus. The university’s head chef Andrew Wood also decided to use fair trade products such as Divine Chocolate produced by social enterprise Divine for all external and internal events. It adds to the story of why we are different.
But this shouldn’t just be a case of tinkering at the edges to get good PR. It needs to be an ethos that runs through the institution, influencing spending decisions across the board. The approach I’ve taken at my previous universities has been to set up a Fairtrade steering group made up of senior staff from across the institution. Crucially, this includes the procurement team – the people who ultimately put spending plans into practice.
Aside from establishing a Fairtrade steering group, there are practical steps all universities can take in achieving Fairtrade status. Firstly, staff and students and procurement need to work together to select the products which can be switched to Fairtrade. It is then key to communicate these decisions to staff and students by using annual events such as Fairtrade Fortnight to raise awareness of the social, economic and environmental benefits procuring Fairtrade products brings to disadvantaged communities. Furthermore, embedding issues of global trade justice into the university curriculum is a great way of creating conversations between staff and students on how procurement and consumption can have an impact on sustainable development.
There are also regional purchasing consortia in higher education that can speed up the process by preparing frameworks and contracts that help universities target social enterprise suppliers.
Procurement is an area that all institutions are looking at as a way to drive better value for money. It’s also an area that can deliver better social value from their spend.
There is so much wrong with this article but I will focus on the most egregious part – the sheer cynicism. And I thought it was us right-wing loons who were supposed to be cynical.
The programmes described a self-serving while wrapped up in goody-goody stuff like “fair trade” (not enough space to say why this is a terrible thing that is damaging the very people it claims to help) and “social enterprise” (as if the direction of surplus is more important than the conduct of the business).
Read this:
“There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that a university’s stance on fair trade and social enterprise is an important factor for students and their parents, employers and other stakeholders.”
Now apart from not being able to find any of this evidence, I’m surprised that the marketing motive for the actions is revealed!
What is worse is the corruption of the university – instead of presenting the information, discussing it and allowing students to arrive at a view, we see the bending of the curriculum to a given political (and fair trade is a political movement not a ‘moral’ or economic one) position:
“Furthermore, embedding issues of global trade justice into the university curriculum is a great way of creating conversations between staff and students on how procurement and consumption can have an impact on sustainable development.”
This is bias and propaganda – universities should be places of true debate not vehicles for brainwashing.
All this is before we’ve even touched on the extremely dubious assertion that “social enterprise” is somehow superior in economic development terms to other – presumably “antisocial” – enterprises. In regeneration terms this is arrant nonsense – any increase in total economic activity helps regenerate.
So yes I am appalled and in equal measure saddened by the approach described here.
I loved the idea of “anti-social enterprise” as a term that could gain currency. I am sure most of us can think of companies appropriate to the description. But it is the social enterprise reference that interested me.
I would not push the notion that procurement is only good if it is using social enterprises. What I do like, however, is the way many social enterprises can “spend money twice” insofar as they are often able to deliver the economic part of the contract and also produce social impact as a by-product of that delivery. For example, B4 Box (www.b4box.co.uk) wins and delivers commercial construction contracts which it delivers using a labour pool drawn from local unemployed people which it trains. No grant money is used, the construction is completed and more people have jobs and training. I think that a sound result and is the reason I support social enterprise.
I am very interested in how we can all use money twice so the notion that people might look at procurement budgets to see what additional value they might drive is compelling. How one sells the idea of doing this (for it will involve work and risk) is the challenge. For many corporates there is the chance to hit CSR targets by using their existing procurement budgets rather than a new CSR budget. For universities there could be a link between a procurement strategy which involves social enterprise and students choosing to enrol. However, I suspect that story is harder to tell and much harder to sell at this stage.