RYVU POLICY AND PRACTICE DISCUSSION

On 10 May, Dr Bianca Fadel was invited as a guest speaker to join the Community of Policy Practice series of online conversations as part of the Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) Project.

The Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement (CAPE) is a knowledge exchange and research project that explores how to support effective and sustained engagement between academics and policy professionals across the higher education sector. It is funded by Research England as a partnership between UCL and the universities of Cambridge, Manchester, Northumbria and Nottingham in the UK, in collaboration with the UK Government Office for Science, the Parliamentary Office for Science & Technology, Nesta, and the Transforming Evidence Hub.

On the 10th of May, Dr Bianca Fadel joined CAPE’s ‘Lunch and Learn’ series of conversations aimed at facilitating knowledge exchange about experiences of connecting research to policy. The informal online discussion was moderated by Jenny Hasenfuss, CAPE Project Coordinator at Northumbria University, and attended by 15 participants across professional services and academic staff at Northumbria.

During the event, key findings from the RYVU project were discussed, and particularly the RYVU policy briefings which share data, insights and recommendations on how to enhance the impacts of volunteering on refugee skills and employability, and how to promote fairer practices for recruiting, training and recognising refugee volunteer activity in ways that prevent volunteering from increasing the inequalities.

In addition to the briefings, Dr Fadel also emphasised the importance of creative and accessible outputs to connect research with public policy audiences. She presented the RYVU games as fun and interactive tools to explore volunteers’ experiences and understandings of volunteering, sharing ideas and insight for improving the policies and practices that shape refugee engagement in volunteering in Uganda and beyond.