Social Purpose

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In our 10 year strategy, we at UAL are committed to becoming a purpose-driven university, and a few people have said to me that we already are. Social purpose is in the DNA of who we are as an organisation. But what we mean by becoming purpose-driven is actually embedding those values, that sense of our mission in the world, and the value of creativity in everything we do so that it's in all of our teaching, all of our research, and also in how we run ourselves as an organisation and how we engage with the world outside as well.

This couldn't be more important because the world really does need creativity. We see crisis all around us. We know about the climate emergency, we know about racial and social injustice everywhere we look, and we have an incredible opportunity as a university where knowledge is both created and shared to be part of the solution.

We're already on the right track. If you wandered around the summer shows or the graduate showcase, you can't help but be impressed by the way our students with the support of their teachers are engaging with the future, engaging with the kind of people we want to be, with new materials, with sustainability, with the role that makers and creatives need to play in building the future that we so desperately want.

What we need to do is make sure that the whole system, the whole architecture of UAL, is really pushing in that direction rather than asking people to push the boundaries all by themselves. The question for me is, how we make that happen.

So we listened to people from all across the university, staff and students alike, to really understand what people wanted from the social purpose transition? What did it mean to them for this to be a social purpose university? And people had lots of ideas, people also had a few concerns so we really wanted to put together a plan that reflected all of that, and that's exactly what we've done.

One of the things that we realised was particularly important was to align everybody around a common set of social purpose goals so that we were all pulling in the same direction towards those things that we felt were most important. And in the plan we set out what those 4 goals are. The first one is to do with the creativity of this institution that is at its heart, and how we can use that to bring joy, meaning and purpose to people's lives.

The second one, is really about diversity and how can we celebrate humanity in all its forms. Thirdly, it's about stabilising our climate, regenerating our environment. And finally, how do we build a more just and equitable world. As projects and programmes come up for review, that's the moment we will see how to embed social purpose and really work with people across the university to understand, how does it feel to put social purpose into your work every single day?

And it's not just about what we do internally, it's also about how we influence the external world, government and industry, and other universities, so that UAL can really be a role model for what it feels like to be led by your social purpose.

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