After 16 years of delivering student social action with university students and communities, Student Hubs’ Trustee Board and Management Team have taken the difficult decision to cease operations of the charity in January 2025.
We appreciate this news may come as a shock for the students, alumni, former staff members and partners of ours over the years, and we firstly want to thank you all for your support, your engagement with social action, and your commitment to active citizenship.
Why we have made this decision
The reasons for this decision are complex, but include:
- Challenges faced by the higher education sector: the higher education sector has been undergoing turbulent times for some time now. With a mixture of budget cuts, redundancies, significant strategic changes, and lack of clarity from internal university teams about what 2024-25 and beyond will look like, it seems this will continue. As a charity that primarily works in partnership with universities, we are not able to be confident that the sector would stabilise in the short-term.
- Insufficient funding for our activities: we continue to believe that every student should have the experience to tackle social and environmental challenges during their time at university, and that this approach can help to address many of the challenges we see students and communities facing. However, this is not currently a funding priority, both for universities and for trusts and foundations who have previously supported our work. Without sufficient funding to support the staff who make our vision possible, we are not able to continue operating.
We are proud to be a people-focused organisation, and believe that closing in a planned way is in the best interest of our staff team, without whom this work would not be possible.
We want to thank our student volunteers for their tireless dedication to social issues, social action, and making change in their local area.
We want to thank our university partners for working with us to deliver innovative programmes, activities and place-based opportunities over the past 16 years.
We want to thank our incredible alumni community (of both students and former staff), who we aim to be in touch with across the next few months as we compile an in-depth report about the long-term impact of our work as part of our closure activities.
What’s next
Over the next six months, our team will be doing justice to the legacy that our work can leave in our unique position across the higher education sector and third sector, and we want this work to continue to resonate for years to come with students, universities, and socially impactful organisations.
Our remaining Hubs in Bristol, Cambridge and Southampton will be closing, and local activity will no longer take place beyond the end of July 2024. Please see our web pages in due course for more signposting about other ways students at these locations can get involved in local activities.
From August 2024 to January 2025, our national team of Simran Dhanjal-Field, CEO, Sophie Payne, Network Director, and Fiona Walsh McDonnell, Partnerships and Development Director, will be leading on a series of legacy events and resources.
These will include:
- The launch of our Impact Report 2023-24. We have already launched our local Hub reports for Bristol and Southampton for 2023-24;
- The launch of our Active Citizen Case Study, charting the long-term impact of our work on previous alumni across our 16 year history;
- Various toolkits and resources aimed at supporting student and community engagement by universities;
- Toolkits and resources aimed at small to medium third sector organisations, focused on learning from our approach to people and culture;
- One-off events, including webinars, workshops and an event which recognises our various achievements across 16 years.
We will share more information about these opportunities soon, and we encourage anyone with any questions to come speak to us. We would also love to hear from you about what resources, toolkits and information it would be useful for us to share as part of our legacy work, so please contact us with any feedback you may have.
Students and former staff members will still be able to secure references from members of our team, and more information about this and other areas will be shared before the organisation closes.
We will continue to stand for student social action as we wrap up our activities and the work of Student Hubs, and we know that student social action and active citizenship is vital for creating a world where we can imagine a better tomorrow. We hope you will join us for our legacy events and learn from our resources, and continue to champion social action no matter where the future takes you.
Thank you, and please get in touch with any questions, concerns, or feedback you may have.
You can email Simran Dhanjal-Field, CEO at info@studenthubs.org.
To keep up to date with the launch of our toolkits and webinars, amongst other Student Hubs news, please sign up to our partner newsletter here.
The Student Hubs Trustee Board and Management Team