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Community Reps is a project concerned with the relationship between students moving into an area and the residents who were living there before the students’ arrival. Ben Haddock – who is studying at the University of Nottingham – noticed how, even though these people are living around the same area, most don’t know who their neighbours are. He thinks that the age gap and “culture clash” can sometimes cause tensions in these areas.
It’s this tension and lack of communication that Ben wants to tackle with Community Reps. The idea started in his home town of Sutton Coldfield where he did a similar project, doing surveys to find out which problems residents were most worried about in their area and then trying to work out how they could solve them together. This direct approach to solving problems is something that Ben thinks could work even better with access to such a large population of students to help out.
The project involves collecting research from certain areas of Nottingham where a mix of students and non-students live. In some cases the results will come from knocking on people’s doors for a quick chat, in other cases there will be coffee mornings inviting people to the students’ union to talk about the place they live and how they’d like to see it improve. From the results, Community Reps will figure out what issues people are most concerned about around their city. These could be noise levels, roads in need of repair, litter, or maybe people feeling unsafe in their own street. They then need to try and solve these problems, which is when students and non-students can work together to launch campaigns at the students’ union or approach local government to try and make a change.
The hope for Ben is that working together to see an issue and to try and solve it will also help improve the relationship between students moving into accommodation and their neighbours who live nearby.
Ben said, “I can’t praise Live UnLtd enough. It’s not just the money side of things; the advantage of working with Live UnLtd is having a personal development manager at the end of a phone. I’d happily recommend Live UnLtd to anyone.”
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