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About us

Teesside University Community Hub

The Teesside University Community Hub is the gateway for community and voluntary organisations to access the full range of skills and services the University can provide and to collaborate on projects and funding opportunities.

This could include:

  • funding opportunities
  • access to specialist expertise from our academics, researchers, students and graduates
  • supporting our students and graduates through volunteering opportunities and work placements
  • sharing your professional sector knowledge with our students

Events

Register your interest if you would like to be updated about future events

Access specialist support

The University offers a range of low or no-cost specialist support to the community and voluntary sector.

We offer: help with your marketing campaigns, management training for your team leaders, advice on how to make your data collection more efficient, legal advice and guidance on researching background information for funding bids.

Law Clinic

Offering free legal advice, guidance and representation to the public. Our law students provide this service as part of their Law LLB (Hons) degree and you can get help with a variety of legal matters including employment, civil disputes and consumer law.

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Teesside Business Clinic

Teesside Business Clinic offers tailored consultancy services to small businesses, social enterprises, sole traders, and start-ups in the Tees Valley - free of charge. We offer both a marketing clinic and an enterprise clinic covering everything from digital marketing and PR to event planning and project management

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TUCAN

TUCan is an innovative in-house digital production studio based at Teesside University. experienced academic staff work alongside top graduate talent to create a range of video and animations to demonstrate the work of your organisation.

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Our Partners

Barefoot Kitchen CIC

"Barefoot Kitchen CIC is a social enterprise, based in Middlesbrough, that delivers 'plot to plate projects for people, places and the planet.' As well as creating new spaces for people to grow and harvest food, we also provides opportunities to prepare and share the food they've created, building health, wellbeing and fairness into our local communities. We feel it's important that Middlesbrough is a food resilient town, and that its residents are well supported to deal with the challenges they face.

Much of our work is collaborative and it's usually innovative: we enjoy working to our own strengths and enabling others to do so too. Partnerships are the network that can support our communities in times of challenge and provide the best possible levels of service. Creativity enables us to adapt to shifting dynamics and respond comprehensively and effectively to the changes around us.

Our current projects include Middlesbrough's Farmstart programme, where we are supporting amateur growers into developing food enterprises; working with Middlesbrough's most recent arrivals to increase food and outdoor learning opportunities as a means to create supportive friendships; supporting a community group to develop a growing space whilst collecting data to help with the co-design of green spaces in a regeneration programme; delivering a 'lower carbon' catering service that specifically includes and celebrates ingredients produced by local growers to improve financial autonomy and reduce environmental impacts."

Catherine Howell, Barefoot Kitchen

Student placements and internships

Our students and graduates contribute to organisations of all shapes and sizes, bringing enthusiasm, creativity, innovation and problem solving to help your organisation thrive. When employing a student or graduate for a placement opportunity, you'll have support and guidance from our team of friendly and experienced advisers. We'll help you select the right placement scheme for your organisation, offer a recruitment and matching service and help you through nay paperwork you may need to complete.

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Volunteering

Volun-tees provides a free service to local and national voluntary organisations and can help you promote volunteering opportunities in the community, promote the services of your organisation, raise awareness of potential fundraising opportunities and provide networking opportunities.

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Jess Tones, Changing Futures North East (CFNE)

My work specifically focuses on working with children and young people who live in care (such as in foster care or in a children's residential home). CFNE first started working with the Volun-tees team to support students into fulfilling volunteering roles around four years ago. Since then, the relationship between CFNE and the team has grown massively.

Volun-tees plays a key role in helping vulnerable children have people around them who care and listen to them. University volunteers befriend and support children living in care, calling them on a regular basis and meeting up twice a month to do fun activities such as bowling.

The most important impact the student volunteers have within the charity is the positive experiences and memories they build with the young person they support. The student volunteers build up trusting, safe relationships with children who have suffered a lot of family and relationship breakdown. They have improved the lives of local children through volunteering with CFNE and would highly recommend other local organisations to engage with what Teesside University students have to offer.

Julian Penton, Hartlepower

Teesside University is opening its doors even wider to voluntary and community sector organisations through the launch of their Community Hub. They've made it straightforward to access academic researchers, student volunteers, potential trustees, student work placements and free legal guidance. This represents huge opportunities for community benefit.

Hartlepower has joined the steering group set up by the University to develop the Community Hub. The first challenge is to raise awareness of the Community Hub as widely as possible across the Tees Valley voluntary and community sector.

We have also used the University's volunteer portal, Volun-tees. We set up a profile on the portal, offering volunteering positions and we received multiple expressions of interest.

The University, alongside Hartlepool's Community Led Inclusion Partnership, Hartlepool Council and Hartlepower in submitting a bid to Innovate UK to establish a disability-focused Community Research Network. A successful bid would lead to even closer ties between the University and Hartlepool's disability-focused community organisations.

Training

Keep your teams' skills relevant and up-to-date. Whether you are looking to improve your leadership skills, get more digital savvy or just try something new over Summer - there is something for every level available at Teesside University.

Leadership and Management

Skills Bootcamps

DigitalCity

Summer University



Looking for something a higher level?

Higher and Degree Apprenticeships

Evaluation and Impact Team

We work with you to co-develop a bespoke evaluation plan so you can demonstrate the impact of your project, now and in the future.

Many organisations are measured on their success in achieving social outcomes, which in turn is central to their ability to maintain trust and legitimacy with both their stakeholders and future funders. Increasingly, those organisations need to be able to provide independent evidence to funding bodies that demonstrates how outcomes and value has been achieved. This type of evaluative research is often complex, crosses a wide variety of academic disciplines and requires independence.

Evaluation and Impact Team works with organisations across the North East and beyond, to develop bespoke research-led evaluation projects of grant funded projects.

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Contact us

TUCHUB@tees.ac.uk

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