What I Thought I’d Find in the US… and What I Actually Did

Reflections on community, organising and student belonging from the ACUI Region VIII Conference

In November, I had the opportunity to travel to Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont to attend the ACUI Region VIII Conference, alongside visits to Bentley University, Dartmouth College, Southern New Hampshire University and Middlebury College. I was able to attend thanks to support from Coole Insight Ltd, following the selection of a proposal to present on our Community

Organising work at Leeds Beckett Students’ Union - reflecting a wider commitment to investing in practice, learning, and contributing back into conversations across the Students’ Union sector.

That proposal meant that I arrived with a pretty clear sense of purpose. I wanted to share the journey that Leeds Beckett Students’ Union has been on (both the progress and the challenges) in embedding a Community Organising approach, while also testing our thinking with an international audience.

Equally, I was curious to see how things worked, first hand, across the pond. Community Organising

has deep roots in the United States, and I assumed I would encounter models of student life where

organising, as we understand it at Leeds Beckett, was visibly embedded in campus culture.

At Leeds Beckett, when we talk about Community Organising, we are not simply talking about

student activity or engagement. We are talking about building relationships across difference,

developing student leaders, and creating the conditions for students to act collectively on the issues affecting their lives, their communities and wider society. Ultimately, it is work rooted in power - who has it, who does not, and how it can be built and used collectively.

What I found was something a bit different.

Across the institutions we visited, there was a strong and highly visible culture of ‘community’. Students appeared deeply connected to their campuses, not only socially but through a sense of ownership over shared spaces and activities. Student centres, social programmes and co-curricular opportunities did not feel peripheral, they appeared central to the student experience.

However, this was not ‘community organising’ in the way we have come to understand and practise

it at Leeds Beckett. Rather than focusing on building collective power to act on shared interests and

drive wider societal change, the dominant model appeared to be one of provision, belonging and

institutional responsiveness.

There were certainly examples of students effecting change within their institutions. However, these seemed to emerge less from organised collective action and more from strong, often well-established relationships between students and institutional staff. Students articulated needs or ideas, and staff worked to respond. Influence, in this context, appeared to flow through access and trust rather than through the deliberate building of collective power.

At times, this dynamic was visible in ways that surprised me. In several student panels, institutional

staff were not just present but actively shaping the conversation - prompting, supporting, and

occasionally steering. It felt well-intentioned, but at moments almost parental. Students were clearly being listened to, but within quite carefully managed boundaries.

One conversation at Middlebury College particularly stayed with me. A staff member explained that

the process for establishing new student groups was intentionally difficult, in order to limit the

number of groups to what the institution felt it could realistically support. I understood the capacity

challenge immediately - it is one many of us recognise. But it also left me wondering whether, in

trying to manage demand, institutions risk constraining the very student energy and initiative they

are hoping to encourage.

Alongside this, I was struck by the extent to which students were embedded in the day-to-day

running of campus environments. In some cases, students held significant responsibility for

managing buildings and services - levels of trust that would still feel like a significant leap for many

UK universities or Students’ Unions. This pointed to a culture in which student voice is not only

heard but operationalised, albeit through a different mechanism than the organising approaches we are developing.

Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.

One of the clearest examples of intentional community-building in practice was at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.

Unlike many UK institutions, where arts facilities are often restricted to students on specific courses, the Hopkins Center offered open access to activities such as music lessons, studio practice and woodwork. What stood out was not simply the range of provision, but the intentionality that appeared to be behind it.

For a student struggling to find their place - particularly those for whom traditional social spaces

such as bars or parties may feel inaccessible or unappealing - these environments offer an

alternative route into community. They reduce the pressure to perform socially in extroverted ways,

allowing connections to form more gradually and authentically, often through shared activity rather

than forced interaction.

It made me think about how often we unintentionally narrow our own understanding of what

student connection looks like. We speak frequently in the sector about inclusion and belonging, but

many of our social infrastructures still rely heavily on confidence, extroversion, and students having

enough free time and headspace to participate.

I saw similar intentionality in campus dining provision. Dining halls and food courts were clearly

positioned as social infrastructure, not simply places to eat. The breadth and quality of provision

exceeded what is typical in many UK institutions, with fresh food stations, multiple cuisine options

and spaces designed to encourage students to gather and interact.

At the same time, I could not entirely separate what I was seeing from the wider economics of the

US higher education system. Many of the most impressive examples of community I observed - high-quality facilities, extensive programming, thoughtfully designed shared spaces - are enabled by levels of resource that are simply not comparable to most UK contexts.

Our own approach to Community Organising at Leeds Beckett has developed, in part, as a response to that reality - a recognition that, in the absence of significant additional resource, and within an HE funding system that increasingly feels broken, building relationships, developing leaders and organising collectively are essential ways of creating change.

Reflecting on these observations, I am left with a series of questions, but there are a couple of things that really stand out as things we must give serious consideration to if our Community Organising model is to be successful.

Firstly (and I’m fully aware that this is not new thinking) - belonging is not a “nice to have’ alongside

organising, it is a prerequisite. If students do not feel connected, confident, or that they have a place within the institution, then the idea of building collective power is, at best, aspirational.

But recognising that creates a more uncomfortable challenge for us in the UK context.

Too often, we talk about student leadership, engagement, and even organising, without fully

reckoning with the reality of students’ lives. Many of our students are balancing study with work,

commuting, and significant financial pressure. The idea that they will simply step forward and invest time in building relationships, developing campaigns, and leading change is, in many cases,

unrealistic – and is the single biggest question mark over our Community Organising model.

So… no blueprint to bring home and attempt to replicate. But what I did bring back was a much

sharper understanding that if we are serious about building student power and influence, then we

need to be equally serious about the conditions that make participation possible in the first place.

That may mean paying students for their time. It may mean embedding this work into the curriculum and recognising it through academic credit. And it certainly means moving beyond models that rely primarily on goodwill, confidence, and whatever spare capacity students happen to have left at the end of the week.