Thrive: One year on
Posted on: 16 September 2024 in 2024
Professor Georgina Endfield, APVC for the Research Environment and Postgraduate Research at the University of Liverpool, looks back at what Thrive has achieved in its first year.
Creating a more inclusive culture in research teams
This week is National Inclusion Week (23-29 September), and we are also celebrating the one-year anniversary of Thrive.
Thrive was launched in September 2023 to help create a more inclusive, positive and respectful culture in research, so to celebrate our anniversary during National Inclusion Week is perfect timing.
The project is funded through the Research England Development Fund and the University of Liverpool is leading in partnership with the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Advance HE.
Since starting the project, our ambition has always been to develop a new team-led approach that will provide an alternative to the traditional Principal Investigator (PI)-led model, increase the diversity of leadership voices and promote inclusion.
To help us achieve this, over the past 12 months, the project team's core aim has been focused on identifying the steps that need to be taken to increase the diversity of voices in research, including technical and professional services colleagues, early and mid-career academics and under-represented groups.
This isn't an easy goal, but we have been engaging with a wide range of stakeholders from across multiple sectors to gain a better understanding of what makes for effective team working and collaboration. We have also been able to explore what kind of changes may be needed to existing systems and processes to foster team working and to begin to consider how the combination of whole team expertise might lead to better research outcomes.
The findings and insights that we gathered have been instrumental in helping us co-develop and shape a new team-led approach that is underpinned by five key strategic team convening principles for teams to follow:
- emphasising and enabling collective capability
- shared leadership
- inclusive governance
- team development
- reflexive practice
The new team-lead approach is now being piloted through AHRC's Responsive Mode Pilot: Mission Awards Outline Stage, which will enable us to gather insights to inform further development of team-led approaches.
The first year of Thrive has been fast paced but exciting. It has been particularly rewarding to work with colleagues across and beyond our sector to help shape the principles and to now see engagement with these principles through AHRC's funding call.
There's been many highlights, but the key ones for me are:
- Collaborative working: cross sector workshops were held to gather insights and feedback on the challenges and opportunities of team-led working.
- Co-production: stakeholder input helped to co-develop and refine the team-led approach and its underpinning team convening principles.
- Building relationships: worked closely with a range of stakeholders and partners to share experiences and learnings and to discuss the Thrive principles.
- Funding call: worked with AHRC to help shape their Responsive Mode Pilot: Mission Awards Outline Stage, which was launched in May 2024, supported by two applicant webinars for interested applicants to gather more information.
As a team we are looking forward to seeing what the next 12 months of Thrive will bring, and how this might help to reshape the research ecosystem by developing a more positive, inclusive and rewarding culture in research.
Find out more about Thrive.
Keywords: thrive, research, inclusive culture.