The Charity Project: connecting research, volunteering and assessment

Dr Miles Tufft, Faculty of Brain Sciences, and Molly McCabe, Students' Union UCL, collaborated to bring psychology students and the voluntary sector together through education.

In 2024, Students' Union UCL and the BSc Psychology Programme collaborated to bring first year undergradate psychology students and the voluntary sector under one roof, in the largest education and volunteering collaboration ever. 

Introduction To Psychological Experimentation (PSYC0005) is a core undergraduate psychology module which brings a research- embedded approach to year one research methods training.

The Charity Project

For their final assignment, The Charity Project, students are asked to conduct their own primary research to help answer the question, “What psychological factors affect peoples’ decision to donate to charity?”.

In small teams, they generate testable hypotheses, design and build novel experimental paradigms, collect their own quantitative and qualitative research data, and then present their insights in the form of academic posters during a student-led poster conference at the end of term.

Sharing insights with real-world organisations

This year, the course convenor, Dr Miles Tufft, wanted to push the approach further by adding an enterprise component which allows students to share their insights with real-world organisations. To achieve this, he connected with Molly McCabe, the Community Research Initiative Manager at the Student Union, and together they developed the idea to expand the poster conference into a Charity Knowledge Exchange.

This two-hour event, held in the main cloisters, saw voluntary sector leaders invited to learn about the psychological science behind charitable giving from student research. At the same time, the students had the opportunity to learn from the charities directly about the challenges such organisations encounter when fundraising.

The exchange involved a diverse set of representatives from six charity partners who spent time viewing the posters while engaging in conversations with the students about their research and sharing their own experiences on the realities of fundraising in the voluntary sector. Students were also able to take part in a dedicated Q&A panel during which they put questions to the charities, gaining insight and making connections between their research and the real world.

Empowering research skills making a real-world difference

On the day the excitement of the students was palpable. There were several eye-opening moments for the students as they learned about the realities of the voluntary sector from firsthand accounts. The students and organisations were able to draw connections between their work and share their knowledge as equals in the space.

For first-year students, who had only been at UCL for 2 terms, the event not only empowered them in their research skills but also allowed them to connect to grassroots leaders of their community and see the impact they can make.

Integrating enterprise into education

Miles was looking for innovative ways to integrate enterprise into undergraduate education supporting the development of key transferrable skills and inspiring real-world student-led impact. His search led him to the Community Research Initiative and just at a time when it was looking to expand its offerings to undergraduate students.

With inspiration from Miles, and the momentum of the initiative, we were able to quickly develop a plan to bring charities and students together.

Record-breaking education partnership 

Though there are different efforts at UCL to introduce students to community-university working, a partnership like this between the UCL Students’ Union and a UCL undergraduate programme has not happened and certainly not at this scale with PSYC0005 comprising over 130 undergraduate students.

The inspiration to connect our students with industry in an educational context comes from Miles’ drive to see more enterprise-led curricula. Not only do these interactions improve our students’ employability, but they also provide students with impactful and rewarding educational experiences. Events like the Charity Knowledge Exchange provide students with the confidence and inspiration that comes from seeing how their work can make a difference, while at the same time learning what matters to the real-world decision makers which may represent their future employers, colleagues, or collaborators.

Building on education excellence

The research-embedded approach of PSYC0005 has been the fruition of a team effort over several years which culminated in a Team Provost Education Award in 2020 (Dr Katie Fisher, Dr Stephanie Lazzaro, Dr Miles Tufft, Prof Alastair McClelland, Prof Daniel Richardson). More recently, the course convenor, Dr Miles Tufft, has been working on strategies that support the integration of enterprise and knowledge exchange into the undergraduate curriculum. Miles believes that student-industry partnerships are an excellent way to develop a range of important transferrable skills that come from communicating science to non-academic audiences as well as offering the space to showcase the talent pool of UCL students. The Charity Project seemed an ideal opportunity to trial such an approach and once the collaboration with the Student Union was established the Charity Knowledge Exchange was born.

This collaboration also represents a new area of exploration for the Community Research Initiative, which typically works to connect Masters students with charities to co-design research. We were unsure how the students and charities would come together, especially as this was many students’ first time meeting a voluntary and community sector leader. However, we were delighted with the level of insight and knowledge exchange that took place on the day. The students experienced several “mic drop” moments when listening to the realities of the organisation leaders and how difficult the fundraising landscape can be. Moments like these took our programmes a step further and we are excited to continue to experiment with how we can expand on these successes next year.