Students at the Heart of Knowledge Exchange (SHoKE)

This year, we partnered with Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) as part of their Students at the Heart of Knowledge Exchange (SHoKE) programme. SHoKE matches teams of volunteer student researchers with civic society organisations to research and recommend solutions to challenges these organisations face. The student research teams come from a range of academic and personal backgrounds and often meet for the first time as part of the challenge.  

CEP We first approached ARU to get involved in their Impact 24 challenge in May. In just 24 hours, the team produced evidence-based recommendations on how community energy (CE) groups can best support young volunteers. These recommendations directly informed training on volunteer development as part of the Community Energy People project.  

Following this, the SHoKE team asked if CEP we would be interested in participating in their longer Student Consult project. In October, we were partnered with a team of five student researchers who worked with us over four weeks to research how CE groups can maximise their social impact. We met weekly with the team to steer their research, which resulted in a 33-page report that draws insight from across the sector and beyond. This research comes at a key time and will feed into our wider work creating a methodology to enable CE groups to better capture the social value they create.  

All the research outputs are open source, and we’d like to thank our student researcher teams for their enthusiasm, hard work, and expertise.