About the Bristol City Fellows Programme

The primary aim of City Fellow programme is to craft a series of projects that can ensure that communities at the margins are considered to be critical knowledge producers in decision making around city futures.

Image of a hand doing visual note taking. text includes "we need diversity of thought" and "and give those who never considered leadership a possibility the tools and belief to step up"Bristol City Fellowships is an innovative new programme of fellowship opportunities for academics and practitioners working alongside communities at the margins, which aims to build inclusive cultures of collaboration in the city. It is a joint programme between the University of Bristol, Bristol City Office and the Social Justice Project.

The City Fellows programme will craft a number of projects collectively with the diverse communities of Bristol, to develop principles and practices of collaborative working. We use the concept of ‘craft’ to refer to the desire to do things well, to work long and hard on perfecting something beautiful and useful1. The City Fellows programme will demonstrate that the expertise and practice developed when practitioner and community knowledge works alongside academic research can play a key role in shaping city governance. It will enable us to contribute to changing cultures of collaboration in the city, alongside the Bristol City Office and aligned with the One City Approach, working towards a radical rethinking of the inclusion of marginalised voices in decision making. The programme will develop a new, inclusive approach to city governance and policy making, a ‘Bristol City Approach to collaboration’ that other cities could learn from. City Fellows will work as a team to design and influence structures of city scale decision-making to tackle systemic inequalities.

This programme has been made possible with the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact Acceleration Account.