My journey as an NCE Policy Fellow: three lessons for future reference

When I decided to apply for the NCE Policy Fellowship last year, I was not entirely sure what to expect. As the Fellowship was being launched for the first time, I could not get advice from any successful candidate. In the absence of that, chatting with Rich proved especially useful. Rich made clear for me what the Fellowship was about and most importantly for whom and for what it was intended, and the support the NCE would provide to researchers towards enhancing the impact of their research across civil society and different policy-making arenas. I finished that conversation almost with a sense of entitlement, that I was the right person for it. I had just entered a new phase of my research on cities and human rights, focusing on children’s right to clothing in Nottingham. I had already been told (not by Rich) that a ‘REF-able’ Impact Case could be built upon and around my research, and the initiative I had just embarked upon of establishing Nottingham as a Human Rights City. What I missed however at that point was a more structured and sophisticated approach to producing impact and ‘make a difference’ with my research.

When I was told that I had been awarded the Fellowship, I felt that I had made some significant progress towards understanding and organising impact better. I was happy to engage in events that the NCE facilitated for me like the Partnership Lab at the University of Nottingham, giving me the opportunity to become known and liaise with a variety of Nottingham-based people and institutions, as well as activities internal to NTU aimed at helping Fellows develop key impact-related skills, e.g., pitching your research to policymakers. The Fellowship’s budget also enabled me to continue to develop my Human Rights City initiative, particularly the establishment of the Nottingham Human Rights Forum in December 2024. The Impact Case Officers also offered me invaluable training as well as more individualised assistance in the organisation and delivery of impact-related events, like the Forum.

Having now completed my Fellowship, I want to share three lessons I learned over the past year, which I hope might help the current and future cohorts of researchers that will continue to benefit from it.

Firstly, speaking about your research in a way that is competent yet approachable, and make sense to those who are listening to you, is a skill that can only be achieved through practice. A meeting we had in January 2024 where Fellows were invited to pitch our research to an imagined community of stakeholders made this very clear. Striking the right balance, and finding the right entry point into your work, which gets the attention and most importantly then the time and engagement of a potential stakeholder, is hard work. To make things even more complicated, the following holds true as well in my opinion, that different pitches will work with different people. And yet, by having to repeatedly pitch my research in a variety of venues and for a variety of audiences, from the Partnership Lab to the Human Rights Forum, I felt I was struggling less with hitting the right note and at the same time I was becoming more convincing and effective. Positive feedback from the Impact Case Officers did make me feel more confident in this respect.

Secondly, on your way to impact, it is important to build trust with key partners. Ideally, a collaboration starts at a very early stage, via the co-production of research. During my Fellowship I reflected quite a lot on my engagement with organisations that are involved in my right to clothing project and/or part of the Human Rights City initiative in Nottingham. As a Fellow, I had access to a budget that helped establish the Nottingham Human Rights Forum and foster my relationship with its members. Money can facilitate collaboration and help build trust. However, working with civil society organisations in particular, I felt that what matters most in this respect, and to begin with, is some level of authenticity and availability in what I as a researcher can offer to my partners (which transforms what could otherwise remain a purely instrumental relationship): human rights, as an opportunity to frame their claims, empower themselves, and influence policy, because I also believe in the value of human rights like they do, and in the change that my partners want achieve with human rights.

Thirdly, influencing policy is hardly something you achieve from one day to the next, or something you can reduce to one single action. There will be key moments, actors, and arenas to focus on but what happens before and after may be less visible but equally important, all of this contributing to a broader strategy to achieve impact. Things cannot and should not be rushed. Big ideas can be conveyed straight away but the evidence that prove that big ideas can work do matter and often help stakeholders understand the nature and potential of the big ideas. I realised this while I was trying to pitch my research to stakeholders and having to do that without offering any example as I was still waiting for data to be collected. Impact takes time and it takes even more time in my case if, as I believe, in order to produce impact and affect policy, human rights must be appropriated and mobilised by community and civil society actors. This for me would be the ultimate evidence that my research had an impact, on the work of both social agents and policymakers, hopefully contributing to some positive change.