Social Impact Pledge 2023

In February 2023, the Principal of the University of Edinburgh signed a Social Impact Pledge, reaffirming the institution’s commitment to improve its social impact.

The Social Impact Pledge is a Scottish Government initiative which asks public sector organisations across Scotland to commit to increasing their social impact by committing to changing three aspects of their current operations or policies.

The university has pledged to “Challenge ourselves to increase the positive impact we make on our local community. We will do the following things that we don’t do at the moment to improve our social impact”

The 3 commitments are - 

1 - “We will build on our renewed University of Sanctuary status by extending additional support to New Scots”

2 - “We will open Dick Vet in the community, providing accessible veterinary support to the pets of homeless people”

 3 - “We will offer space to a range of community engagement projects from our new community-facing location at 127 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh”

This is the third time the University has taken part in the social impact pledge.

Most recently, in 2019, the University made commitments around homelessness, poverty, and providing meeting spaces... The first commitment from 2019 was “The Centre for Homelessness and Inclusion Health will extend its educational outreach and partnership-working in support of effective practice”. The university has taken action on this by creating projects like accessible professional development for homelessness practitioners, using art to improve lives, through the ‘Living through Covid’ project, and provided practical support for people experiencing homelessness.

The second commitment from 2019 was “We will launch phase 1 of the 'Understanding Place Project', a research programme aimed at tackling multiple deprivation and empowering and giving a voice to hard-to-reach and marginalised groups.” The university tackled this commitment through a project called Heart and Home. This project was led by Edinburgh International Festival and also had help from the community team within the university that supported with community engagement. 

The final commitment was “We will develop and pilot a scheme to allow local community organisations to make use of the University's rooms.” This pilot scheme was ready to launch however Covid-19 delayed its launch. In January 2022, the scheme was re-started, with a pilot ongoing.

You can read more about the 2019 commitments here.

You can read more about the 2023 commitments here.