Community engagement
There is always a strong connection between the built, natural and social environments. Our community engagement programme enables our people to work with local communities to address all three.
For sustainable development to mean anything it must improve the lives of the most marginalised and vulnerable communities. Our community engagement programme is a chance to put that promise into action.
Our community engagement programme provides time to our members so they can contribute professional and technical skills to underserved communities and charitable organisations. Our people tackle issues at all scales, from particular local needs like improving safety through lighting in informal settlements to global challenges such as access to safe and affordable housing, as well as responding to disasters and emergencies. We deliver our pro bono community engagement projects to the same technical and safety standards of Arup’s wider commercial work.
Our founder, Ove Arup, believed that work’s greatest value is its ability to improve the world. Today, our community engagement programme is a key part of our commitment to creating a more sustainable future for all. We focus on areas of need where Arup’s skill sets have most value. So, our community engagement programme focuses on three key priorities:
- reducing inequities
- creating resilient and sustainable infrastructure
- providing affordable, safe shelter
Reducing inequities
At its heart, reducing inequities means improving access to healthcare, education, sanitation and economic opportunity, ensuring the whole community benefits. Our community engagement activity addresses these priorities in terms of physical infrastructure as well as knowledge sharing.
Resilient and sustainable infrastructure
This is a core element of our work. Within our community engagement programme infrastructure means the basic services and systems that enable communities to function and thrive. This includes sanitation, drinking water, off-grid energy systems, digital connections, transport networks, healthcare and education facilities. Additionally, we regularly provide technical consultancy to ensure the delivery of health-related services in crises and emergency contexts. We also support access to essential infrastructure closer to our offices.
Our contribution to The Zubin Foundation family centre in Hong Kong is an example of how we brought our deep technical expertise and were also able to extend the collaboration to secure pro bono contributions from some of our longstanding clients to benefit the community.
Affordable, resilient and safe shelter
A safe and affordable home should be available to everyone. Community engagement projects enable us to focus on those affected by housing insecurity and homelessness to improve access to affordable, resilient, and safe shelter. Our contributions have included advisory services, assessments on quality of housing, designing context-specific housing, and increasing local home building capacity. Our work on shelter is in cities where we have offices, in informal settlements, distant rural communities, and camps for displaced people.
Strengthening communities: Bidi Bidi music and arts centre is a vital new community facility for displaced refugee populations in Uganda. We provided design advice on sound, lighting, and spatial features for the centre, which opened in December 2023.
Building climate protection: Learn more about our work with Roof Over Our Heads, an initiative to defend informal settlements from the effects of climate change.
Working to end homelessness: Our teams have been working with Homewards, an advocacy group that’s tackling homelessness in the UK. Learn more.
Improving health infrastructure: Our people have provided technical engineering, design, and sustainable development expertise to improve medical infrastructure for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
How to work with us
We work with many different partner organisations around the world. Projects we support must align with at least one of the following three themes: reducing inequities; improving access to resilient and sustainable infrastructure; and improving access to affordable, resilient, and safe shelter.
We collaborate with a wide range of organisations too, from local community-based charities to national and international non-profit groups. Our work takes many forms, but always aims to make a positive difference by ensuring our projects reach the most marginalised and vulnerable communities – in the places where we work, where we live, and further afield.
We always want to hear from potential new partners. If you would like to collaborate with us or find out more about our pro bono work, please get in touch.
Bridges to prosperity: visualisation tool to support local connectivity
Bridges to prosperity, Rwanda
Transforming school grounds into centres for nature-based learning and climate resilient design
Climate ready schools, Canada
Helping communities recover after the 2021 floods
Post flood assessments, GermanyGet in touch with us
Last year we worked with 200+ organisations ranging from international NGOs and local governments to community interest companies and local community organisations. If you would like to find out more or get involved, please get in touch.
