If you work or volunteer in the VCSE sector in East Sussex, and you want to start doing research or strengthen the research skills that you have, then these workshops are for you. When we say ‘research’ we mean this broadly – things that you or your organisation do to gather information, listen to clients and service users, evaluate your activities, and so on.
The University of Brighton and East Sussex County Council have partnered to deliver a programme of activities to support local voluntary and community organisations to do their own research. As part of this, we are delivering ten online and in-person workshops about topics including research design, collecting data, analysing data, and presenting and sharing your findings. Our aims are:
- to support the confidence and capacity of VCSEs to carry out research, through learning that can be used/adapted quickly and slotted into practice;
- to add value to existing or planned projects.
The workshops are open to people working or volunteering in the VCSE sector in East Sussex, regardless of your experience with research. You can sign up to as many of the workshops as you like – you do not have to sign up to the whole programme to take part. An outline programme is provided below. We are keen to adapt this to participants’ needs. The content of each session may therefore change as the programme unfolds. Further information about each workshop will be provided in advance of the workshop.
If you are interested in joining our mailing list or have any questions, please email rch-escc@brighton.ac.uk putting ‘RRC’ in the subject of your email.
You may also wish to look at this resource pack, which will be referred to at various points throughout the programme: Community Research Resource Pack 2025.pdf, trustdevcom.org.uk pdf,110KB
Training Sessions
Session 1: What is Research?
Session 2: Exploring Different Approaches to Research
Session 3: Survey Design
Session 4: Interviews and Focus Groups
Session 5: Qualitative Analysis
Session 6: Creative Methods: Participatory and Arts-based Research
Session 7: Disseminating Your Research
Session 8: Putting Findings into Action and Taking the Next Steps
Session 9: Applying for Research Funding
Session 10: Bringing it All Together
Provisional Training Programme
Workshops can be booked on the Ticket Source website at Research Ready Communities event tickets. On the Ticketsource page, please click on the title of each workshop for further details. These workshops are for people from VCSEs in East Sussex. Links to online workshops, and venue details for those taking place in person, will be confirmed in due course.
This programme of workshops is part of Research Ready Communities, within the Research Collaborative Hub, a partnership between East Sussex Council and the University of Brighton. For more information about this partnership: Research collaborative hub rch
