Public Spirit

Public Spirit is a proposed new on-line public forum featuring research, analysis and debate on religion and public policy. Public Spirit will provide a space for academics, policymakers, politicians and practitioners from voluntary, community and faith-based organisations to engage with current research and debates on religion and public policy, in a forum that crosses political affiliations and religious traditions, supported by regular off-line events. The proposal for this online public forum emerges from the project 'Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance' (MPCG) that is jointly funded by the AHRC and ESRC through the Religion and Society Programme. The online forum will provide a mechanism for further disseminating the project's findings to a range of policy, practitioner and civil society audiences, through a series of short articles on specific aspects of the research. It will connect these findings to broader contemporary debates about religion and public policy, by hosting contributions from a wide range of public actors who are actively engaged in these debates.
Issues relating to religion and public policy have generated considerable interest in recent times - with both New Labour and the present Coalition government according particular significance to religion and faith groups in policies on cohesion, integration, equalities, welfare, active citizenship and security and counter-terrorism. The anticipated audiences for Public Spirit include policy-makers, practitioners, civil society organisations (e.g. think-tanks, pressure groups, community organisations and religious institutions) and academics. Guided by feedback from our consultation with 44 such actors, the forum will: provide accessible articles on the findings from the MPCG research; connect this research with views and perspectives from a range of actors; provide accessible analysis and reflections on related research; feature spotlights on evidence and analysis on local areas to inform national debates; host debates that bring together academics, policy-makers, think-tanks, pressure groups and religious institutions to engage with and inform one another.
Public Spirit will be hosted by the Centre for Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, where the project team will be based. The forum will work with an Editorial Board with a membership from the fields of academia, publishing and politics. The Editorial Board will meet to determine and commission the content for Public Spirit and discuss strategies for impact.
In order to maximise the relevance and influence of Public Spirit among wider audiences, we have formed an agreement to partner with the recently formed All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Faith and Society and its Secretariat, FaithAction. This partnership will allow Public Spirit to connect with the actors and audiences engaged with the APPG and FaithAction, whilst providing an additional forum for debate and considered reflection on the issues raised in the work of the APPG.
There is at present no blog or forum that focuses on religion and public policy in the UK (at national and local levels), featuring academic research that is presented accessibly and which is engaged with policy, practitioner and civil society discussants and contributors. Public Spirit will provide a unique forum for Knowledge Exchange. Using digital media, it will make the findings of the MPCG project easily accessible to individuals and groups outside of academia who cannot normally easily access conventional scholarly sources. It will significantly increase user engagement with the MPCG project, as well as other related research, and enable Knowledge Exchange among a diverse range of actors concerned with issues relating to religion and public policy.

The non-academic beneficiaries of Public Spirit will include: policy-makers and government at local and national levels in the UK; voluntary and community organisations - especially faith-based organisations - that are involved in local governance networks and/or the delivery of national policy agendas at the local level; and the wider public, who will be able to use the forum access to gain insight into current debates about religion and governance in Britain. The forum will help policy-makers to develop an understanding of the significance of local contexts in the delivery of public policy initiatives and the reasons for resistance to specific public policy agendas involving faith communities. It will promote critical scrutiny of policy by allowing those responsible for the creation and delivery of public policy, as well as researchers in the field, to discuss and debate the rationales behind policy initiatives. It will also act as a centre for high quality debate about faith and public policy-making, and encourage informed conversation about how government engages with religion.
From the outset Public Spirit will collaborate with and include contributions by national- and local-level policy-makers, as well as opinion formers in influential think-tanks, pressure groups, community organisations and religious institutions. In some cases, collaborations will draw on relationships with participants built up over the course of the research for the Muslim Participation in Contemporary Governance project (MPCG). In other cases, they will be based on the working relationship developed with the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Faith and Society. These collaborations will facilitate knowledge exchange among a diverse range of political actors and researchers concerned with religion and public policy, and ultimately increase the possibility of the forum - and the research it publicises - having a concrete influence on the implementation of current and the development of new policy initiatives.
In addition to these collaborations, promotional activities will be included in the project's lifecycle that will be designed to reach a broad group of stakeholders. The launch event held at the Houses of Parliament will increase awareness of Public Spirit among politicians and national-level policy-makers. This will be supplemented by publicising the forum at 4 dissemination events planned in central London, Birmingham, Leicester and Tower Hamlets as part of the MPCG project. The forum's activities will also be promoted by electronic means via established on-line networks and mailing lists (such as those of the EHRC Religion and Belief Network, the Faiths and Civil Society Unit and the mailing list for the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at Bristol University). Our relationship with FaithAction (the secretariat of the APPG), which is a national network of faith-based and community organisations with a membership of over 1,300, will play a key role in our knowledge exchange and impact.
In order to monitor impact, monthly impact summaries will be created from month 3 of the project lifecycle (when Public Spirit will be formally launched) onwards. The metrics used to assess the forum's influence will include: summaries of web traffic and commentary on articles; records of engagement with the site and the debates it hosts (including written contributions) by significant political figures; a record of public acknowledgment of the debates hosted by Public Spirit in other media; details of any references made to debates or articles on Public Spirit in policy reports; observable influence on national-level policy development or local-level policy implementation; and feedback from forum users. In addition to providing input into the content of Public Spirit, the editorial board will play a key role in developing a strategy for maximising the impact of the debates, as well as promoting the site themselves.