Joanna Motion 0:04

Dundee, for us at More, seems a very good place to be talking about place, which is the topic we've just spent three hours on. And our colleague Ben Beaumont, who writes so beautifully for us, had this nice crisp thing as a prompt, which was place is not new, but it does feel quite now. And I'd like to think when when did we first start talking about place as a powerful tool in the kit? And I think for me, I doubt I date it back to hearing a case conference, a summit must be 15 years ago, where the president of New York University, NYU at the time, John Sexton, was on a panel with other distinguished institutional leaders, and he said this really neat thing, which was that he didn't have Harvard's endowment of gazillions of dollars, or he didn't have Stanford's access to Silicon Valley, but what he did have was an endowment of place. He had New York, he had this world city with attitude and an immigrant place that looked forwards and it had energy, and that that was a profound resource for him, which balanced the kind of assets that that his peers had. And then I think we've played that out with various clients of ours who have seen something in that that they could use. And I I we both worked at the University of Helsinki, and I think they they they embraced it for one. And you've worked with others who've really sat up straight when they thought about that.

Nik Miller 2:00

Yes, I think that endowment of place refrain has really resonated at different institutions we've worked at. And I agree, I think the first place where it landed successfully was at the University of Helsinki, that sort of place based in the world's capital of clean air, of social equality, of world-class education. And it seems to me that they, just as John Sexton was, were talking about place less as geography and more about identity and values. What does it mean to be here? What does that mean for the difference we want to make locally and globally?

Joanna Motion 2:35

And Nik, what difference do you think it made to them, to the team, to appear in the team when that light bulb went off? What did it make them do or feel differently?

Nik Miller 2:48

So I think for that community of people and for others that we've worked with, it gives them a stronger sense of confidence, which is born out of a sense of authenticity, that we can talk about ourselves in a way that is not boasting about what we do. It's about being proud of what we stand for and the difference that we make. And I think in you know the many hundreds of cases of support you and I and others have been involved in constructing, they can feel quite placeless and transferable between institutions who are using a vocabulary that becomes almost kind of hackneyed. And I think rooting things in place gives you a distinctiveness and an authenticity which resonates with different audiences. And I see the institutions that are using it most effectively are managing to combine that sense of roots in place with momentum, as we were discussing earlier. You know, they're using not the past as nostalgia, but the our origin story, the values in which we're rooted, as a way of describing the difference they want to make in the future. You know, we've seen, for example, in Manchester's campaign, that sense of we were here when you needed us during the first industrial revolution, we're now here for the next one, that sense of being rooted in place but looking forward.

Joanna Motion 4:17

Not limited by, not limited by. What about is there a risk that if place feels too geographically specific that it actually inhibits you from, it might make you parochial, might make you a bit local, or only local rather than something further reaching? Is that a danger?

Nik Miller 4:41

Yeah, I think it can be. My general experience though has been sort of counterintuitive in that some institutions we've talked to about the importance of place have raised that concern. Will this sound too parochial, inward-looking? But actually, I think as institutions and the world has become more globalised, that specificity of place is a distinguisher. You know, what is special about this place, what happens around here, matters in that kind of global context, I think. But I think it also plays to the point that your the playbook is different for different audiences, I think, too. You know, so I think of a couple of wonderful institutions we work with where place really matters, McMaster University in Canada, the University of, Newcastle University here in the UK. You know, I think they're talking about place in slightly different ways depending on whether it's to a prospective student, a high net worth donor in their local community or a a donor overseas. I don't I don't think it's a static narrative.

Joanna Motion 5:48

But it comes from a spine, as it were, that's consistent.

Nik Miller 5:55

Yeah. We we we talked earlier too about size, which on the one hand sounds like a very simplistic thing to be talking about, but I've seen that be used quite powerfully by different institutions. Institutions that will say things like our community is small enough to be able to foster collaboration and for us to be able to work interdisciplinary without too much kind of friction and transaction cost, but we're big enough to change the world. And I think some there's something about place and size as well, which is relevant here.

Joanna Motion 6:34

There's a very interesting question around who can use this toolkit powerfully and who may shy away from it. And you might think it's something that's available to the dominant player in a region or in a city, so that it's as it were, the University of Cambridge is going to take up a lot of space here. But actually, I think it is a useful way of thinking for a kind of challenger institution. They may not think of themselves in those terms, but it but as a place that feels they have a reach or a community or a loyalty which is understands and knows and serves the place intimately well. So as it were, the second or third university to be founded in a city may feel that it has something to say for the place and and not just have that word 'of' in the title of the institution.

Nik Miller 7:41

That also provokes a thought about the fact that place can be a great strength and a great asset, but as soon as you begin to talk about place, you also inherit a great deal of responsibility. And that topic of responsibility to a place, so being for a place, not just of a place, I think is something that is a live conversation for lots of organisations. And and where does that responsibility stop and start? And I think I've observed on occasions there's a risk that institutions can slip into a sort of deficit narrative and almost accidentally position themselves as being the saviour of a place, which can take you down some challenging paths, I think.

Joanna Motion 8:32

The tone is really important there, it seems to me. The language and the modulation that you use, as well as the sort of concepts of are we going to do this to you, this good thing, or is it something that we will work out among ourselves? And words with co on the front, co-design, co-create, co-think, co-imagine, much in currency now. What do you think about the ability to access funding sources with a place mindset or narrative which might not otherwise have occurred to an organisation that they they could find support.

Nik Miller 9:25

Yeah, I think there there are conversations, of course, about the potential kind of catalytic effect of having matched funding for people giving to particular places that might historically not have been recipients. And I guess in that paragraph, lots of people are thinking about places outside London generally, where a sort of disproportionate amount of philanthropic funding tends to be centred to. I think there are also interesting organisations we work with who are sort of place-making but who do not, in a sense, have a place where they belong. So I'm reflecting on organisations like the Football Foundation, for example, that are, to my mind, one of the biggest providers of community infrastructure. They provide the facilities on which people play football and various other sports and bring people bring different communities together on that basis. They are around England, placemaking through their work, but in terms of the place they inhabit, Wembley Stadium, I'm not sure that is, you know, it's a different argument, I think, for them.

Joanna Motion 10:33

It is an iconic place.

Nik Miller 10:36

So I think the other potential sort of happy consequence of talking about place is that it can unlock donor motivations. So a great example of that, I think, is you know, people giving to Trinity College Dublin. The gift is to the university, but in essence it's a gift from a non-alum to Ireland. And the vehicle for creating the impact happens to be the university, but this is the diaspora giving back to their home country. Similarly, people giving gifts to Newcastle University, it's a gift to the region as much as it is to the institution itself. I think talking about place unlocks those conversations.

Joanna Motion 11:17

And what it does is I think it increases the number of people who say "us" and "we" about the institution. It it expands your pool of interested, engaged allies, which is hugely valuable as a time when some sense of social consent to universities particularly, but other sorts of organisations, you need more than just a few big gifts to get through through. You you want people to understand and affirm the points of contact and the reach that the institution has into many community lives. You made me think of a gift at the University of Kent, probably the biggest they've ever had, which it came from a source which was Kentish. I mean it came from sale of land that had been bits of Kent and an extremely beautiful house that is now run by the National Trust, and it went into music, which was the passion of the gentleman, the lovely, lovely James Colyer- Fergusson, whose gift it was and his trust. And there's something in the end there about the impact of that on the university. So this ends up being a seven and a half million pound building for music in a university that doesn't have music on the curriculum, so it's a it's a very much a community serving as well as a student serving opportunity. And two things I'd want to say. One is the impact on the university in terms of standing taller, you're you mentioned confident, that sense of gosh, we were worth it. You know, we have that sort of generous friends in our community. But I'd like to think, I hope this isn't fey, that something of the origins of the gift come with it because you're bringing history, you're bringing the story of that connection and the Ightham Mote and all the rest of it to touch and enrich the institution. So you get layers, you get depth when the connection is is live.

Nik Miller 14:04

And you're making me remember our visit, the visit to Leiden two summers ago when we went to the sweat room. Do you recall this room? It's the room in which prospective graduates carve their name into a wall, which has been done by the many hundreds of thousands of people who have preceded them, and that sort of physical manifestation of your relationship with place and space and your sense of the ancestors who came before you and your place in the history of the place.

Joanna Motion 14:36

And the successors who will follow you, that you're part of a tradition, and you're kind of implicated in in that. Yeah, it's a great example. I mean places can be a specific, well, room in that case, can't it? But what else can it be? It can be it can be a city, it can be a landscape, it can be a football stadium. A football stadium, absolutely, yes. Yeah.

Nik Miller 15:10

And indeed a country. I think one of the powerful messages in our work with McMaster in Ontario is they're talking a lot about the world needs more Canada solutions. And I think that is authentic, and they can be precise and specific about what they mean by that. So yes, it has layers.