Most of my teaching is at postgraduate level and I have a large group of PhD students working with me on co-productive PhD projects. I also teach from our resilience research base across the curriculum – particularly to nurses, midwives, social workers, occupational therapists and doctors – and I support others in our resilience group to do this too. This includes BSc Nursing, Research Methods (undergraduate to PhD level), Health Visiting, Qualitative Research Masters Module, and Leadership and Decision-Making in Safeguarding Children Masters Module.

Teaching by others on the resilience approaches I have co-developed is embedded in many courses in health, education and social work at the Universities of Brighton, Sussex and beyond. For example, the BSc Nursing, Preceptorship programme, Health Visiting course, clinical supervisors training, practice teacher’s module, mentorship preparation course, PgCHSCE, Paramedic programme, MSc in Community Health and an international MA in Health.

Much of our resilience research has produced practical resources that are freely available on the website of our close community partner, Boingboing. Students are able to use and adapt these as they wish as part of their learning and practice development. Many of our PhD students have co-produced resources in their own contexts that can then be shared with others, such as the Kinship Carer’s guide and the adult version of the Resilience Framework.

As the longstanding Academic Director of our Community University Partnership Programme, I always try to enthuse others to work in a way that is helpful to communities outside the university. My aim is to use my academic privilege to support other people, and I work closely with co-researchers who are young people with complex needs and adults experiencing adversity. I am an adoptive parent of three children with complex needs myself so I also come at my work from this parenting perspective. I also support a lively (and international) group of more traditional researchers who want to work in a more co-productive way.

My work is interdisciplinary and I work closely with evidence bases and colleagues from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, community development, education, social work, psychiatry and nursing. All of my research is co-productive, and as the Academic Director of the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP) I have expertise in applying insights from research within the context of Communities of Practice (CoP). CoPs bring people with a shared passion together across, not only different agencies and disciplines, but also organisational forms and status boundaries, including service users and their carers. I am passionate about using research insights to inform practice developments and vice versa.

I have published widely on health and social care services to disadvantaged children, their families and their supporters, especially in relation to fostering and adoption to midwifery and health visiting and in relation to the concept of resilience. I have also published work on the development of community university partnership programmes. All of my work results in practical applications. Most recently I have been supporting the implementation of my co-developed resilience approaches to mental health across a whole town, funded to the tune of £12million by the National Lottery Community Fund. Blackpool UK is the pilot site for what we are calling a ‘Resilience Revolution’. A key feature of this is an exciting co-productive research programme, by, with and for young people.

Professor Angie Hart is Professor of Child, Family and Community Health at the University of Brighton and Director of the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice (CRSJ).

She is also Academic Director of the award winning Community University Partnership Programme. As part of that role, she was the Brighton lead for the HEFCE-funded South East Coastal Communities Programme. She undertakes participatory research into inequalities in health and social care in relation to children and families, especially in relation to resilience. Angie teaches on professional courses for health and social care practitioners and coordinates a large group of PhD students working on resilience and inequalities. She currently has a number of resilience-focused research projects under way, including one funded by UKRI. Angie has also received project funding from the AHRC/ESRC's Connected Communities Programme. One of the projects she co-led was the interdisciplinary Imagine project working closely with community partners to research and build resilience alongside people facing multiple challenges.

Angie takes a key role in shaping and implementing research strategy within the School of Health Sciences and leads the CRSJ. Her roles include - attracting research funding, recruiting, supervising and mentoring other researchers and research students, contributing to curriculum design and supporting others to teach from the research base developed in the CRSJ.

Angie provides academic leadership and strategic direction to the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP), promoting CUPP internally, nationally and internationally, and encouraging and supporting the School, CUPP and other University of Brighton staff members to develop an engagement orientated research profile. She supports colleagues through direct project work, grant applications, publications, conference and seminar addresses, workshops and delivering research advice to community groups.

Angie takes overall responsibility for the strategic direction, financial accountability and development of Boingboing as a collaborative resilience research and practice development social enterprise. She does this as Boingboing’s co-founder, Chair of the Board and director, in a voluntary capacity. Boingboing works  in partnership with the University of Brighton (where the organisation is housed), YoungMinds, Amaze and others, including colleagues and organisations in other countries. Angie oversees the Boingboing website and plays a direct role in delivering training to colleagues, offering a consultation service to young people, parents and other practitioners in relation to resilience, and recruiting, supervising and mentoring staff and volunteers.

She has also developed many practice resources which are used in the UK and beyond. Resilient Therapy is an approach to supporting the most disadvantaged children and families which has been articulated in books and films. The Academic Resilience Approach (ARA) is another of Angie’s co-creations. Designed in collaboration with young people’s mental health systems expert Lisa Williams and school members, the ARA is articulated in a free online suite of resources for schools available free to download from the Boingboing website. Schools throughout the UK and indeed internationally use the resource to support the resilience of individual students and to tackle whole school resilience building.

Students drawn to studying with me are generally people with a commitment to social change. All of them share my passion for researching resilience-related topics and most of their studies involve some form of co-production with communities, policymakers or practitioners. Many of them also volunteer for our social enterprise Boingboing and there are loads of opportunities in our CRSJ for students to get involved in some fabulous personal development activities, for example attending conferences on behalf of our Centre, being on the Management Group, staffing a stand at international events, etc.

Prospective supervisory topics I get excited about include:
Co-productive and resilience-based approaches to tackling social and environmental issues including:
Child, family and adult mental health
Practitioner stress and burnout
Schools practices
Higher Education community-university partnership practices.

Absolutely all of my work involves knowledge exchange. In fact, Boingboing, the social enterprise of which I am co-founder and Chair of the Board is connected to our Centre. Boingboing acts as an impact vehicle for a lot of our Centre of Resilience for Social Justice work and you can find out more about it on its own website - www.boingboing.org.uk.