Democracy in Action: Bringing back the night bus

Democracy in Action is an award-winning module on community organising, currently offered to students in their final year at the University of Essex. Students from the 2023/24 intake share their experience in a series of blogs.

Adam Rust, a student from Essex Business School, tells us about his experience on working on the campaign to bring back the University’s safety night bus.

Bringing back the safety night bus

Over the course of the academic year 2023/24, I worked on a campaign that aimed to bring back the safety night bus to campus. Our campaign group worked with members of the Students’ Union (SU) and supported their ongoing campaign that started three years ago. The campaign was successful and, as of Autumn 2024, the safety night bus will be back in action, run by the SU.

Issues of safety

The need to bring back the bus was highlighted in our listening that we did as part of the Citizens UK five steps to social change. It was clear that transport was a key issue facing students in Colchester and the safety night bus was mentioned as one solution to the issues arising. The next stage involved gaining deeper insights into what the safety night bus would mean to people as well as finding out how safe students felt travelling home at night. The results showed that most students felt unsafe travelling at night and that the safety night bus would be a real help.

Working with the Student’s Union

Relationships were formed with the SU who helped to distribute our survey to gain the insights mentioned. They also secured funding to restart the safety night bus. This was achieved through their previous relations with the University of Essex and others. By bringing together our listening results, survey statistics, testimonials, and possible solutions into a presentation that was presented to various power holders, we were able to powerfully show the power holders why the safety night bus was needed, and this contributed to the eventual funding to be granted for the bus.

Success

It was clear that the campaign was made possible through in-depth listening with students, the formation of relationships with key stakeholders, the ability to find plausible solutions to the issue, and the discussion with powerholders. These are key parts of the Citizens UK social change process and show that this process can be successful.

Thank you

I would like to thank the Democracy in Action team who, alongside Citizens Essex, taught us how to community organise and then supported us throughout the campaign to bring back the safety night bus. The dynamic, thought-provoking, and engaging method of module delivery should be seen as an example of how modules should be run more broadly.