When universities listen: 30 years of UTS Shopfront

A former resident of Parramatta Girls Home, Bonney was determined to uncover and preserve the stories of the thousands of girls and women who had passed through the institution.  

"I really just had a sort of idea that this is a historic site that needed to be saved," she recalls. "I didn't know how to do that or what would be involved." 

Through UTS Shopfront, Bonney connected with academics and students who helped document the site’s history and strengthen efforts to preserve it. The work ultimately contributed to the Parramatta Female Factory and Institutions Precinct being added to Australia’s National Heritage List in 2017. 

Yet when Bonney reflects on the experience, she talks less about the formal outcomes and more about the relationship with UTS that grew from that first interaction. 

“Shopfront understands what I'm about now. We've grown together. They've helped shape the direction I'm taking.” 

Thirty years after UTS Shopfront was established, this sense of shaping outcomes together is still at the heart of the program. 

Since 1996, the program has partnered with more than 1200 community organisations and facilitated more than 1700 projects spanning research, design, communications, community consultation and social innovation. Along the way, tens of thousands of UTS students have applied their learning to the real challenges faced by communities and helped create countless waves of positive change.

An experiment in partnership 

Inspired by the European ‘Science Shop’ movement, UTS Shopfront was founded on the principle that expertise and knowledge live both inside and outside universities, and that bringing them together can create greater impact for communities. 

UTS would contribute research capability, disciplinary expertise and students eager to apply their learning. Communities and organisations would bring lived experience, local knowledge and an understanding of the people and issues they work with every day. 

“What UTS understood and supported from the beginning was that knowledge doesn't only live inside the institution,” says Pauline O'Loughlin, one of the people who helped build Shopfront from the ground up. “Shopfront operates at the intersection of university and community knowledges, with each informing, challenging and enriching the other.” 

Recognising that complex challenges rarely sit within a single discipline, Shopfront’s founders didn’t want to confine the program to a single faculty. Instead, they created a university-wide model that gave communities a single front door to multi-disciplinary expertise. What began as an experiment would become one of Australia's longest-running community engagement programs.

Learning for life 

For Alison Page, one of Shopfront’s earliest student participants, the program would shape far more than she expected. 

The award-winning designer and Director of the Indigenous Institute for Designing with Country at UTS was a final-year interior design student when she travelled to Dubbo to work with community members on a proposal to transform a former football club into a cultural centre. 

“It was an amazing project because I was able to actually work with community,” she recalls. “It was quite visionary, I thought, for Shopfront to connect me with community.” 

The experience introduced Page to ways of working that would remain important throughout her career: listening to community, respecting cultural knowledge and recognising that everyone brings their own unique knowledge to a project. 

“I'm really grateful to the women I worked with in Dubbo because they shared some very deep cultural learnings with me,” she says. “I owe it to them – the commitment that I've made to learning more and more about designing with country.” 

For Page, Shopfront’s magic is in what it teaches students beyond the classroom. 

“You are learning leadership. You are learning how to have these relationships,” she says. “When do students ever get that opportunity to work directly with clients? To work directly with communities?”