Academia is too slow to respond to communities that can’t wait

There is a moment I have replayed many times in my head. A community leader I had been trying to build a partnership with looked at me across a table and said, almost apologetically: “Oh, so you are from the university? Where are the forms? We know universities love forms!”

Her organisation’s members needed help as soon as possible, but as soon as she learned I was an academic, she was bracing for committees, ethics processes, 18-month delays and the particular brand of institutional politeness that means “no” without ever saying it.

The perception of universities as slow, bureaucratic and fundamentally unresponsive to urgent community needs is not new, and it is not entirely unfair. But what interests me most as an early career researcher whose work sits at the intersection of academic inquiry and community practice is what that perception does.

Once embedded, it shapes behaviour just as powerfully as structural reality does. Universities’ community engagement strategies struggle to gain traction because potential community partners often never approach them in the first place, taking their urgent social questions to organisations that feel less prestigious but more human.

I do not want to be unfairly critical. At my institution, a dedicated public engagement team works hard to support researchers in building exactly these kinds of relationships. They run festivals, offer training, produce podcasts. They also support academics and always show up when things get complicated. They matter enormously to the university’s civic agenda.

I would not have known how to begin my community-based work in Southampton when I first arrived if I had not worked alongside them. As a small team, they act as the bridge between university processes and hyperlocal communities. When that bridge holds, partnerships flourish. My only hope is that they retain the time, capacity and support they need because work of this quality depends on people who care so deeply.

I came to academia through community music. Before my doctoral study, I worked in youth centres, charities and primary schools, and I still work with them – not primarily as research partners (although research may emerge from these collaborations where appropriate and with consent) but as sources of meaningful opportunities for music-making and social connection, for both students and the wider community.

In such spaces, urgency is the default. A youth worker supporting a child with complex needs cannot wait for a funding cycle to align. A charity responding to a spike in demand cannot pause while an ethics application works its way through a committee. And no amount of goodwill on either side fully closes that gap.

One thing I have learned from navigating both worlds, however, is that honesty about process, offered early and plainly, does more for trust than any amount of strategic relationship-building language. When I have been direct about what I can and cannot offer – whether I have the funding, time and institutional clout to do what they would like – the response has almost always been more generous than I expected.

Community partners are not naive. They understand that universities have governance structures and ethical obligations, and they can work with honest limitations. What they often cannot bear is the feeling that bureaucracy is a comfortable excuse rather than a genuine constraint.

Yet I could promise my partners so much more if only career and funding structures permitted. Early career researchers are often the people most naturally positioned to do relational, community-facing work. We are closer to non-academic settings than more senior colleagues are and less encased in the protective scaffolding of established reputation. Yet we are also more institutionally precarious and feel most keenly the imperative to chase grants from funding agencies typically drawn to large projects, established track records, clearly defined work packages and measurable impact within fixed time frames. None of that can be delivered by the slow work of building reciprocal relationships with hyperlocal communities with evolving priorities, the most significant impacts of which often emerge long after the reporting period has ended.

Community priorities begin with everyday problems rather than research questions. Someone needs to learn to use generative AI to draft a letter to challenge a parking ticket. Another needs it to request the return of a removed wheelie bin. At first glance, meeting such needs seem unlikely to generate the kinds of high-profile outputs or impact metrics that major funding schemes often prioritise. Yet it reveals how AI literacy is enacted in everyday life: through practical acts of civic participation and self-advocacy.

Beginning with these everyday needs was not a diversion from the research; it was the research. And it mattered. That’s why I keep doing this work even though I have yet to secure a major, fully costed grant. I have never found a way to walk away from the communities that brought me into research in the first place.

Two years on from that initial encounter, I have worked on several projects with the community leader who braced for bureaucracy. We have navigated institutional processes side by side and built something that feels genuinely reciprocal. But that trust was earned slowly, through consistent presence, honest conversations and occasional willingness to simply show up without an agenda. It is the kind of work that does not fit neatly into a Research Excellence Framework return but it is the kind of work I am most proud of.

UK universities’ knowledge exchange and enterprise frameworks offer one possible way forward. If genuine community engagement were recognised and resourced within those structures, it would send a clear signal about institutional priorities.

That version of the university exists. I have seen it in the public engagement team that answers when I call and in the internal grants that made urgent projects possible. But for it to be fully realised, external funders must move beyond counting outputs and recognise trust-building as genuine research, not as a soft optional extra.

The perception problem and the structural problem are the same challenge. Solving it cannot be left to the brave few who care enough to try anyway.

Chi Ying Lam is lecturer in community music and social justice at the University of Southampton, where she is also widening participation coordinator in the department of music.