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Wellbeing

Last updated:
20 November 2025

Three people look at books on a table
Students at Earth Day Appetite for Justice event, 2022, Central Saint Martins, UAL | Photograph Ana Blumenkron

How might we innovate to support wellbeing, connection and resilience across UAL’s working and learning environments?

Our staff and students move between many different environments, from busy London campuses to digital platforms and home spaces that are not always designed for work or study. Wellbeing is shaped not only by each of these contexts, but also by the transitions between them. Digital increasingly mediates in-person experiences too, influencing how we connect, collaborate, and create together.

Each setting brings its own pressures. In digital spaces, people can feel isolated, disconnected, or struggle with blurred boundaries. On campus, the demands of commuting, financial strain, and mental health pressures can be intensified by the inequalities of life in London. For international and under-represented communities, cultural differences and barriers to accessing support services can add further challenges. Across all contexts, wider stresses – from housing insecurity to social, racial, and climate concerns – continue to shape everyday experiences.

This challenge creates space for experiments, ideas, and collaborations that can strengthen our collective capacity to work, study, and create well across UAL’s diverse in-person and digital spaces.

Projects should aim to achieve 1 or both of the following objectives:

1: Support connection and belonging across environments:

  • Explore practices that reduce loneliness and isolation.
  • Prototype inclusive ways of building community on campus, online, or in the transitions between.
  • Test approaches to meetings, teaching, and creative practice that prioritise wellbeing.

2: Strengthen wellbeing and resilience in the face of pressures:

  • Use research and design methods to surface what supports wellbeing across campus and digital contexts.
  • Pilot small-scale interventions that can be scaled or adapted across UAL.

1: Budget efficiently with an itemised breakdown of spend, naming the intended hiring manager for staffing contracts and the intended suppliers for materials or services – you’re strongly encouraged to use UAL suppliers.

2: Ask for no more than the maximum challenge allocation of £5000 and allocate no more than 50% of the proposed spend to staffing costs.

3: UAL staff: get approval from your line manager, dean or director and key project stakeholders.

4: UAL students: get approval from your course leader and key project stakeholders.

5: Deliver a clear output within the project period: February to July 2026.

6: Design and deliver collaboratively so that benefits extend beyond individual practice. Collaboration across UAL Colleges, disciplines, staff and student groups is highly encouraged.

7: Consider how you can involve students and positively impact the student journey, directly or indirectly. The fund can’t support students’ final projects.

8: If your project involves sensitive data or direct engagement with vulnerable or marginalised communities, set out how:

  • data risks will be managed, including GDPR compliance
  • participants will be safeguarded (for example: a named, qualified safeguarding lead or experienced project partner)
  • appropriate support and signposting will be provided.

In some cases, submission to the UAL Ethics Committee may be required.

9: Represent genuinely new initiatives, or a new, distinct phase of existing work. We cannot fund ongoing initiatives that already have substantial funding. If an existing initiative does not have enough or sustainable funding, you’ll need to make a strong case for how your proposed phase clearly aligns with the challenge brief and brings something innovative. You cannot rely on the fund to extend current work.

In January 2026, proposals will be reviewed through a participatory grant-making process. This means that applicants and a group of UAL staff and students will come together in person and decide how to allocate the available funds.

It’s mandatory for a representative from each project to attend 2 half-day meetings on 16 and 28 January. At these sessions, applicants will pitch their proposals in a short presentation.

Attendees, including applicants, will then provide each project with a score based on 3 criteria:

1: Togetherness and co-creation

Does the project bring people together, involve diverse voices, and strengthen connections across communities?

2: Innovation and legacy

Does the project introduce new ideas or approaches that create lasting benefits, with outcomes and learning that continue to make a difference into the future?

3: Clarity and alignment

Is there a clear and realistic plan that aligns with the challenge brief objectives and can make the vision a reality?

Apply for the Social Purpose Innovation Fund.

Download the Social Purpose Innovation Fund application guide (Word 65KB).