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Global Crises, Local Impacts: City–University Collaboration in Preventing Hate and Maintaining Social Cohesion in Times of Global Crises

Publication Date:

01/10/2025

Content Type:

Event Reports

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City–University CollaborationGlobal Crises Local ImpactsPrevention PartnershipsSocial Cohesion

— 11 minutes reading time

This report provides a summary of discussions during the webinar and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Strong Cities Network Management Unit, Strong Cities members, event sponsors or participants.

Summary

On 1 October 2025, Strong Cities Network hosted the latest in a series of monthly webinars on Global Crises, Local Impacts: City–University Collaboration in Preventing Hate and Maintaining Social Cohesion in Times of Global Crises. The webinar series is part of Strong Cities’ Global Crises, Local Impacts Initiative, launched in late 2023 in response to growing requests from the Network’s members and other cities to provide support and peer learning as they try to navigate the local impacts of successive and concurrent global crises, including climate change, migration and the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The October webinar explored how local governments can leverage and otherwise benefit from the important contributions that local post-secondary institutions (for example, colleges and universities, colleges and universities) can make to whole-of-city efforts to prevent hate and other threats to social cohesion in times of global crisis. This includes data gathering and analysis, research, expertise, training and programme evaluation. The session explored how local government and campus actors can work together to help manage impacts of global crises like protests, marches and overnight demonstrations by encouraging civil and respectful dialogue and ensuring freedom of protected expression and speech while safely maintaining a welcoming and safe campus and community for all.

The webinar’s panel discussion featured city and university officials from four Strong Cities members. They shared how their respective institutions established mutually beneficial partnerships to prevent hate and address local threats to social cohesion:

• Birmingham, England (UK)
  • Sean Arbuthnot, Prevent Manager, Birmingham City Council
  • Jon Elsmore, Director of Student Affairs, University of Birmingham
• Columbus (Ohio, US)
  • Michael Schadek, Director of International Affairs and Regional Partnerships, City of Columbus
  • Dr. Russell Hassan, Ambassador Milton A. and Roslyn Z. Wolf Chair in Public and International Affairs, The Ohio State University
• Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, US)
  • Randy Duque, Deputy Director, Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, City of Philadelphia
  • Denise Wilhelm, Deputy Chief of Operations, Public Safety, Temple University
• Tempe (Arizona, US)
  • Doreen Garlid, Vice Mayor, City of Tempe
  • Tim Gomez, Senior Director of Government and Community Engagement, Arizona State University

Key Takeaways

1.  Local government and university officials should proactively establish relationships before a crisis or incident occurs. This includes building systems and communication protocols with key staff, including administration and law enforcement, to facilitate information sharing and create prevention and response plans.
2. Prevention partnerships and efforts, especially those on campus, should be student-informed. To ensure the development and implementation of prevention initiatives that are legitimate, effective and sensitive to diverse experiences, officials should leverage and appreciate insights from a diversity of students. 
3. Professors, researchers and other university staff can contribute their expertise, evidence-based research and programme design and delivery experience to a whole-of-city, multidisciplinary approach to addressing local challenges that threaten social cohesion. These threats are increasingly complex and intersectional and are best addressed with a team reflecting diverse professional backgrounds.
4. Initiating local government-university partnerships can require bold action, but once sparked, can lead to results in unanticipated connections and benefits. Although partnerships may be established to initially address a particular issue area or leverage a new opportunity, it is often only the first step in creating deeper and more meaningful long-term engagement.
5. Outside influencers – those individuals or groups that come from outside the university community to participate in on-campus protests or demonstrations – can create conditions where hate or violence can flourish. City–university collaborations allow for information sharing and risk assessment, and mitigation to prevent and respond to potential outside agitators.

City–University Collaborations Can Take Many Different Forms

In Tempe, Vice Mayor Garlid highlighted the city’s 140-year partnership with Arizona State University (ASU), which includes a co-funded position that liaises between the university and local government. In his position, Tim Gomez works closely with city and university leaders and student groups, including sororities and fraternities, to gain insights on local ordinances, policies and other measures impacting youth. These student groups also work closely with the city to get plugged into community volunteer opportunities with the city and community-based organisations. His work also includes helping to integrate student voices on local boards and commissions and making local elected officials accessible. ASU’s School of Public Affairs runs a two-year programme for Public Administration graduates that embeds them in city managers’ offices across the state. As part of the university’s orientation for off-campus students, the city’s Neighborhood Services Division counsels students on ‘good neighbour’ practices and how they can be partners in maintaining community cohesion and safety. The city and police department also leveraged relationships with ASU students and community members to develop its It Starts With Me: Building Community Resiliency booklet on identifying and responding to hate crimes and incidents in Tempe.

This city–university pair also shared that having young residents passionate about political and human rights issues makes Tempe a more curious, innovative and civically engaged city. Vice Mayor Garlid pointed to a recent example of global crises impacting their community when ASU students organised a peace march related to the Israel-Gaza conflict from campus property to the city-owned Tempe Town Lake park. City and university officials worked closely to ensure a smooth and safe transition from campus to city property. Vice Mayor Garlid emphasised that collaboration between law enforcement and civilian officials from the two institutions helped ensure students were able to safely exercise their free speech rights.

In Columbus, Michael Schadek and Dr Hassan explained that a crisis became an opportunity for deeper collaboration when the city faced substantial challenges to managing civil unrest during the 2020 social justice protests following the murder of George Floyd. After recognising the public’s dissatisfaction and mistrust of law enforcement’s response during protests and demonstrations, which often exacerbated community tensions, the City of Columbus adopted a public health approach to managing protests, focused on preventing unnecessary use of force and understanding the root causes of violence.

It worked with the Ohio State University (OSU) John Glenn College of Public Affairs, visiting professor Clifford Stott, an international expert in public protest de-escalation tactics and strategies, and Dr Hassan to develop and implement a new model of protest management, which included the creation of a Dialogue Team within the Columbus Division of Police. With an emphasis on de-escalation and using dialogue to reduce tensions during protests, the Dialogue Team works to maintain communication with protest organisers with the goal of minimising potential violence before it escalates. Since adopting the Dialogue Team model in late 2022, Columbus has managed to keep the majority of protests peaceful. According to Schadek, the model has been internationally recognised in its approach and impact and has been successfully replicated in cities across the globe.

Critical to the success of the Dialogue Team was a motivated and focused multidisciplinary team as well as internal champions in the Columbus Division of Police who were open to culture change within the organisation. Dr Hassan emphasised that using small wins to build a coalition of supporters and facilitating genuine co-production of ideas helped sustain efforts. Schadek also highlighted that working with a trusted, independent community partner like OSU helped build internal and external credibility for the initiative.

In Birmingham, city and university officials have seen significant local impacts from global crises. Migration, tensions between India and Pakistan and the Israel-Gaza conflict have resulted in rising anti-migrant, antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate, as well as protests and encampments on and off campus. However, despite having seen the most pro-Palestine activism compared to anywhere else in the UK apart from London, the local police in Birmingham have managed to maintain public safety while making few arrests. Birmingham Prevent Manager Sean Arbuthnot credits well-informed and pragmatic policing and genuine community engagement that includes engaging trusted stakeholders and providing them a key role in planning and decision-making as well as inviting community observers in the police control room during protests.

The University of Birmingham boasts around 40,000 students, an estimated third of whom are international students. Jon Elsmore shared that the university has similarly felt the intense impacts of multiple global crises on its campus. Recently, protests and encampments related to the Israel-Gaza conflict have challenged officials in their attempts to bring student groups together to open dialogue. The university hosts a large Muslim student population and the largest Jewish student population of any university outside of London. Although the school has a multi-faith chaplaincy to serve students, tensions were too high to bring the various student groups together. Because campus faith leaders and chaplains could not adequately address student concerns, the university partnered with the City of Birmingham and the Department for Education to bring brokers and mediators from outside of the campus to communicate with organisers and student groups. Through these mediators, university officials were able to meet with student groups and those participating in the encampment to take the first step in opening dialogue.

Supporting similar calls from webinar panellists, Arbuthnot and Elsmore urged city and university officials to establish partnerships and institutional structures before a crisis or incident occurs. And when a crisis does occur, collaboration can help institutions share risks and responsibilities and allow multidisciplinary teams to contribute to consistent, clear and credible messaging to the community. These collaborations can also lead to unexpected benefits and serve as an opportunity to leverage each institution’s area of expertise and influence to advance each organisation’s goals.

In Philadelphia, Randy Duque shared the Commission on Human Relations (Commission), along with its Interagency Civil Rights Task Force and Rapid Response Teams, are inter-disciplinary and interagency teams which include partners from law enforcement, local, state and federal government, local community-based organisations and local colleges and universities. Together, these entities work to form proactive partnerships, facilitate information sharing and create prevention and response plans. The Commission has also provided bias awareness training to university law enforcement and shared resources on dialogue building to assist universities with managing the impacts of global crises, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict, on campus. For example, Temple University officials recently worked with the Commission, Philadelphia Police Department and other city partners as Temple students gathered and marched through the city centre to meet additional student groups, ultimately gathering at University of Pennsylvania to establish a large Pro-Palestine encampment. The Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of Muslim Engagement worked with the university to locate local imams on campus to meet with individuals, student groups and outside protesters to open dialogue and facilitate understanding of the goals of the encampment to university and public safety officials.

Temple University’s Denise Wilhelm also shared their strategy of first attempting dialogue with campus protest organisers and then mediating communication through the Dean of Students or Student Affairs offices. This open dialogue with organisers or student groups on their objectives and plans, she said, can allow university law enforcement and other partners to strategise how they can best collaborate and support the safe exercise of their free speech rights and prevent any escalation to violence.

Additional collaborations include the Commission making its resources related to bias incident and hate crime reporting available to Temple’s international student population, who often live off-campus and may experience higher rates of discrimination. Similar to ASU, Temple works with the local government on a good neighbor initiative for its off-campus students, organising neighborhood cleanups and other neighborhood events to promote social cohesion and community connection. These engagement efforts often also involve fraternities and sororities that work on volunteer and other neighborhood improvement projects.

Both city and university representatives echoed the guidance of other webinar participants, urging officials to be bold in their outreach efforts to their institutional counterparts and reap the benefits of multidisciplinary collaboration.

Next Steps

This webinar was presented as part of the Strong Cities Global Crises, Local Impacts webinar series, focused on sharing best practices and building awareness of the foundational aspects of city-led hate and targeted violence prevention. The next Global Crises, Local Impacts webinar on November 18 2025 will explore Strengthening Community Safety Through Collaboration Between Local Police, Social Workers and Healthcare Professionals.

Please sign up for Strong Cities Network’s mailing list, to receive invitations for upcoming webinars and other events.

Additional Resources

• A Guide for Mayors: Preventing and Responding to Hate, Extremism & Polarisation, Strong Cities Network (updated March 2025)
• A Guide for Cities: Preventing Hate, Extremism & Polarisation (see Navigating Difficult Issues), Strong Cities Network (updated March 2025)
• A Guide for City-Led Response, Strong Cities Network (updated February 2025)
• A Ten-Step Roadmap for Enhancing City-Led Support for Community-Based Programmes to Address Hate and Extremism, Strong Cities Network (February 2025)
• Managing Migration: City-Led Approaches for Being an Includive, Welcoming and Socially-Cohesive City (April 2025)
• City-Led Youth Engagement in Addressing Hate, Extremism and Polarisation: Ten Recommendations for Cities (February 2025)
• Bridging Differences Playbook, Greater Good Science Center & Bridging Differences (February 2025)
• Countering Hate Speech in Times of Crisis: Considerations for Mayors and Local Governments, Strong Cities Network (December 2024)
  

Contact Information 

For more information on this event, the webinar series, or the Global Crises, Local Impacts initiative, please contact our team at [email protected]. 

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