Collaboratory Researcher Profiles
Project Title: (Stone)Bridging the social capital gap: Exploring how community spaces can cultivate social capital to improve young people’s employment chances
What were you doing (e.g. type of work/study) before your PhD/Placement?
I’m on a graduate scheme at the East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA), where I currently work in the Research and Intelligence team. I was actually involved in EMCCA’s match funding of six of these Collaboratory research placements before deciding to undertake one of them myself!
As part of this work, I scoped the initial research questions that informed the placements now underway. I’m excited to be able to take this work forward as a researcher myself, not just contributing behind the scenes.
What are you researching?
I’m investigating how social capital shapes access to employment, with a particular focus on early-career recruitment in deprived communities.
Social capital refers to the value of an individual’s social network – including the number and diversity of connections they have, and how effectively they can leverage them. These networks influence both awareness of opportunities and perceptions of what is achievable.
My research explores this using Stonebridge City Farm, a free community space in St Ann’s, Nottingham, as a case study. The farm brings together people, activities, and shared experiences to foster connection, routine, and belonging – and in this way, it directly contributes to building social capital in those that frequent it. St Ann’s faces high levels of deprivation, low employment rates, and low levels of bridging and bonding capital, making it a valuable context for understanding how social value initiatives can address inequality.
Stonebridge is launching Stonebridge Futures, a programme designed to help young people into work by providing structured work experience within the farm’s operational environment. I will be evaluating how effectively the programme builds participants’ social capital and supports their employment journeys.
What motivated you to apply for this specific Placement project?
For me, social capital is such an interesting topic, and yet it’s massively unexplored! We don’t tend to reflect on how our social circles affect our life outcomes, especially because it’s intangible and difficult to measure.
What particularly interests me is how this plays out in recruitment. In today’s increasingly competitive labour market, where social mobility has become a zero-sum game, access to networks and insider knowledge plays a significant role in shaping who is able to access and succeed in employment.
This is something I’ve seen firsthand: Many people rely solely on platforms like Indeed and end up on an onerous job hunting journey characterized by repeated rejection. Over time, this can lead to disillusionment and a loss of confidence which is often internalised as personal shortcomings rather than a reflection of unequal access to knowledge and networks.
It’s very important to me that everyone gets an equal understanding of how the job market works and what opportunities are out there. Without tackling the uneven distributions of social capital, true social mobility will remain out of reach.
Why do you think this research is important?
The 2025 Ipsos Employer Skills Survey found that word-of-mouth and personal recommendations are the most common recruitment channels used by employers in the East Midlands. This naturally privileges those with stronger networks, while disadvantaging communities that have historically been excluded from these opportunities.
Even where formal, accessible recruitment processes are in place, candidates with access to informal knowledge (about companies, roles, application processes, etc.) are often better positioned to succeed. It’s a story we know too well: ‘who you know’ shapes where you go.
Despite this clear evidence of its impact, social capital remains unexplored in both policy and recruitment. A lot of public sector work to improve employment outcomes focuses on skills and qualifications, and rightly so, but this can overlook the less visible barriers. Skills development is often preceded by opportunity, and access to opportunity is heavily shaped by social capital. Therefore, if we want to achieve genuine social mobility and inclusive growth, we need to level the playing field, which is what my research hopes to address.
What difference do you hope to make in Nottingham through this research?
It’s important to me that my findings can be materialised to actually improve local outcomes. Therefore, I’m aiming to produce practical outputs, including list of recommendations to help employment support programmes better integrate social capital into their design, as well as an evaluation framework for Stonebridge City Farm to track and strengthen the impact of their Stonebridge Futures programme.
The research will also support EMCCA’s work on skills, employment, and inclusive growth by addressing one of our existing knowledge gaps. Beyond these tangible outputs, I hope this research sparks a broader conversation about the role of social capital in recruitment, encouraging employers and service providers to consider how their practices can be more inclusive and equitable.
What do you hope to be doing in five years’ time? (personally and/or professionally)
I definitely want to stay within the public sector as it’s where my work feels purposeful. I hope to work within strategy ideally, bringing together research, policy and lived experience to inform public decision-making. I’m also really interested in enhancing citizen participation and championing co-design, making sure people have a meaningful role in shaping the services that affect them.