Perspective on First Year by UCL Beacon director: Steve Cross.

This month I celebrated a year as UCL's first-ever Public Engagement Co-ordinator, and May also marked 4 months since Hilary Jackson started in the new UCL Public Engagement Unit. This a good time to look back over what has happened at UCL so far.

After 12 months of hard work, it's now clear how we're going to deliver the ambitious list of programmes we included in our bid for Beacons money. Everything is either now happening, or plans are in place that make clear how and when it will happen. We've put a lot of effort into trying to make staff aware of our existence and the help we can give them, and this is finally starting to pay off; Senior staff now come to us for help and advice, based on our reputation within the institution.

Our unit was established entirely using money from the Beacons initiative, and we use the funds as strategically as we can; We never get involved with a project just because it's a good engagement project, and instead we're always interested in what it will do to build capacity for engagement work, to build networks or to generate new learning about what universities and communities can do for one another.

We recently announced our first symposium for UCL staff to share public engagement expertise in a formal way, and we've been deluged with applications to attend. We've even had to upgrade to a larger lecture theatre than we originally anticipated. It was great to see a lot of familiar names amongst the attendees, making clear that all of the individual meetings to enthuse staff about engaging with the public in a co-ordinated way are bearing fruit.

A major help to us recently has been the Research Councils new emphasis on impact in their grant-making. Staff are coming to us for help filling-in the relevant sections of their grant applications, and we're finding it easier to convince the minority of academics who remain sceptical about the value of engagement. Many staff are now actively looking to us to provide opportunities for them to take the first steps to satisfying the funders demands in this area.