Joanna Holmes

Doctor of Laws

Wednesday 24 July 2024 - Orator: Professor Tom Sperlinger

Listen to the full oration and honorary speech on SoundCloud.

"Pro Vice-Chancellor,

 In the late 1990s, a Bristol MP took an idea from the city that would help inspire a transformative national policy. 
 
The Sure Start centres were a network of children’s centres across the country offering health, parenting, learning and childcare support. Their impact, over the next 20 years, ranged across maternal mental health, children’s educational outcomes – and more.

The seed in Bristol that inspired Sure Start was a well-established family centre at the Barton Hill Settlement, a charity and community hub. 
 
More than 30 years ago, Joanna Holmes walked past the Settlement every day – while dropping her eldest child off at a nearby school – and, one day, another mum from the school asked if she would like to attend a toddler group there. Soon after she began to volunteer.
 
The first leadership role Joanna took on at the Settlement was as manager of the family centre, and in the mid-1990s she led the redevelopment of the space. The approach bore Joanna’s distinctive stamp. She brought parents and architects together to lay out the blueprint for what the new building would look like; and then the parents trained in construction and went on to complete the self-build.
 
Over the decades, thousands of parents have benefited from the networks, expertise, and community that the family centre has offered.
 
Joanna went on to be CEO of the Settlement for 20 years, and her work there was underpinned by the same principles: a creative approach; a commitment to bringing different people together so they could share their expertise; and a belief in ensuring the talents and potential of communities should be nurtured, so that they could make their own decisions and act decisively to shape the world around them. 
 
Above all, Joanna understood, and nurtured, the human relationships that are at the heart of the Settlement.
 
Barton Hill is one of the most economically deprived areas of the city, and also one of the most complex: with over 70 languages spoken there, it is a site of rich expertise, a place that truly makes real the promise of Bristol as a global city.
 
As CEO, Joanna oversaw the construction of further new buildings and enabled new tenants to join the Settlement, as varied as the Bristol Somali Resource Centre, the Travelling Light Theatre Company, Bristol Multi-Faith Forum, NHS Child and Family Consultation Services and Bristol Refugee Rights.
 
She oversaw the Settlement’s response to COVID-19, during which it was a vital community hub, and its merger with the Wellspring Healthy Living Centre, giving it a new name of the Wellspring Settlement.
 
And it was Joanna’s vision that brought the university back into the Settlement in 2020, after a nearly 50-year gap. The Settlement was founded in 1911 by staff and students at the University as “the university settlement”, part of a wider movement in the UK and US of universities establishing hubs within communities; until the 1970s, there was still a library and University staff on site.
 
As the University’s new Temple Quarter campus emerged just a mile away, Joanna saw an opportunity to rekindle this relationship.
 
She worked with Professor Morag McDermont at the university to establish a Social Justice Network, which they led together, bringing together academics and community leaders from across the city. This led to the creation of a City Fellows programme, with local people coming into the university to share their expertise.
 
From these collaborations came the first physical footprint of the new campus: a university micro-campus in the Settlement’s new micro-settlement, made of multicoloured shipping containers. It is now home to research, teaching, homework clubs, a little library, research coffee mornings – and more.
 
More than this, a new home for the university in the Settlement has offered a model as the university moves into a new part of the city, of how to work in partnership; to recognise diverse kinds of expertise; to listen and learn from communities close to hand. 
  
Hilda Cashmore, the first Warden of the Barton Hill Settlement, once said: “There are no ordinary people” and Joanna’s work too has embodied the belief that ordinary people are extraordinary, if we attend properly to their voices – and find the right ways to nurture their talents.
 
Joanna’s work has embodied the principles of the settlement movement, as Margaret E Berry (former executive director of an American federation of settlements) described them:
 
‘that each person had the capacity to grow and the right to enjoy “the best”… and that the welfare of the nation as well as its neighbourhoods was dependent on personal communication across the barriers of economic and social class.’
 
Many of you graduating today will be looking ahead at the start of your career, wondering what role you might play in the years ahead. Joanna Holmes offers us all a model of what a career looks like that allows others to grow and enjoy “the best” of life; that ensures communication across barriers; and that demonstrates how acting creatively, and together, can change lives for the better, locally and nationally.
 
Pro Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Joanna Holmes as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Laws."