3MT Meet the Judges: Zara Kitson

Zara Kitson is currently Head of Partnerships at leading youth charity The Prince’s Trust Scotland and is on the Board of Engender – Scotland’s feminist policy and advocacy organisation. With a background in the youth and community sectors, focussed around community engagement, involvement and raising the voices of those who are easiest to ignore has been a core part of Zara’s work across the public and third sectors. A feminist and activist who has engaged in local, national, and international projects and movements, her activism centres around social, economic, gender and environmental justice. She is passionate about driving change with and within communities. 

Can you tell me a bit about who you are and what you do? 

I’m Zara Kitson and I’m a feminist, I'm an activist, and I guess I'm also a leader in Scotland's third sector. I’ve previously worked in community engagement focused roles, largely in the children and young people’s sector, and recently I’ve also done some work in the housing and homelessness sector. I’m currently the Head of Partnerships at young people's charity The Prince's Trust, supporting disadvantaged young people to achieve their full potential. So, it’s a really mixed bag of different things. I’m also a mother of a toddler, which is a very important job – it’s definitely the most stressful one! 

What does your work involve on a day-to-day basis? 

In my current role the focus of my work is really about developing and strengthening partnerships and funder relationships mainly in the public sector. So, I work with government and local authorities and other public sector bodies to forge partnerships to ensure that The Prince’s Trust can support as many disadvantaged young people as we possibly can. Day to day that means that my work involves developing relationships and building connections across all departments of the organization - and The Princes Trust is actually the biggest youth charity in the UK. I spend a lot of time translating ideas and projects into something we can make a reality by pulling in the partnerships to support the work to take place on the ground. Part of this means being able to communicate impact to those outside of the organisation as well: telling lots of stories about the amazing journeys that young people have gone on and the impact that our work has had in order to encourage more people to work alongside us to support young people across our communities. 

During the Three Minute Thesis Competition we talk a lot about ‘public engagement’ in an academic sense, as a vital part of disseminating your research to a wider audience. But as someone who doesn’t work in a strictly academic environment, what do you think the value is of connecting and communicating with people outside of your field? 

From my perspective working in the social sector, I think that the key purpose of any form of research should be that it’s driving something bigger, some key change, or helping us to progress in some way. It’s so important for ideas to be shared in the public domain to drive this kind of progress and push for better. It’s also so vital for ideas to be communicated across different fields because that’s where you get cross-fertilization of ideas and make the connections that grow into potential collaborations. That experience of sharing ideas widely or engaging the public with them is a way to then forge connections into different fields or sectors or organizations that potentially you might not have thought of working with, and it also inspires ideas and connections to those fields from other people as well.  

What are the main features of a good communicator to you? 

For me, the most important thing is having your audience in mind. I think that when you have to communicate, you should be communicating for the audience. You have to make sure that, whoever your audience is and whatever the setting is, you're aligning your communication in a way that's going to be something they can relate to, connect with and be engaged by. This is where the idea of storytelling can be really useful: making sure that you’re taking people on a journey and describing your ideas in terms of experiences that they might be able to relate to. Sometimes, if ideas are too abstract then it can immediately switch people off, and they might even feel stupid and think that what you’re saying just isn’t for them. So, for me it really is all about keeping your audience in mind and relating to them to keep the content engaging. 

What will you be looking out for in the presentations which make it to the final? 

I’m looking for people to be authentically themselves. I think the best communicators are the ones that really lean into their own authentic style, and aren’t afraid to communicate in a way that works for them rather than trying to emulate someone else. You can obviously be inspired by and learn from how good communicators present themselves to an audience, but the best presenters are those that are authentic in their style of delivery. If you’re trying to copy someone else too much then you’re just going to make yourself uncomfortable in the process, which is the opposite of what you want to be. When you’re comfortable the audience is comfortable and vice versa – and you always want to try and make your audience as comfortable as possible. 

 I also really value when people show a bit of creativity in their communication style. I know that in terms of the competition there is a format that people have to follow, but there’s still space within this to be creative and to let your own style and personality shine through – and that’s what I’ll be looking for. 

What are you most looking forward to about being involved in 3MT at UofG? 

It's an obvious one but I'm looking forward to hearing about everyone's different research topics. I’m not really involved in the academic world, so I'm just excited to hear how passionate everyone is about their respective ideas and seeing the creative ways that people come up with to share those presentations. Three minutes isn’t very long, so it’s going to be an exciting challenge for those involved and I'm just really looking forward to seeing the different ways that people tackle that challenge. 

Any final words of wisdom for this year’s 3MT competitors? 

I know that academia can be a very pressured, and sometimes competitive, environment. So, I just want to encourage people to have fun with this. Don’t take it so seriously that it becomes just another pressure or stress to add to your plate. Try to see it as an opportunity to learn something and to develop your own skills, rather than being something you have to beat yourself up over. I think I’d also like people to see this as an opportunity to really learn what their communication style is – to learn what feels comfortable to them and what lands well with audiences.