12
October
2026
|
08:50
Europe/London
One World Together Takes Home Partnership Excellence Award
The team at One World Together (OWT) – a social enterprise co-founded by GDI’s Professor Nicola Banks and Chibwe Masabo Henry – is delighted to have been awarded a prize at the University of Manchester’s inaugural Partnership Excellence Awards.
OWT Awards Pic
Award winnders (left-right): Laura Dempsey, Head of Individual Giving, GDI alumna, Nicola Banks, Professor of Global Development at GDI and Co-founder of One World Together, Skyler Colarusso, Operations Manager, GDI alumna and current PhD student.
Summary
- One World Together receives the ‘Social Enterprise Partnership Excellence’ award at the University's Innovation Festival
The awards were set up as part of the University’s Innovation Festival 2026, with the aim of showcasing the role of collaboration in advancing research, driving innovation, and delivering social value across Manchester and beyond. OWT and its partners within UoM won the ‘Social Enterprise Partnership Excellence’ category, which recognises outstanding partnerships between the university and organisations delivering measurable social, environmental or community impact.
Responding to the win, Nicola said: “I’m absolutely delighted that our partnership with One World Together has been recognised in this way. OWT grew out of research at Manchester, but what I’m most proud of is everything that has become possible since then by working together — with our community partners, schools, students and colleagues across the University.
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We’ve been able to turn research into action, create opportunities for young people and students to see themselves as capable of making change, and build new ways of sustaining and strengthening community-led organisations over the long term.
OWT may have started here in Manchester, but the relationships, ideas and possibilities it is building reach far beyond it. It feels like a wonderful example of what ‘from Manchester, for the world’ can mean in practice.
Prof Nicola Banks, co-founder One World Together
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Also shortlisted at the awards were Professor Diana Mitlin for GDI’s longstanding partnership with Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a global network of community organisers advocating for improved conditions for people living in informal settlements. As explored in a recent GDI blog, GDI’s collaboration with SDI has fundamentally shaped the trajectory of research within the institute, paving the way for projects like OWT.
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Our nomination is noteworthy insofar as it recognises the significance of alternative understandings, or alternative ways of knowledge. GDI’s diverse engagement with the informal settlement residents that make up SDI federations is a project in social justice; but it is also our intellectual interest of their understandings, of local ecologies, of political realities and of community knowledge. We are stronger together.
Professor Diana Mitlin
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We’re immensely proud of the partnerships GDI has nurtured over the decades. As an institute with social justice at its heart, our researchers are accustomed to working alongside others to deliver new ideas addressing some of the world’s biggest challenges. We’re thrilled that two impactful GDI projects were recognised as both winners and finalists and will continue championing the power of partnership across our scholarship, teaching, and wider public engagement.
Professor Sam Hickey, Head of Institute at GDI
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