Our community

UK’s only special needs yoga centre is based in one of our flagship London properties.

A yoga therapy charity working with children and adults with special needs and life limiting conditions is based at our Stapleton House property in London.

Back in 2017, Unite Students in partnership with Islington Council, utilised a planning stipulation to incorporate a community space within its new Holloway Road accommodation. We wanted to find an organisation that would bring direct benefit to the local community.

Following a successful tender process, MahaDevi secured the premises and relocated from their previous home, into our much larger premises that we specifically outfitted for their client’s needs

The centre itself provides heavily subsidised therapy to children and adults with special needs often working with hospices to provide yoga therapy to children with life limiting conditions and end of life care. More than 100 yoga therapy sessions are now delivered weekly across three flexible spaces, including one-to-one sessions, tailored to suit specific conditions and individuals. Waiting lists have been substantially shortened due to the larger space facilitating more therapy sessions for both current and new patients.

In addition, the centre has now been able to create a fund which helps to subsidise sessions for families on a low income, making them affordable to all. 228 sessions were provided via this fund over the past year. The organisation has been able to avoid an increase in session prices (already priced at less than half the cost of the national average for this type of session) over the past three years.

The centre also has close links with the student community living in the adjacent property. The centre now has 25 students attending classes on a weekly basis. Several of these students have volunteered along with other members of the community to help redecorate the studio spaces, helping to achieve one of the key objectives for this initiative to provide a genuine way of integrating the students with the local community.

Ben Eydmann, MahaDevi manager, said:

“It was becoming increasingly difficult to run safe spaces for people [where we were before].

“We could never have known until we moved here what would happen: it’s just growing and growing in terms of being a community hub.”

Volunteers dredge canal and clear tow path in Birmingham

Unite Students’ volunteers helped dredge a canal and clear a tow path in Selly Oak, Birmingham – removing shopping trolleys, bicycles, golf trolleys and much more.

It came after Unite Students opened its second building in Selly Oak, home to the University of Birmingham (UoB) campus and student accommodation.  Demand for student housing greatly outstrips supply in this area.

The team partnered with the Canals Trust and UoB to create volunteering opportunities. Employees and students worked to clean up the canal and surrounding area to provide a safer, cleaner and more engaging environment for local residents and students.

Since opening in September 2019, Unite has invested more than £21,000 into the local area and community. It is hoped the canal dredging and tow path clearance will encourage more students to adopt greener methods of transport between their accommodation and university. Unite has also offered financial support to the Lapal Canal Trust to support the reshaping of part of the canal to make it safer and more accessible.

Victoria Simmons, Unite’s Area Manager in Birmingham, said:

“Our top priority is keeping our students safe and providing a brilliant experience; we want to extend this to the local community in the areas surrounding our student home. Working closely with the University of Birmingham and local charities, we are working to make a positive impact that benefits a wide range of people. We look forward to continuing this work going forwards, bringing in more student involvement to help with their integration into the local community and spread these efforts even further.”

We have a special relationship with the city of Bristol and the local community built over three decades and provide extensive support to local organisations particularly those working with young people and the city’s homeless population.

As the place where our company was started and where our head office is still based, for 30 years we have been working with the local community on a number of projects in Bristol.

Each year our employees at South Quay House nominate and vote for a local charity partner to support. Over the past three years we have worked with three different charities supporting young people in the city.

Through our property at Nelson House, we provide a multi-agency youth homeless prevention hub run by Bristol Youth MAPs and other agencies, with fully renovated and fitted ground floor rooms at a significantly reduced rent. We also provide a city-centre office and funding for a mental health worker for Bristol’s Street Intervention Service, tackling the root causes of anti-social behaviour.

Other initiatives we have sponsored include sponsoring Bristol Pride for five years and Better Bristol, part of Bristol 24/7

We are working closely with Streetwise, a charity in Bristol which supports the homeless and drug users. We have provided Streetwise with office space and are funding a full-time employee.

Over the past few years the impact of homelessness in Bristol has been felt by our teams, students, and local communities with regular instances of anti-social behaviour. So we are supporting Streetwise, an organisation with expert knowledge and experience around homelessness, to tackle anti-social behaviour through a multi-agency initiative,

Our support has provided and fitted out an office and meeting space for Streetwise and funded an additional full time ‘street beat’ worker. In the first four months of this position being filled, four clients have successfully completed an alcohol detox programme and 214 members of the street community have engaged in a methadone treatment programme.