When Carers Lead: The Institutional Power of Staff Networks

Madiha Sajid - Blog Post Author

Celebrating the International Day of Staff Networks 2026

Madiha Sajid, Imperial College London

My name is Madiha, and I work at Imperial College London. I previously worked at UCL where I set up the UCL's Parents and Carers Network (PACT) and most recently beginning to lend my experience to the parents and carers network at Imperial College London. My story is not unusual among working carers in academia. What is less usual is what I and my networks have chosen to do with it.

Following the International Day of Staff Networks (12th May 2026), I want to reflect on a question that often goes unasked: what do staff networks actually do for institutions?

The personal benefits of community, solidarity, feeling less alone are well documented and genuinely important. But the institutional dimension is quieter, less visible, and arguably more consequential. How do we ‘unite for equity’? Particularly for those of us working at the intersection of parental leave, caring responsibilities, and academic careers.

A carer’s account: from invisible to influential

Unpaid carers are the backbone of families, communities, and social support systems. In higher education, they are frequently invisible navigating school runs and parents' medical appointments alongside grant deadlines and teaching schedules, absorbing the weight of what economists call the "hidden labour". The challenges of a carer’s life are layered and I know them from the inside. Caring responsibilities are demanding, time-consuming, and nonstop. Achieving a work-life balance often feels like a moving target. And then there are the emotional dimensions that rarely make it into appraisals or one-to-ones such as the exhaustion of complicated family dynamics, the guilt of having no time left for yourself, the weight of cultural expectations, especially for women, to absorb caring for parents as well as children, often without question and often without the same expectation placed on a partner. I have felt all of this. Many of my colleagues have too, in silence.

UCL PACT was created precisely to hold that complexity. Through sustained, strategic work, we raised awareness of the challenges parents and carers face, fed into policy and procedural consultations, and earned a seat at tables where decisions about working conditions are made. As one senior UCL voice reflected: "parents and carers now have increased visibility at UCL. Our needs and challenges are better understood. And our views are considered for policy and procedural matters." That same voice named the most lasting legacy as something harder to quantify: "a strong sense of community and togetherness which has become visible in the last few years."

The structural work that networks do

Networks like PACT do not simply provide emotional support. At the institutional level, we function as an intelligence layer surfacing challenges that line managers may not see, spotting policy gaps before they become crises, and connecting people across silos who share common ground. Over the years, we ran sessions on maternity coaching, men's mental health and fatherhood, loneliness and isolation, coping with caring responsibilities, multi-lingual parenting, raising teenagers, baby loss, and the compound burden of Covid-era caring. Every session was shaped by what members told us they needed, in real time.

The impact on those members is what keeps me going.

-       "It was helpful to hear other people's experiences & it made me feel less isolated."

-       "I appreciate that you've given me the space to speak about aspects of my life that aren't pretty. There's a pressure to only focus on nice things and not the grubby, uncomfortable parts."

These are not simply expressions of personal comfort. They are evidence that something structurally important is happening and people are being seen in their full complexity, rather than as a version of themselves edited for professional compatability. This is exactly the kind of grassroots intelligence-gathering that formal institutional processes often miss. Staff networks are, in a real sense, embedded researchers continuously collecting qualitative data on what it feels like to balance care with career, across every career stage, in every corner of an institution. That data matters.

Next stop: UK PACT (Parents and Carers Together) Network

There comes a time in a staff network’s life when it becomes large enough to enable other organisations and to act as a blueprint. This is exactly what happened when I set up the national network for parents and carers in higher education, now ably chaired by my colleagues at UK PACT. It is a collaborative network dedicated to supporting, connecting, and strengthening Parent and Carer Networks across the UK Higher Education sector. This open-access resource provides practical guidance, shared experiences, and case studies to help institutions establish, develop, and sustain inclusive support networks.

Spreading the model: From UCL to Imperial

What excites me right now is what comes next. Having helped build something meaningful at UCL, I am now beginning to work with the parents and carers network at Imperial College London. This is not a small thing. Imperial and UCL are two of the UK's most research-intensive universities, operating under enormous pressure and expectation. They attract researchers at the peak of their ambition and those researchers are also, quietly, managing school drop-offs, caring for ageing parents, negotiating parental leave, and trying to sustain careers that were not designed with any of this in mind. I want to bring everything I have learned at UCL:  what works, what doesn't, how to get institutional buy-in, how to build a community that people actually want to be part of and help shape something equally meaningful at Imperial.

There is something about expertise in community-building not through formal policy transfer or top-down mandates, but through people who have lived it, built it, and know what it takes. It is a reminder that staff networks are not just internal assets. They are part of a wider ecosystem of knowledge and advocacy and grow stronger when institutions share learning rather than operate in isolation.

Why it is worth it

I have been fortunate to receive recognition for this work including UCL's Provost's Excellence Award for exceptional leadership and service to staff members. But the honest answer to "why bother?" is simpler than any award. It is the moment someone in a session says they feel less alone. It is the policy that gets amended because we raised a concern. It is the colleague who comes back from maternity leave and finds, even marginally, that the institution has been thinking about them.

Staff networks, when given genuine access and institutional support, can be one of an organisation's most effective mechanisms for translating the rhetoric of wellbeing into something that actually works. For those thinking about how to make academic workplaces genuinely supportive of parents and carers - before, during, and after leave - I would say this: the infrastructure of community is institutional infrastructure. It is not a nice-to-have. It is how we learn what our people actually need. And it is, when done well, how change happens from the inside out.