As Director of the Amsterdam Law Hub, how can I help? You can turn to me if you want to share your knowledge (or that of your students) with a societal group but do not know how best to approach it.

Specifically, this means the following:

• For researchers, I offer individual grant support for impact/knowledge utilization; finding third-party funding opportunities; network building with societal partners; and developing a personal impact strategy or brainstorming about new projects.
• For lecturers/teachers, I can liaise with third-party funders, and relevant societal partners and professionals (designers, technologists, etc.) for educational programs; and simultaneously discuss how our 'Justice Entrepreneurship' program can be integrated into your existing educational programs (where students learn how to develop human-centered solutions for legal challenges).
• Students can contact me to inquire about opportunities to collaborate with the Law Hub on projects, for entrepreneurial advice in the legal sector, to learn about our Justice Entrepreneurship programme, or to discuss ideas for an impactful project or event.

There are a lot of misconceptions about impact in academia which I explore in a Folia article together with Olga Gritsai. At the Law Hub, we work with a very simple definition: Impact is about conveying your knowledge to a clearly defined (societal) target group in a format that they can actually use. Whether you achieve this by collaborating with a non-profit organization to distribute your work through their network, writing an op-ed for a newspaper, or creating an interactive art exhibition to explain your findings at Dutch Design Week; it does not matter. An impact activity (in my personal opinion) is legitimate if it meets two simple criteria: it is something you (as an academic) enjoy doing; and it is delivering your knowledge in a format that resonates with (and can be used by) your target audience.

The Amsterdam Law Hub was founded by the Law Faculty to ensure that the valuable knowledge generated by our students and academics generates positive impact for all levels of society. Our mission is the democratization of legal academic knowledge

This mission to 'democratize' knowledge can be seen on three levels:

Within academia we use our knowledge of FdR researcher activities to facilitate new partnerships with academics or students from different faculties or institutions;

For society we identify and work with stakeholder groups who are not the traditional partners of legal academia;

Methodologically we ensure that our collaborations are democratic partnerships between academia & society, leading to legal empowerment rather than creating knowledge dependencies.