ABSTRACT

The Northern Architecture Graduate Retention and Development (GRAD) programme is a collaboration between built environment graduates seeking relevant experience and employment, community-based organisations, architectural practices, and schools of architecture in the region. The GRAD programme creates 'shared-value', a concept devised in Harvard Business School. GRADmag began as a means of encouraging the recording of work in progress and of documenting aspects of the participants' experiences which were not part of the projects. archiGRAD is the catalyst for a geographically 'local cluster' of architecture graduates and related disciplines. It demonstrates at least the possibility of a more agile and enterprising model of professional practice generated by a shared-value approach, able to collaborate with a network of peers on a project-by-project basis. Projects with more proscribed outputs can offer GRADs opportunities to develop particular skills or, as in the case of community consultation and workshop activities, can develop 'tools' for future archiGRAD projects.