Do you have a brilliant idea to engage people with or involve them in your research? Great news, the Public Engagement Unit's Engage and Involve Grants funding call is now open.

Engage and Involve Grants funding call

For the 2023/24 Engage and Involve Grants, we have a total of £20,000 available. This funding call is open to staff members in the Research & Education and Technical & Experimental job families (any discipline or career stage) and doctoral students.

This year we've switched things up a little and broadened the remit of what we're able to fund and reflecting that change we've renamed our funding call, it's now the Engage and Involve Grants.

Why the change?

We're exploring our definition of public engagement and we're classifying it as any activity that seeks to improve the connections between research and society. It should involve people outside academia in spaces or at times where they can choose to participate and relate to specific and active research.

It could be activities that, whilst not essential for your research, can enhance or enrich your research, or it could be activities that actively involve people in research. Public engagement can happen at any stage of the research life cycle.

High-quality public engagement allows people to discover, discuss, participate and/or create research in meaningful ways for them.

What we're looking to fund

We're aiming to fund a portfolio of different types of activities that engage people with and involve them in research from across the three Faculties and the School.

We're looking for activities that improve the connections between research and society. Here are some examples to illustrate what we mean by this:

• partnering with a cultural venue to co-create opportunities to share research with their audiences
• piloting approaches to patient and public involvement and engagement
• testing activities that could form part of a community (citizen) science project
• hosting an event in a community space with a relevant community to help you prioritise your research questions

We anticipate funding 10 projects up to £2,000 each.

Working with us

The aim of the Engage and Involve Grants is to support colleagues in developing their expertise in public engagement practice.

Over the last couple of years, colleagues have told us that working with a creative practitioner has helped them think differently about engaging and involving people in and with their research. If you're successful in applying for a grant, we would like to work with you throughout your project.

For the 2023/24 Engage and Involve Grants, we are therefore looking to fund applicants who are willing to work with us and a creative practitioner to refine their ideas in the initial stages of the project.

How to apply

We have pulled together this Engage and Involve Grants guide, which outlines key details of the call, including assessment criteria and key dates. You'll notice our Engage and Involve Grants application form is also different this year, we've pared it back and have asked you to think about where on the spectrum of purposes of public engagement your activity sits. We'd be happy to have a chat if you're unsure of how best to classify the purpose of your activity, drop us a line (public-engagement@bath.ac.uk).

Information session

Come join us on Wednesday 1 November 1.15-2pm in 3.16 in the Chancellor's Building, or you can join online (drop us an email for the Teams link, public-engagement@bath.ac.uk).

Deadline

The Engage and Involve Grants are now open, and the call will close at 4pm on Friday 8 December 2023.  Please email applications to public-engagement@bath.ac.uk.

Get inspired

If you're looking for inspiration of how you can meaningfully engage people with and involve them in research, we have a couple of examples from previous editions of our Engage Grants:

The Healthy Later Living Network's Listening Project - through a series of informal conversations between researchers from several disciplines and older adults from community groups like the Bath Ethnic Minority Senior Citizen Association, the project aimed to gain insight from people's lived experiences to help inform the Healthy Later Living Network’s research priorities.  

Fostering Hope - a project that brought together researchers from the Department of Social & Policy Sciences with Bristol-based fostering charity The Adolescent and Children’s Trust. Using participatory approaches they utilised each other’s skills and expertise to tackle a challenge the charity faced, finding new foster carers for refugee children.

Get in touch

If you have an idea and would like to discuss it with us ahead of submitting an application, we would love to chat, drop us a line (public-engagement@bath.ac.uk)

Dean Veall is Deputy Head of Public Engagement at the University of Bath