The Public Engagement Unit is thrilled to announce the 11 successful Engage & Involve Grants projects 2024/2025.

Overwhelming response

This edition of the Engage Grants funding call saw an overwhelming response from colleagues. We received the most applications in the 12 years of running these calls, a whooping 41 applications - 10 from Engineering & Design, 26 from Humanities & Social Sciences, 4 from Science and 1 from the School of Management. The total funds requested came to £162,000.

Whilst this scale of requests has made the task incredibly difficult, broadening the scope of these grants to include public involvement in and engagement with research has seen a much wider range of applications than in previous years. It also demonstrates the increasing demand across the University for support to meaningfully involve people in research, reflecting the expectations from research funders of improved connections between research and wider society.  

Public involvement and engagement with research

When we talk about public involvement and engagement, we know it encompasses a diverse set of activities. The nature of these activities will vary depending on the discipline people are working in.

It could be physicists taking demos to science festivals, engineers working in healthcare technologies doing some patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) on medical devices, or researchers working with young people as co-researchers exploring their experiences of the care system.

It's a whole spectrum of types of activities, each with a different purpose.

But there are common features to all this work. Public involvement and engagement with research activities should:

• relate to active and specific research
• involve people outside academia in spaces or at times where they can choose to participate
• be relevant (in terms of interests, needs and goals) to the people involved and/or engaged
• be beneficial for the people involved and/or engaged as well as for you and/or your research

For us, high-quality public involvement and engagement with research allows people to discover, use, discuss, participate in and/or create research in ways that are meaningful for them.

This is how we frame our work at the Public Engagement Unit.

Successful projects

The total funds we had available for our Engage & Involve Grants 2024/2025 was £32,000. Instead of a straightforward ranking of applications, we knew we had to consider several factors to ensure an equitable distribution of funds. We took a portfolio approach. We wanted to fund activities from:

• across the three Faculties and the School
• researchers with a range of experience of involvement and engagement
• different parts of the research cycle
• researchers at different levels of experience

The following researchers from across the University of Bath and at different career stages were successful in their applications:

Faculty of Design and Engineering

Taghried Abdelmagid (Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering)

Leading a cross-disciplinary team of researchers from departments including Mechanical Engineering and Social and Policy Sciences and the School of Management, Taghried will engage DIY enthusiasts with games and materials to share their work on choices around sustainable building materials.

Ricardo Codinhoto (Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering)

Working with owners and residents of Bath's historic homes, Ricardo will co-design a solution to help people make informed decisions about the retrofit needs to help reduce their carbon emissions.

Ruth Gibson (Department of Mechanical Engineering)

Using interactive junk modelling workshops, Ruth will engage children and young people with the topic of transport to better understand their experiences, ideas and aspirations for the future of travel.

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Mark Brosnan (Department of Psychology)

Mark will work with autistic school-aged children to co-create a research agenda for the future of autism support for them and their carers.

Ioannis Costas Batlle (Department of Education)

Supporting mentors who work with young people facing significant challenges is the focus of Ioannis' project. He will work with MentoringPlus to develop a training programme to share the latest emotional and relational tools and with the mentors as peer researchers work to understand the impact of their work with young people.

Alison Douthwaite (Department of Education)

Alison will work with a cohort of young people not in education, employment or training who have been part of her research project to devise a series of recommendations to local and national policymakers to support them and their peers in the transition into the labour market.

Saoirse Fitzgerald (Department of Psychology)

Bringing together policymakers from the local authority, researchers, healthcare professionals and service providers, Saoirse will develop and deliver workshops to map and learn about the needs around social prescribing in Bath and North East Somerset.

Fiona Gillison (Department for Health)

Fiona will host interactive workshops with parents and young people to provide spaces to discuss issues around weight and co-create guidance for constructive conversations on this topic with them, responding to a gap in the available resources.

Lucy Maddox (Department of Psychology)

As part of Lucy's The Compassion Project, she will develop resources for a training programme that will focus on giving voice to the people who have worked in, been cared for or been the parent of someone who has been resident in a child and adolescent mental health ward.

Esther Walton (Department of Psychology)

Communities in Twerton and Whiteway will work with Esther and local environmental charity MoreTrees to undertake nature-based action in their community to investigate how environmental work affects health and wellbeing.

Faculty of Science

Christopher Clarke (Department of Computer Science)

A cross-disciplinary team of researchers from the departments of Computer Science and Health, clinicians from the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Disease and patients living with the spinal condition axial spondyloarthritis will come together to identify areas of priority for future research projects.

Engage Grants

Since 2013, the Engage Grants have aimed to support researchers at the University of Bath in developing their skills and understanding of public involvement and engagement with research by funding activities where they can give public engagement a go for themselves. Over the last 12 years, the Public Engagement Unit has invested over £300,000 in 110 diverse public engagement projects from the Faculties of Science, Engineering & Design, Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Management.

Acknowledgements

While we could not fund everyone who applied, we want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their time. As part of our ongoing work, we will offer our support to those who are unsuccessful in developing their ideas and considering other funding opportunities.

We would especially like to thank the panel members from outside the University who joined us in assessing these grant applications, Niyah Campbell (Senior Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement Lead, University of Birmingham) and Philippa Forsey (independent community-based creative wellbeing practitioner).

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