The Festival of Communities is returning on the weekend of 11-12 June 2022, taking place in Stepney Green Park on the Saturday and the Queen Mary Mile End Campus on the Sunday, and the Call for activities and workshops is now open!
Exploring living and learning together in Tower Hamlets, the Festival of Communities is a collaboration between Queen Mary and local-based organisations, and over 3500 residents join us over the weekend. The activities at the festival are designed for local families to learn something new or try something different. These varied activities range from hands-on experiments, sharing stories and views, interacting with demonstrations and trying out new things. We are looking for projects to take part by running a hands-on activity, workshop, demonstration, stall, exhibit or in other ways – we’re open to fun and creative ideas!
The Festival is a great opportunity for PhD students to engage local residents with your work and research in a ready-made event. The students involved in previous years gained a lot by taking part: designing their own engagement activities, talking to different members of our local community, and developing their engagement, project management and communication skills.
To support creating new or adapting existing activities and workshops to showcase at the Festival, Queen Mary staff and students can apply for up to £700 of funding through the Centre for Public Engagement. This year, the Festival funding opportunity also extends to reimbursing PhD student time to design and deliver activities taking place at the Festival, linked to their research.The CPE team are on hand to offer advice on your engagement activity or workshop design through festival information and 1:1 advice sessions and a hands-on engagement training session.
The Festival call to tell us how you’d like to be involved and the funding opportunity closes at the end of day on 31st March 2022. Visit the Festival website or email festival@qmul.ac.uk for more details.