The Community Engagement Awards celebrate QMUL’s connections to our local community and wider society, celebrating how local, national and international communities shape our work. You can read more about our 2018 award winners below.
More photos from the Awards evening can be found here.
Ashley Marshalleck, Community Sport - Queen Mary Students' Union
Ashley’s work with the Community Sport programme has seen 77 volunteer sport leaders facilitate over 1400 hours of sport in the local community. Through Ashley’s leadership the programme has evolved to become a targeted community engagement activity, working to develop the employability skills of local students and address the needs of local organisations including schools, local sports clubs, and housing associations. Ashley has grown the programme based on research and consultation and as a result has designed projects that provide a platform for students to make an impact locally.
British Institute of Human Rights
The British Institute of Human Rights, a national independent human rights charity hosted by the School of Law worked with Tower Hamlets Recovery College, part of East London NHS Foundation Trust to coproduce and deliver 2 community open learning sessions on Mental Health, Mental Capacity and Human Rights. The sessions were created and delivered in partnership providing legal expertise alongside people with lived experience. This partnership directly contributed to the success of the workshops, enabling attendance from a diverse group of service users, carers and friends, and practitioners working in the field.
Bridging the Gap
Kathleen McCarthy, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film and Nurull Islam, Mile End Community Project
Dr Kathleen McCarthy led Bridging the Gap, a project on heritage language and intergenerational storytelling within the local Bangladeshi community. The project brought together the youngest and eldest members of the community through school workshops, the production of three short films and a large event in the QMUL Octagon. By collaborating with local families, primary schools, community projects, and a film maker, the activities enabled children, with the help of their parents, to document the stories told by their grandparents.
Nurull's passionate commitment to the local Bangladeshi community enables staff and students at QMUL to forge links that result in innovative collaborative projects. This is demonstrated by both his work on the Bridging the Gap project and Languages in Your Lives, a project discussing bilingualism and heritage language use. Nurull has been vital in these projects, both creatively and as an advocate for his local community.
Hephzi Angela Tagoe, Blizard Institute, School of Medicine and Dentistry
Hephzi’s commitment to community engagement has led to her working on projects both in the UK and internationally. Starting in Basildon, Hephzi has organised a number events for local residents to engage with science, with Basildon Street Science now running annually as a community science festival in the town square. In Ghana, Hephzi has received funding from the Wellcome Trust for ‘GhScientific’, a series of mentoring and practical science days for female students aged 12-18.
Memories Through Cinema
Ashvin Devasundaram, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film Studies
Memories Through Cinema features a diverse range of contributors from London’s Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, resulting in a documentary film, screening events and an exhibition. The exhibition features memorabilia, artefacts, film posters, photographs, media, and oral testimonies from community participants. Much of the activity was led by a creative team of young people, working on filming, editing and collecting oral histories.
Moments/Anlar
Ozlem Eylem, Wolfson Institute for Preventative Medicine, School of Medicine and Dentistry
Moments/Anlar was a public event focussed on generating understanding around suicidal behaviours. The event was organized in collaboration with charities, construction companies, educationalists, students and QMUL staff. By bringing academic, professional and community organisations together the project enabled meaningful discussions to take place and actively worked to create an environment where all experiences were able to be shared and valued.
Stories & Supper
Olivia Sheringham, School of Geography and Helen Taylor, Stories & Supper
In partnership with the East London refugee supper club Stories & Supper, this project involved the development and delivery of two story-telling café sessions at Walthamstow Garden Party. As well as the performance of stories through comedy, interviews and spoken word, the events included street food, prepared by refugee chefs. Refugees and asylum seekers were involved in the planning and delivery of the project to involve a larger more diverse audience, aiming to challenge the prevailing negative migration narratives and bring together local people.
Visual Reflections of Mental Health
Kristoffer Halvorsrud, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, School of Medicine and Dentistry
The Synergi Collaborative Centre is a 5-year national partnership between Queen Mary University of London, The University of Manchester and Words of Colour Productions, funded by the Lankelly Chase Foundation. Synergi aims to transform the mental health care system and tackle ethnic inequalities in severe mental illness and their fundamental causes, co-producing the evidence through shared ownership. Prioritising the personal experiences of service users and stakeholders in a series of workshops and exhibitions the photovoice project has helped gain a deeper insight into the stories of ethnic minority service users and those involved in their care.
VOICE (Vision On Information, Confidence & Engagement)
John Marshall and Adrienne Morgan, Barts Cancer Institute, School of Medicine and Dentistry
VOICE is a 5-day residential course in basic science for people affected by cancer who wish to be patient advocates on grants and government committees. The course was designed and is run with the support of members of Independent Cancer Patients Voice (ICPV), a patient advocate group, and addresses the needs of the cancer patient community by providing training to empower these members of the public to express opinions and experiences when surrounded by often large panels of scientific and clinical specialists.