Search these pages to explore a selection of our directory of activities. You can use the keyword search and filter buttons to discover how we are addressing each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the five priorities in our Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement Plan. You can also filter activities by location and function.
searching subjects: Public engagement
We participate in the UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day every year, celebrating the cultural diversity and multilingualism in Manchester. The events to commemorate this day are focused on language and are led by libraries, community groups, universities, schools, poets, and writers.
Each year, the University’s Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health (FBMH) hosts the ‘Talking Science Competition’ where second year undergraduate students and above are invited to share their ideas on how science can create a healthier, fairer and greener world, creating a unique opportunity to talk about a subject that really matters to them.
To mark the UN’s International Day of Older Persons we have created a booklet which showcases the different ways older age is experienced in Greater Manchester, alongside an accompanying animation. This booklet offers a guide to a more immersive, flexible, creative and participatory approach for engaging with those within the category – enabling policy communities, academics, and others to gain a richer, localised and more personal understanding of what it means to be an older person. The project also responds to research and campaigns that have found representations of older age often fall back on medicalised, stereotypical accounts of what constitutes older lives.
Academics from the University have worked with practitioners from the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation to develop a framework and toolkit for conducting ‘mediated dialogue’ with groups in conflict. The framework and toolkit is used in community safety and neighbourhood team roles, restorative youth or community practices by social services and youth offending teams for a broader range of groups experiencing escalating conflict or as an opportunity to repair relationships.
Manchester Museum is taking action to Indigenise and decolonise its collections. As part of this, they have been hosting annual Indigenise Speaker Series, which brings together Indigenous scholars and projects from around the world to participate in activities and discuss how to empower Indigenous communities and collaborate with them at the museum.
Each year, we host the Irene Manton Lecture in partnership with the Linnean Society of London which celebrates the significant contribution made by women to the Natural Sciences.
We have an annual, student-led DentMan conference which seeks to encourage students in dentistry to explore our pioneering humanising dentistry concept and give them freedom and space to engage with the community and the wider global society through outreach and volunteering programmes. It also provides a platform for dental students to demonstrate and recognise how they have made a difference to dental health inequalities across Greater Manchester and beyond. In recent years, the conference has reached a global audience, with over 200 staff, students, and oral healthcare professionals from both the University of Manchester and University of Ghana in attendance.
We launched the first ever museum-sector-specific Carbon Literacy toolkit as part of Roots & Branches, a partnership between Manchester Museum, Museum Development North West (MDNW), and The Carbon Literacy project. The toolkit helps museum professionals and volunteers undertake training, to then certify as Carbon Literate. This foundational work supports staff, volunteers, and partners to build their understanding of climate action, so that they can make informed sustainable choices. The project also encourages museums to develop organisational pledges to act against climate change.
Each year our University marks LGBT+ History Month with a variety of events, awareness raising activities and calls to action to mark the contribution and importance the LGBT+ community has had on the University. Events include exploring aspects of LGBT+ inclusion and a screening of a documentary focusing on intersectionality, followed by a discussion. Members of our alumni are also invited to join a panel where they discuss the theme allocated to LGBT+ History Month for that year.
Each year we celebrate International Women’s Day with various events and activities for students and staff to partake in to increase awareness about discrimination, recognise women’s achievements and take action to drive gender equity.
The Firs, our botanical garden, is located on the University’s Fallowfield Campus where it is currently used to aid environmental research. The state of the art greenhouse facilities within the gardens are also used for issues relating to food security and climate change. The interactive 360 degree tour enables viewers to explore the greenhouse, select plants and learn interesting facts about them. The virtual tour is also an excellent online resource for both adults and children to learn about the various biomes located at The Firs. Additional information about habitats, photosynthesis and climate change are also available on the tour.
Each year our University’s Creative Manchester hosts the Schools Poetry Competition, where students across Manchester are encouraged to express themselves through writing poems relating to a particular theme.
Our two multi-disciplinary teams from the University have been working with The British Council (UK) and AdvanceHE to promote improved gender equity in higher education and research institutions. In India, we are working with their Department of Science and Technology (DST) on the Gender Advancement for Transforming Institutions (GATI) project which promotes women in STEMM at tertiary institutions.
The ESRC festival of Social Science is an annual celebration of the research conducted in social sciences and its profound impact on society. It offers a fascinating insight into some of the country’s leading research and how it influences our social, economic, and political lives – both now and in the future. The festival is open to everyone and is a unique opportunity to engage directly with researchers about the projects they work on.
Fresh-water ecosystems (community outreach) Additionally, peatland restoration working with Professor Martin Evans has focused on flood mitigation and greenhouse gas reduction in collaboration with Moors for the Future, National Trust, Environment Agency, United Utilities, Yorkshire Peat Partnership and others. Sustainable fisheries (community outreach) Prof Holly Shiels is also working on the impact of fossil fuel-based pollution on commercially important fish like cod and halibut and has shared this work with local and global communities through an engaging video. Our NanoWhales Project has also been supporting the fight against the accumulation of plastic waste in the Mediterranean on life under water through the expeditions and the development and sharing of free resources highlighting the plight of the whales. Overfishing (community outreach) Conservation and sustainable utilisation of the oceans (events) Professor Holly Shiels is the President of the Fisheries Society of the British Isles – a society that works to the benefit of fish biology and fisheries science. An example of a recent event that took part through this Presidency has been on Fish Habitat and Ecology in a Changing Climate.
Policy@Manchester is our University’s sector-leading policy engagement institute. It connects researchers with policymakers and influencers, nurturing long-term policy engagement partnerships and impact.
We partner with a range of organisations to carry out meaningful public engagement with diverse audiences and share ideas and research as well as inspiring informed discussion, debate and creativity. Examples include:
Our Justice Hub allows students to explore and apply various arms of the law to make real change in our communities. The Hub runs a free legal advice centre for economically disadvantaged people in areas such as family, housing and immigration law. During the pandemic, our Justice Hub set up the Virtual Vacation Scheme, which aimed to simplify some very complicated areas of law impacted by the pandemic, and created an accessible and informative method of legal help for the community through workshops, videos, briefings and webinars.
In Place of War (IPOW) is a global spin-out charity from research in our School of Music and Drama. IPOW works with grassroots organisations in refugee camps, war-affected villages, towns under curfew, cities under occupation, and refugee communities, using creativity in places of conflict as a proven tool for positive change. IPOW enables communities and grassroots change-makers in music, theatre and across the arts to transform a culture of violence and suffering into hope, opportunity and freedom.
The Firs is located on the University’s Fallowfield campus and houses a suite of facilities for environmental research, monitoring and engagement. Our UNESCO World Heritage site, Jodrell Bank, is another area rich in biodiversity. To help promote biodiversity on campus, we’ve developed: We’ve also transformed a former road into Brunswick Park – a pocket park to enhance green space and wellbeing on campus.
The Whitworth created the UK’s first dedicated post of Cultural Park Keeper. This has led to the creation of a Natural and Cultural Health Service programme of outdoor activities to raise awareness, educate and inspire our diverse visitors to connect with and protect life in our park. At Jodrell Bank we work with community and voluntary groups, including the RSPB and the Cheshire Beekeepers Association, to protect and enhance our natural environment.
A renowned engagement expert from our School of Environment, Education and Development is using her Ketso Connect community and stakeholder engagement toolkit to help the government’s Natural England advisers launch their National Recovery Network. This network aims to restore 75% of protected sites and to create or restore 500,000 hectares of additional wildlife-rich habitat. The project is piloting public and civic engagement models with local libraries across Manchester.
Our Manchester Museum Vivarium is dedicated to the conservation of reptiles and amphibians. We recently partnered with Panama Wildlife Charity PWCC on non-invasive research and conservation education involving local communities in the Santa Fe National Park in Panama. This led to a world first in 2021: one of the world’s rarest toads, the Harlequin Frog, was successfully bred in captivity outside its country of origin, at our museum. We also curate a world-famous FrogBlog and deliver a digital Learning with Lucy conservation programme for schools.
As part of our partnership with the local NGO, Manchester City of Trees, students can use our Volunteer Hub to sign up for one-off or weekly tree planting sessions or even become a Citizen Forester. Our student volunteering is supporting their mission of planting one tree for every person across Greater Manchester, creating a healthier and more sustainable city region.
Deforestation is the second leading cause of climate change after fossil fuels, accounting for almost a fifth of planet-warming emissions. Our researchers led an international and interdisciplinary team of ecologists, economists and political scientists in the largest ever study of community forestry. Studying 18,000 community-led forest initiatives in Nepal we found that community-forest management led to a 37% relative reduction in deforestation and a 4.3% relative reduction in poverty.
International Mother Language Day
Talking Science Competition
Age-friendly Greater Manchester
Conducting ‘Mediated Dialogue’
Manchester Museum’s Indigenise Speaker Series
Irene Manton Lecture
DentMan conference
Manchester Museum’s Carbon Literacy Toolkit
LGBT History Month
International Women’s Day
360 Degree Tour of University Botanical Gardens
Schools Poetry Competition
Promoting gender equity in academia
ESRC Festival of Social Science
SDG 14 – Life Below Water: engagement activities
We offer free educational programmes on fresh-water ecosystems (water irrigation practices, water management/conservation) for local and national communities. For example, Prof Jamie Woodward’s work on microplastic accumulation in UK waterways has been massively influential and has been shared and co-developed with on local anglers (Tame Rivers Anglers) and charities (Rivers Trust and Friends of the Earth) to influence UK policy and the wider public through engaging videos to engage the public and through BBC documentaries that have a global reach (link 1 link 2) and also through educational resources for school children.
We offer free educational programme and outreach for local and national communities on the sustainable management of fisheries, aquaculture and tourism. For example, the overfishing of sharks and rays is the primary cause for their catastrophic (>80% of populations threatened with extinction) decline in the past 25 years. Our University’s Shiels lab contributed key images and a novel developmental scale for catsharks used in one of the largest educational citizen science outreach projects in the UK, The Great Egg Hunt, run in partnership with The Shark Trust. Over the Easter weekend in 2022 a fantastic 7,560 eggcases were recorded across the UK and scaled using our data. The images and scale has also been included in the Field Studies Centre leaflets used at their marines stations for teaching school groups across the UK, furthering our engagement with the public.
We offer free educational outreach activities for local and national communities to raise awareness about overfishing, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and destructive fishing practices. For example, Professor Holy Shiels worked in partnership with the Physiological Society – Europe’s largest network of physiologists – to create and share 4-video educational outreach video-blogs for local, national and international communities on location in the Arctic regarding the Greenland Shark and impact of overfishing in the Halibut fishing industry on this enigmatic species. We also partner with Sustainable Fish Cities, using educational outreach activities across Manchester to raise awareness about destructive fishing practices and promote sustainable fishing.
We support and organise events aimed to promote conservation and sustainable utilisation of the oceans, seas, lakes, rivers and marine resources. Our Shiels lab contributes to the Shark Trust and European Elasmobranch Society (a non-profit organisation coordinating European activities of national European organisations dedicated to the study, management or conservation of sharks, skates, rays, and chimaeras) meetings with student talks and keynote lectures on shark and ray conservation – for example see this link. The Shiels lab also works on sharks and climate change events in partnership with the BBC, through marine magazine activities and also through free events that have taken place in partnership with the Fisheries Society for the British Isles on video platforms that examine climate change and sharks in UK waters.
Policy@Manchester
Public engagement partnerships
Justice Hub
In Place of War project
Biodiversity on campus
Cultural venues and nature
Nature Recovery Network
Species conservation
Manchester City of Trees
Community forestry in Nepal
