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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
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.
Each year our University’s Creative Manchester hosts the Schools Poetry Competition, where students across Greater Manchester are encouraged to express themselves through writing poems relating to a particular theme. Winning entries from the competition are featured on Manchester City of Literature’s inaugural Schools Writing Trail, a city-wide exhibition of the ‘best of the best’ student writing displayed, in conjunction with the Festival of Libraries.
Being Human is the UK’s National Festival of the humanities, which celebrates how the discipline enriches everyday living and helps us understand a changing world. Each year, our researchers collaborate with local community and cultural partners to create exciting and engaging events and projects for all to enjoy.
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.
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.
To help promote biodiversity on campus, we’ve developed:
We ensure our biodiversity hotspots are taken care of:
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.
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.
Researchers in our Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences have examined degraded soils of grasslands in Kenya and China to understand the role of soil biodiversity in creating and supporting healthy ecosystems.
We’ve scaled up novel approaches to harness ecological connections between native soil microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, algae) and native plants to accelerate recovery from degraded to healthy soil.
Tools have been developed to provide accessible and practical knowledge for local communities to repair soils and public and policy awareness has been raised of the vital importance of soil biodiversity on a global scale.
At our Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, we partnered with IncredibleOceans to deliver outreach talks and programmes to raise awareness of how oceans are facing threats from development and overfishing, climate change, pollution, acoustics and more.
We teamed up with scientists, creatives, community organisations, campaigners, companies and broadcast media to maximise the impact of this educational outreach activity.
Life below water, in rivers and at sea, is threatened by waste flowing from urban river channels into the oceans.
We’ve been highlighting the effect of microplastics – very small pieces of plastic debris including microbeads, microfibres and plastic fragments – on river systems and marine life through a range of pro-active media coverage, engagement with water companies and input into UK legislation on water management.
Climate scientists at our Tyndall Centre are partnering with Bristol-based band Massive Attack to jointly examine the carbon footprint of the music industry.
Utilising data from the Massive Attack touring schedule will provide information and guidance to the wider music industry to reduce negative environmental impacts.
Our academics are involved in GrowGreen, a five year, EU-wide project that promotes nature-based solutions to climate change.
The project involves a range of citizens, business and public-private partnerships in neighbourhoods and across cities to promote learning, sharing and replicating nature-based solutions and strategies to urban sustainability challenges.
Our Manchester Museum has been awarded Arts Council England and National Lottery Project Grant funding for an ambitious two-year partnership project in collaboration with Museum Development North West and the Carbon Literacy Trust. The project will accelerate the museum sector’s ability to respond to the climate crisis.
The Museum will host the ‘roots’: creating a nationally significant co-working hub of cultural environmental action that will bring together museum staff, educators, environmentalists, artists, researchers, third sector organisations and students.
Research by Alliance Manchester Business School has demonstrated how large-scale transitions are needed to deliver significant climate change.
This has transformed how reducing greenhouse gas emissions is understood and addressed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has fed directly into policy recommendations made by the European Environment Agency.
To enable the UK to deliver significant carbon emissions reductions, the University created the Tyndall Local Carbon Budget Tool, helping cities, regions and organisations to play their part in achieving the global Paris Agreement.
Building on the Setting City Area Targets and Trajectories for Emissions Reduction (SCATTER) project, this foundational research established the importance of embedding carbon budgets – rather than end point targets – in setting carbon reduction targets.
It has been used by 250 UK local authorities, led local policymakers to focus on immediate emissions reductions and shaped global policy as part of the United Nations’ Race to Zero initiative.
We worked with colleagues at The University of Sheffield on Change Points to develop new ways of understanding how householders’ routine activities end up demanding resources, including energy, food and water.
A key output was the co-design of a toolkit to support policy makers and other non-academic stakeholders interested in developing nuanced policy processes and business practices around household sustainability.
Every year, our Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) holds the SCI Festival, promoting active discussion and networking among the public, practitioners and policy makers working on the front line of social change towards sustainability.
Our four key cultural institutions – the Manchester Museum, the Whitworth, John Rylands Research Institute and Library and Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre – provide access to more than a million visitors each year to engage with buildings, collections, monuments and natural heritage landscapes, advancing how our city and region can be inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
