Greater Manchester is set to become the first Creative Health City Region, thanks to a £800,000 grant from Arts Council England’s National Lottery-funded Place Partnership Fund. Led by NHS Greater Manchester and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, this ambitious three-year project will unite public services, health and social care providers, cultural and voluntary organisations, higher education institutions, and local communities. The goal is to use creativity, culture, and heritage to tackle health inequalities and enhance the wellbeing of residents. 

In a significant show of collaboration, the Greater Manchester Civic University Agreement partners – University of Bolton, Manchester Metropolitan University, The University of Manchester, The University of Salford and The Royal Northern College of Music – will play a pivotal role in the research and learning elements of the initiative under the banner of the Mayor’s Civic University Agreement. 

As the fourth most heavily populated country in the world, the burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in Indonesia is particularly alarming, accounting for 1 in 3 deaths. The SMARThealth programme tackle the high risk of CVD in rural parts of Indonesia and is projected to prevent 120,000 deaths. The team designed the SMARThealth app as a low-cost intervention to tackle CVD in Indonesia.

Each year we launch a report which highlights how we are addressing key issues facing humanity as set-out by the United Nations.  As the UK’s first university to have social responsibility as a core goal, we’ve developed a strategy to tackle the SDGs in four inter-related ways: through our research, learning and students, public engagement and operations.   

Our latest SDG report shows that the University published over 22,000 pieces of research on the SDGs in the past five years, which is 4% of the UK’s entire share of publications. It details teaching and learning programmes that address the SDGs, such as our ‘Creating a Sustainable World’ interdisciplinary unit. 

Global Futures is a global health strategy that aims to transform health outcomes, with a focus on levelling up healthcare provision and uplifting health systems globally. The strategy has been developed in direct response to predictions made by the World Health Organisation regarding the future of global health. 

The Greater Manchester Citizens Panel contributes to the strategic direction of the Greater Manchester Civic University Agreement, Greater Manchester Universities and research projects at the University of Manchester. 

The panel’s role is to analyse, understand, and act on the views of citizens across the city region. The panel is also supporting researchers at The University of Manchester to connect their work with the citizens of Greater Manchester. 

University of Manchester academics are working closely with Manchester City Council to tackle health inequalities.  

Making Manchester Fairer is Manchester City Council’s action plan to address health inequalities in the city. The plan draws on lived experiences and research to address the socioeconomic factors that drive inequalities between people with the worst health and people with the best health. 

Dr Caroline Miles and Professor Rose Broad from The University of Manchester are involved in ‘The abuse of women who run: experiences, perceptions and fears’, a project working with Greater Manchester Police and Merseyside police. The research involves analysing police data on recorded incidents of abuse experienced by women runners as well as surveys with women runners about their experiences. Following this, there will be events to raise awareness and share key learnings to help tackle street harassment.

Our researchers have been working with The University of Liverpool on an ethnographic study of police vehicle stops. The findings suggested Black men are routinely subjected to stop and search vehicle checks more than any other group. From this, our researchers made several recommendations including for all police vehicle stops to be recorded, to identify any racial disproportionality in their use and investigate links between vehicle stops and disproportionality in stop and search. This study has significantly influenced national policy and practice on racial disproportionality in the use of police powers.

Founders and Funders: Slavery and the building of a University is an exhibition at the University’s John Rylands Research Institute. It explores how profits from slave trading, ownership of enslaved people, and manufacturing with slave-grown cotton funded the cultural and educational development of Manchester. Core to the exhibition is research conducted by a diverse team of emerging scholars who undertook the Race, Migration & Humanitarianism: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in the Modern World module as part of their MA History. This is an important step on a journey we started with the initial research into our University’s links to slavery, in conjunction with seeking the views of staff, students and alumni.

Don’t Brush it Under the Carpet campaign aims to improve mental wellbeing and raise awareness of self-harm as an issue for older people in Greater Manchester. It involves collaborative working between representatives from the award-winning Shining a Light on Suicide Campaign, GM Older People’s Network, GM Ageing Hub, health professionals, UoM researchers and focus groups of older residents led to the establishment of the Greater Manchester Older People’s Mental Health Clinical Reference Group.

Funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, a cross-disciplinary team, including researchers from the University of Manchester, have improved Covid outcomes in Kenya’s slums. The project aimed to identify local knowledge and attitudes surrounding Covid and implement an effective public health campaign. All work on the ground was conducted by trained local field workers, in cooperation with community health volunteers, local officials and village elders, ensuring messages were communicated through trusted personnel with knowledge of the local area and language. The findings from the study highlighted that consistent and targeted health campaigns in informal settlements can facilitate compliance, engagement and understanding alongside ongoing public health campaigns. 

Sustainable Futures aims to bring together the unique depth and breadth of internationally leading research at our University, as well as interdisciplinary working to produce sustainable solutions for urgent environmental challenges. The organisation also aims to develop complete understandings of the environmental systems on which we depend and how humans interact with them, spurring scientific innovation and facilitating societal change at a scale and pace to address environmental crises.

A researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the Sustainable Consumption Institute has co-published a report entitled ‘Being Brave: Innovative Solutions to Public Food Procurement.’ The report highlights how to improve food systems and the resilience of food procurement while also reducing its impact on the climate. The report also finds that there is a pressing need to improve school food provision and that adopting a more sustainable approach to school meals could facilitate substantial benefits in children’s nutrition and health, as well as reduced carbon emissions.

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.

Our criminology researchers have linked up with leading research and technology development company, Trilateral Research, to collaborate on Project Honeycomb.

This develops relationships with organisations across the private, public and civil society sectors, and supports them to record information related to modern slavery, human trafficking and exploitation.

Building on these insights, Honeycomb runs a series of campaigns and helps the city intelligently and creatively protect people from the crimes of human trafficking and modern slavery as well as interrupting traffickers’ activities.

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.

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.

Our One Bin to Rule Them All research programme has drawn on our Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub in our Henry Royce Institute, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and  Sustainable Consumption Institute to work with 17 industry partners and local authorities to address key challenges in the plastics lifecycle.

Researchers from our Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub are also working with the manufacturer Callaly to develop alternative sustainable materials for menstrual hygiene products to help combat the growing need for natural-renewable alternatives for plastics.

Our African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) as part of UK Aid, tackles complex problems in some of Africa’s fastest growing urban areas. Aimed at reducing urban poverty and inequality, our research will generate new evidence to catalyse integrated, sustainable, inclusive approaches to urban development in partnership with frontline humanitarian responders, effective policy influencers, local government networks and deeply rooted civil society groups.

#BeeWell is an initiative established in Greater Manchester in 2019 by our University, Anna Freud, The Gregson Family Foundation, and Greater Manchester Combined Authority. The programme aims to explore young people’s opinions on wellbeing and the ways in which it can be improved. The findings inform activity across Greater Manchester, with schools, voluntary sector organisations and children’s services working closely with young people to interpret and act on the results.