This past Sunday 28th July, researchers from the IMSR and SMQB took part in community engagement activities at Simmer Down Festival in Handsworth Park. One of UK’s largest music and arts festivals, it proudly celebrates the rich cultural diversity of Birmingham. This is the first time the festival has run in-person since the pandemic, so there was a very keen audience and great vibe. Reggae tunes, sizzling jerk chicken and scorching sunshine were all on offer this past Sunday, as well as science!
With the generous support of Society of Endocrinology public engagement funding and Research England QR funding awarded to Dr Caroline Gillett, our team invited audience members to explore some of the endocrine and metabolic research underway at Birmingham.
This included a brand new kid-friendly activity exploring the role of the stress hormone “cortisol”. This activity was the idea of the winners of our “Dragons Den” style competition a couple of months ago (Isabella, Josh and Lucy). The winners have been working on their ideas further with support from Gaby and Caroline in preparation for pilot testing at a family-friendly summer festival. The activity also aimed to show how clinician-scientists, biomedical lab scientists and quantitative scientists come together for Team Science projects bridging combined skills to solve real world problems. The activity itself also encouraged kids to take part in teams, with activities lasting around 10-15 minutes in total. Simmer Down was the first opportunity for the team to test the activity out. We are pleased to report it worked and that festival goers seemed really interested and engaged!
Whilst the children took part in these fun hands-on activities, we also had the opportunity to talk with many of the parents about some of the research we are doing into women’s metabolic health, including conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome and gestational diabetes. These conditions may disproportionately affect women from Black, Black British and Afro-Carribean heritage, so it was a great opportunity to talk directly with many women from these backgrounds in particular.
We were pleased with the level of engagement with our team – helped further by our mixed representation of gender, ethnicity and background. Lots of people were curious and even some young adults and older adults wanted to have a go in our activities or find out more about what the university was doing. For example some people asked about the opportunity for work experience placements for kids and others were interested in our patient and public involvement work.
We will be taking the learning and feedback from this event to make further improvements for future events, but we hope to be back at Simmer Down next year!
Special thanks to everyone who supported running the activities: Dr Gabriela da Silva Xavier and Nicolas, Dr Isabella Martinelli, Ms Lucy Beevors, Dr Joshua Baine, Dr Aqfan Jamaluddin, Dr Lorenzi Tucci, Dr Caroline Gillett. Thanks also to Kerri and Lauren in the UoB engagement team for support with festival logistics.