Over the last ten months, community groups and organisations across Oxfordshire have been working with researchers and staff facilitators from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University on a range of initiatives designed around local needs, perspectives, and interests.
This year’s Science Together collaborations have been co-developed with:
- African Families in the UK – building bridges between scientists and young people living in Blackbird Leys, Oxford, by providing access to high-quality science education opportunities, to help inspire a new generation of STEM researchers and technicians from Oxford;
- Cutteslowe Primary School – examining a new method of integrated learning for primary schools, to see how effective it is in supporting children with highly complex additional needs;
- EMBS Community College – exploring the interaction between nature, learning, and wellbeing through a staff and student-led initiative to renovate an overgrown garden into a new vegetable patch;
- MuzoAkademy II – delivering a programme of music-and-performance opportunities to help people in and around Oxford to develop a range of transferrable life skills;
- Oxford Community Action – learning about lived experiences of sickle cell anaemia in the community, and sharing medical advances in new treatments with communities most likely to be affected;
- Oxford Mutual Aid – examining improvements that could be made to the organisation’s supply chain and operational processes, to optimise the support it provides to people in Oxford who are struggling to make ends meet;
- Oxford United in the Community – exploring how the harnessing of shared interests within a community through the expansion of Oxford United’s ‘Manor Club’ initiative might help to tackle loneliness and social isolation.