Sharing Learning

They propose to run a range of outdoor activities for isolated BAME families in Oldham, including walks, growing food, and trips to parks. They will facilitate three participatory workshops, and explore the benefits to health and wellbeing of participating in this kind of activity. They will use different creative media to document their findings all supported by the Researcher.

Air Athletics, a grassroots cheerleading and dance club, will collaborate with their researcher, an experienced mentor and former elite athlete, to run sessions for young people and parents exploring experiences around wellbeing and competition. They will feed their experiences into a performance piece which will be developed with input from the whole group, and the process will be captured through film. The researcher will be working alongside the group, co-designing a series of workshops to help them understand more about their experience of competition and build skills. 

They will collaboratively design and deliver a peer mentoring programme for young women affected by, or vulnerable to, child sexual exploitation, bringing them together in participatory arts workshops. The mentors will be adult survivors, trained and supported by researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University and given the opportunity to attend training on the campus as well as receive a qualification. The project will be evaluated, using participatory methods in partnership with the mentors and young women. 

They plan to run a series of 8 workshops with South Asian women, exploring identity through the process of craft making, using different materials. The emphasis will be on process, not production and giving women time to experiment creatively, explore their identities and validate their choices. The researcher will help the women construct the stories of self, and share their skills with each other.

With support from their researcher, the StrongHer Together group will co-create a community research project, identifying topics and running a series of research events for local women. They will then use creative methods such as podcasting to draw together the insights from the research.

Derg Valley Care will collaborate on a project bringing together “Grow Your Own” and social prescribing to see if an intervention like that could alleviate both poor wellbeing and food poverty. The researcher will be involved in analysing the Social Return on Investment. They will establish the grow your own work in a rural area, and the Social Prescribing in Strabane, and aim to understand more about the different challenges between rural and urban areas. They will be collaborating with Strabane Health Improvement Project, who bring expertise around grow your own initiatives.

Informing Choices NI, together with their researcher, will co-design an educational programme that informs and supports women with learning disabilities through the menopause. They will review of existing evidence in this practice area, discuss how best to deliver a programme with stakeholders and then use this insight to co-design and pilot a programme for women in Derry & Strabane. They hope to end up with a tested programme that they can deliver across the region.

Londonderry YMCA ran a mentoring project for 15 girls aged 11-14 who access their services, pairing them with student mentors from Ulster University Social Work and Community Art department. The researchers facilitated some group sessions for the mentoring pairs to discuss issues which are important to them. YMCA provided training and support for the mentors and matched them with mentees. This project has now ended.

ARC Fitness will create gender-specific recovery groups, and understand the wellbeing benefits/outcomes based on participation in a gender-specific or mixed group. Researchers will help upskill “research champions” at ARC, and they will share their findings at a community/university dissemination event.

In Your Space Circus will run a programme of circus workshops for three different cohorts of older people in Derry, including two existing groups and one which will be specifically recruited for this project. They groups will help to shape the activity which takes place. The researcher will help capture the wellbeing benefits of participation in social circus projects, and work with group members to create different ways to capture and share their journey

Hive Cancer Support (formerly The Pink Ladies Breast Cancer Support Group) and their researcher will develop an interview schedule and interview cancer survivors about their experience of cancer surgery. They will then commission an artist to take the themes identified by the interviews and turn this into a city centre mural in Derry using non-toxic paint. They will form a steering group, including Pink Ladies members, to shape each step of the project.