An open discourse with youth participants as valued contributors

Catalyst collaborated with two community partners for the Explore Your Universe: Valuing Inclusion grant programme that ran February- June 2024. Trudy Jones, who runs a Science Club at Widnes Library, aimed at children aged between 5-11 years old, and GLOW youth group, a local group set up for lesbian, gay, transgender and questioning young people in Halton aged between 11 to 19 years. Together they developed a programme of activities, starting with open discussions and taster sessions within the community group’s own spaces, before inviting them to engage with Explore Your Universe at Catalyst.

“Our intention is to develop focus groups and gain constructive feedback; this will ensure that our participants feel valued and acknowledged as contributors to our STEM activities.” – Project lead, Catalyst

Visitors and members of these groups were asked to critique elements of the Explore Your Universe science show, considering its relevance to them. Catalyst then developed a revised science show with support from STFC partners such as Phil Day, their local STFC Public Engagement Manager, incorporating the latest STFC research and the feedback from their community partners. After delivering the new show they held an evaluation session with their community groups, giving them the opportunity to share how they felt the process went and discuss future ideas for collaboration.

“We aspired to create a shared, relevant experience that is truly representative of our audience’s everyday life. In opening the content up to be critiqued, we are turning it into a collaborative discourse- something we hope will improve representation…this will ensure that our participants feel valued and acknowledged as contributors to our STEM activities” – Project lead, Catalyst

The community lead for GLOW youth group shared how impactful the project had been for their community members, noting how it gave them more chance to spend time with each other in a different environment, doing different things, and that “it made them feel that sense of belonging… like an LGBT group they often do feel quite misplaced and sort of their opinions not valued, they sort of feel like outcasts. And so it was really nice for them to have this safe space where they were made to feel like their opinion mattered that they could be honest. Whether that was brutally honest, you know their opinion mattered, and they could be themselves.” You can find more evidence of this impact in the programme evaluation report.

Catalyst were one of the few organisations that chose not to use the postcards evaluation tool provided by ASDC, and instead the external evaluators agreed to allow them to use their own methods, whilst still implementing the same required questions for their outcome areas. They chose to collect the answers using Mentimeter, which worked really well on the day in receiving responses.

Please see below the Explore Your Universe: Valuing Inclusion report by Jen DeWitt and Sophie Bartlett. This report delves into the findings from the grant programme and how effective the 6 inclusive outcome areas were.

Evaluation Report Explore Your Universe Valuing Inclusion