When Have You Heard? was first dreamt up by a small group of friends over beers in the pub I don’t think any of us expected it to grow as it has! Over the last 2 years, the team has expanded and travelled across Greater Manchester, connecting adults with science in a community setting.

This month, we launched the Scottish chapter of HYH as part of Glasgow Science Festival. These events, held across a weekend during the Festival, were a bit of an experiment for the project. Usually we reach out to community groups and go to them in their existing community space. This time, we asked the public to come to us.

As nerve-wracking as that was, we needn’t have worried. On both days we had great individuals from across Glasgow join us in Govan Stones (go check them out – their exhibit is incredible!) who kindly hosted us & also provided much appreciated tea, coffee & cake!

We were excited to also have some new members from north of the border join the team to deliver parts of the session. Fingers crossed for more events in Scotland soon!

Back in February, the ‘Have You Heard?’ project was shortlisted for the Making a Difference Awards for Social Responsibility 2019. This is a wonderful achievement that the whole team was proud to be recognised for.

So once it came round to May, the trio of Donna, Jack and myself dressed up to the nines to enjoy an evening celebrating all the great work happening at the University of Manchester. From innovative prison-based modules in criminology, to a hate crime prevention project using Holocaust education in schools and communities across Manchester. It was truly inspiring to learn about the wide spectrum of on-going projects by students and staff of the University of Manchester.

HYH had tough competition in the category of “Outstanding local engagement in public and community engagement initiatives”. This was the most nominated category, taking up almost a third of the applications for the Making A Difference Awards.

It was a shock to us all, but we came back from the awards as winners!

Massive thanks to everyone who has supported us. In particular Engagement@Manchester for the funds to get us started and Dee-Ann Johnson for her eloquent summary of the project – [video]

Here’s to a future of making more of a difference.

As the end of 2018 is rapidly approaching, we wanted to look back of some of the things the HYH team got up to across the last year. We’ve been fortunate enough to visit lots of local groups to hear about the types of health and science stories that have caught people’s attention. The feedback from the groups helped us to develop our handy infographic to help people judge the reliability of research-focused media reports. We’ve even used the infographic to judge news stories for our own blog posts. The image below gives you a flavour of the topics we were writing blogs about in the past year.

In the past few months, we have been joined by a host of new members, who bring lots of new and exciting ideas for HYH in 2019. So stay tuned, and in the meantime- we thank you for your support and wish you happy and healthy holidays!

For the final session of 2018, the HYH team ventured over to the Northern Quarter in Manchester to work with a group of young adults with Katharine Cresswell from Public Programmes Manchester.

This was a new challenge for the HYH project, as we’ve never had a real chance to trial out our workshop with teenagers.

However, we had an engaged group who were interested and found it “thought provoking” to explore this world between science and the media that they had never acknowledged before. This definitely gave us an insight into what the younger generation may do to seek the news, and how they interpret the cutting edge science that surrounds us.

We opened the floor to discussion and it was impossible to avoid the CRISPR genetically modified baby in China that broke headlines. We continued our conversation on the science, the ethics, the cultural differences, and the media frenzy alongside it.

We followed up with Jack Barton explaining the process of science making its way into the media with his own experience as an avid blogger, and how his stories have been skewed incorrectly by the media. After getting an idea of the journey from the lab, to publication, to journalism – we all got a better view of where and how miscommunication of the message could occur.

New recruit, Julieta O’Flaherty, then took over and ran the Headline Game and we went through some examples of sensationalised headlines from recent years.

• BROCCOLI CHEMICAL MAY IMPROVE AUTISM SYMPTOMS
• SLEEP DEPRIVATION CAN CAUSE BRAIN TO START “EATING” ITSELF
• TATTOOS COULD GIVE YOU CANCER

We explained the science behind some of these stories, and gave our young adults the infographic and tools required to pick apart what is real science, misunderstood terms, and just plain “fake news”.

Take things with a pinch of salt and remember to read past the headline!

Last week the HYH team did something a little bit different to usual. We joined up with a plethora of the best scientists and communicators from the University of Manchester (among many other fantastic institutions) at Science Spectacular, part of the Manchester Science Festival.

Joining Jason, Donna, Kirsty and myself was new recruit Maddy who jumped right in at the deep end without breaking a sweat! We had a fantastic time chatting about recent science stories in the news and just generally how we hear about scientific discoveries. We also had some great discussions about how science gets from the lab to the headline and, importantly, how you can use our infographic to cut through the hype and get an idea of the research behind the headlines. We even managed to make some great contacts for groups that we can visit in the future!

All in all a hugely enjoyable day (and fun for me to be back in Manchester for the first time in a while). Watch this space for our next sessions and some other exciting updates from the Have You Heard? Team!