Tab Content: Initial QUENCH Workshops

QUENCH Networking Building and Collaborative Funding Workshops (Feb-March 2022)

A key part of building the QUENCH network involved five workshops in Early 2022 that helped to make new collaborations between participants, with pump priming funds available for supporting the development of research projects.

From 120+ applications to participate in the workshops, 42 individuals across diverse academic disciplines (including ecology, environmental sciences, psychology, health sciences, geography), local and national government departments, third sector and private organisations were selected to take part. Participants were selected to cover early-, mid- and advanced-career positions, as well as inclusive across groups commonly under-represented at events like ours.

There were a total of five half-day workshops that took place over a three-week period. While all workshops took place online, they were designed to be engaging and allow for opportunities to meet people. Alongside the QUENCH facilitation team, the workshops were supported by five fantastic mentors:

• Charlotte Russell (The Eden Project)
• Katherine Irvine (The James Hutton Institute)
• Piran White (University of York)
• Rich Fry (Swansea University)
• Rosie Hails (National Trust)

The first two workshops focused on developing diverging ideas through building connections across members of the QUENCH workshops to identify new research opportunities together. In the first workshop, participants had the opportunities to meet others in the network. QUENCH mentors introduced themselves and gave short presentations outlining interesting areas for future research. The second workshop saw continued opportunities for networking and participants were invited to start thinking about the research connections across participants. We began to populate ideas and research gaps to focus on.

We then moved onto a process of converging ideas into feasible research projects. In workshop three participants began to identify projects that could answer research gaps aligned to the QUENCH key research questions. Teams began to form around these questions and we looked to ensure that all teams had a mix of environmental science expertise combined with other research disciplines and practitioners from different sectors. In the fourth workshop, research groups received feedback from mentors helping them to refine their ideas further prior to submitting proposals to the mentoring team.

The final workshop was an opportunity for all research project teams to pitch their proposals. In total, we had seven presentations across themes including inequalities in environmental quality, urban food growing, pollinators and mental wellbeing, nature connectedness in young people, and the benefits of private gardens.

A total of five projects were funded following a scoring process based on reviews by the QUENCH mentors and votes submitted by participants. You can find out more about these on the projects section of the QUENCH website.

We thank all participants and mentors for enabling the QUENCH workshops to be successful. We look forward to finding out more from the project teams as their research progresses over the summer.