Making science accessible to the community: a lesson from the RAISE project

The first two years of the RAISE project are completed. What did Native Scientists learn from it, and what are their plans for the future?

A collaborative work led by Native Scientists with the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) and Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes (iMM) for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and Citizens grant, the  first two-year cycle of RAISE (Researchers in Action for Inclusion in Science and Education) project run from 2022 to 2024. RAISE is a science engagement project designed to make science feel more approachable, valuable and relevant for people, with a focus on children and adolescents. It helps connect researchers with Portuguese residents, particularly children and their families from underserved and/or underprivileged backgrounds. Now that the first two years of the project are ending, we asked Mariana Ferreira, Native’s RAISE Project Lead, to share her experience and future plans.

In the summer of 2021, Native Scientists and CF, connected by a common vision, experience, and desire to promote scientific literacy and social justice for underserved communities, started what will eventually lead to the conceptualisation and creation of RAISE. They then brought in more partners and applied for European funding to collectively implement the educational programmes “Researchers at Schools” and the annual European Researchers’ Nights. These two years of RAISE were our opportunity to allow children and adolescents to engage with scientists within schools and to get their families involved as well. Once a year, we would invite the families involved in the project to the European Research Night annual science outreach event at the Champalimaud Foundation building in Lisbon, where underserved groups could connect with science and scientists. Our scope was to engage with underserved communities as a whole - not only children or adults. And we achieved what we wanted through different partnerships! Seeing the excitement in kids experiencing science and asking, “Please, please, can I come back and bring my parents? They would love this!” and actually being able to tell them “Yes”, truly made me feel that this work is valuable and makes a difference in the lives of children and teenagers that continue to feel left out of science. 

Working on this project and following up on the amazing work by Nuno Negrões and Catarina Miranda, I learned that if you want to make science accessible to society, simply keeping the doors of research institutes open is not enough. You need to use simple language to take science to the streets and choose motivating, engaging, and empowering methods to effectively build bridges, making everyone feel welcome and confident with scientific topics. It has been a team effort among the partners, where everyone brought value to the project. Catarina Ramos and her team at CF (Teresa Fernandes, António Monteiro, Carla Emilie, Diana Cadete, João Zelst, Raquel Gonçalves, Marta Correia and John Lee), plus Helena Pinheiro, Cláudia Silva and Inês Domingues at iMM are fundamental to the success of RAISE. Thanks to Native’s expertise connecting children and scientists, we could reach many communities facing vulnerabilities and lacking access to science and technology activities. However, the RAISE project so far was also a learning curve. We realised even more clearly that science is neither diverse nor inclusive. When we tried to analyse whether students were related to scientists, we found this was not always the case. Sometimes, the kids mentioned that they felt different from the scientists they were meeting. This reinforces the importance of projects like RAISE in showing that science is (or should be) accessible to everyone, irrespective of their circumstances. 

These two years have been such an experience! We managed to engage over 4000 young pupils within more than 40 municipalities in Portugal, involving 240 scientists, mostly living abroad, returning to Portugal to inspire the future generations. The collaborations established between Native and the partner institutions CF and iMM are active, and we intend to keep the project vibrant. We are applying for funding opportunities as we speak. We want to continue RAISE’s success and reach even more underserved children, bringing science to them.