Meeting with the Advisory Board: reflections for 2021/2022

Native Scientist is committed to social impact through science education; this year’s meeting with the Advisory Board focused on the growth of Native Scientist as a sustainable social enterprise.

Last March, Native Scientist met with its external Advisory Board (AB) to review the company’s 2020 activities and discuss the strategic plan for 2021/2022. Native Scientist´s AB is formed by a group of experts from different professional areas (education, social business, entrepreneurship, science, language, migration), who bring fresh eyes and advice on how Native can accelerate and increase its impact. AB meetings take place annually.

Following up on the AB advice, in 2022 Native will have created and will be implementing a fundraising strategy, as this was unanimously considered as pivotal for the sustainability of the company. Up to now, Native has been mainly dependent on short-term grants and very reduced fees-for-services, which hinders impact and long-term planning. This will be of utmost importance to hire talent for key roles within the organization, which mostly runs on voluntary work.

Native will also develop new processes to better showcase its short term impact and to better capture the long term impact of its work. This is important to guarantee that a positive social value and change is indeed created and to keep the activities always aligned with Native’s mission, across all countries of action. Native will also be focused on paving the way to establish itself outside the UK in a new country, Portugal, creating a legal entity that will run a new programme (Scientists return to school, Cientista regressa à Escola in the original title; more here and here) and that will incorporate the spinoff organization Cartas com Ciência within its legal structure.

Last year, alongside with the AB, Native Scientist defined its Strategic Plan 2020-2025 (more information can be found here).

About Native Scientist

Native Scientist is an award-winning European-wide non-profit organisation that promotes cultural diversity in science, education and society. Native Scientist provides science and language workshops, science communication training, and bespoke projects for various institutions, including schools, universities and embassies. The work developed connects pupils with scientists to foster science and language literacy through role modelling and science and language integrated learning. Founded in 2013, their work reaches over 1,200 pupils a year and they count with a network of over 1,000 international scientists.