 Hi, I'm Sarah West, a researcher from the Stockholm Environment Institute, and I'm here today to talk to you about engaging with so-called hard-to-reach groups in urban areas with citizen science. Now, I'm sorry I can't be there in person, but the advantage of me not being here is that you can actually live tweet me during the presentation and I'll hopefully be able to respond to you. Thank you. So I thought I'd better start by dealing with some of the common questions that SEI staff get asked. So, Stockholm must be nice. Yes, it is a beautiful city, but actually we're based in offices all around the world. We have about 170 researchers, 30 of whom are actually based at the University of York. We were set up as an independent research organisation by the Swedish government about 25 years ago, and one of the other common questions we get asked is, so you just focus on environment issues, do you? Well, no, we focus on environment and development issues, and at York we have a particularly diverse range of interests, so we do work relating to air pollution, sustainable consumption and production, public participation in scientific research, which includes citizen science, health and well-being, biogeochemical cycling, a whole range of things. So we've been involved in designing, running and evaluating citizen science projects since about 2007, and in 2007 we started working on the OPAL project, which is where I'm going to draw most of my experiences for this talk. So I'm going to particularly talk about engaging with hard-to-reach groups in urban areas. So as I said, the largest citizen science project that we've been involved with is the OPAL project. So just to give those of you who aren't familiar with OPAL a really brief overview of the project, basically we have received funding from the Big Lottery Fund. The first phase of funding was from 2007 to 2013, and then we've received a second wave of funding from now until the end of next year, and that has allowed us to expand it from being an England-only project to a UK-wide project. And we've produced surveys of earthworms and soil, air surveys looking at lichens, water quality, looking at ponds, biodiversity of hedgerows, climate, which actually had a bit of weather incorporated with it, and Bugs Count, which was a survey of invertebrates, and a tree health survey. So OPAL is particularly aiming to inspire people from hard-to-reach and deprived communities with their local environment. So I wanted to define a couple of terms for you. So we consider deprived communities to be those who are within the bottom 20% of the index of multiple deprivation. So the IMD is an England-only statistic produced for the UK government, which looks at multiple aspects of deprivation. So these aspects are income, employment, health deprivation, disability, education, skills and training, barriers to housing and services, crime and the living environment. So I really like this map as a way of looking for particular areas to work in, and it's also really useful retrospectively if you're having to report to your funders about whether you're working with deprived groups or not. So the URL can be seen at the top of the slide, but it can also be found by searching just IMD map. So what do we mean by hard-to-reach? Well this is actually much harder to define, and each project and each funder might have their own definition of hard-to-reach. Basically we use it to mean people who don't usually engage in environmental activities. So we're thinking not people like your typical environmental volunteer groups, national trust members etc. We're thinking perhaps teenagers, elderly groups who maybe meet for coffee, young parents etc. So my question is, are hard-to-reach groups hard-to-reach? No, I don't think so. It's all about contact, it's about gatekeepers, not the kind of butterfly, these kind of gatekeepers. These are the sorts of people who give you access to the other kind of groups that you're wanting to work with. So throughout the OPAL project we've worked with young people in York excluded from school so many times that they ended up being educated one-to-one by a key worker. We've worked with homeless men and women in Bradford. We've worked with young mums in Hull. We've worked with school children and dog walkers around Brownfield sites in Wakefield, elderly nursing home residents in York and many, many other examples. But what do all these examples have in common? They have in common that their group leaders were all looking for activities for them to do with their groups. So you need to work out who these group leaders, who these key stakeholders are or who these key contacts are or gatekeepers and then you need to get in touch with them. So I'm going to give you some tips about engaging with these gatekeepers. So first of all you need to think about what type of group you want to contact. So some of these might be less hard to reach than others but some funders don't require you to work with a particular audience. So here's just some examples of some of the groups that you might want to work with. So for example you could work with refugees and asylum seekers and many urban areas have groups who are working particularly with these groups. You could work with scouts and schools. Scouts I'm using here are shorthand for all of the other associated groups with these and obviously these might be less hard to reach than others. You could work with shore start centres or equivalents in your area. Coffee mornings, loads of people hold coffee mornings, think over fifties club, bingo clubs, all of those kind of things. You could work with prisoners, faith groups, teachers. The real advantage of working with teachers if you are trying to have lots of impact from your project is that although you might only say train 10 teachers they will go on and work with potentially hundreds of children so they're a really good group to talk with. So there are many many other groups that you might be thinking about working with and something perhaps you could discuss later on today. There are also cases where you might not be trying to bring a new audience to environmental work. You might be wanting to target environmental groups for example who might like to try a bit of citizen science, maybe in order to help understand their local patch a little bit better or perhaps help contribute to a scientific study. So I've just come up with a few ideas of groups that you could contact who are environmental groups but who might not be taking part in citizen science. So for example we've got Sustrans volunteers who might be maintaining footpaths or cycleways, the conservation volunteers, TCV, RSPB local groups, natural history societies, allotment groups, local nature reserves, other informal green spaces maybe who have friends of groups, green gym, organisations and similar invasive species action groups, national trust and wildlife trust. So a web search can be really useful place to start to find these kind of groups but bear in mind that many small groups don't have websites or any kind of web presence and actually the small groups who don't have websites are much less likely to have been contacted by somebody else before so you contacting them by phone or by actually going and seeing them face to face might make them more receptive to taking part in your project. So my other tips are before you make contact you need to think about why they might want to be involved with your project. So have a think what sort of reasons might they have for wanting to get involved in your project. It could be that they just wanting to do an outdoor session, it might be that they are already doing outdoor sessions and they want to go into a bit more detail to learn about the natural environment, all sorts of reasons. I'll talk a little bit more about motivations for participating later. So once you've thought about why groups might want to get in contact with your work you need to get in touch with your contact or perhaps multiple contacts by phone, by email, face to face, even a handwritten letter sometimes can be really beneficial for talking to these people. Just to bear in mind that building up a relationship with key contacts is really important but it's really really time consuming or can be and it can be quite disheartening at times so keep persevering and you might need to speak to multiple people before you find the right person that you're needing to talk to. Then you need to make it clear what you are offering to the group. So are you offering free identification of sources? Are you offering training? Activity sessions? Can you run a talk for them or some sort of other event? I also wanted to talk a little bit about engaging with diverse people if you're not accessing them through group leaders etc. So you might be running an event and you want to attract a diverse audience or you might be running a project that doesn't require lots of contact with group leaders and you're just wanting to engage with diverse people. So the first thing that you need to recognise is that people have really diverse motivations for participating in citizen science. So this word on the slide is derived from some work that my colleagues Rachel Pateman, Alison Dyke and I have been doing looking at motivations for involvement in citizen science projects. This was a study funded by DEFRA and we asked a stratified sample of the UK population whether they had taken part in environmental citizen science projects. So please contact me if you'd like some more information on this project. We did quite a lot of work on this and I can only go into a small amount of detail here. But basically here on the wordel, the larger the word, the more often that motivation was suggested by people. So for example, the top motivations that we've got are people wanting to help wildlife. They're wanting to contribute to science or scientific understanding. They're wanting to learn something new. And they're also wanting to, they feel that it's a valuable thing to do. This is a little bit more nebulous concept but they see that involvement in these kind of projects is a valuable thing. There are also motivations that are very important for some people but less important for others. So these are things like sharing their knowledge. So they might have a real in-depth knowledge of butterflies or bumblebees or grasshoppers or whatever and they want to share that knowledge with other people who aren't so knowledgeable about that group. They might want to help a specific site. They might want to do it for fresh air or exercise. They might want to do it to help their career. We've also got some smaller motivations here which is to meet people and have fun and for some people that socialisation aspect of participating in citizen science is really important. And the other thing is that some people might have asked them to do it so somebody persuaded them they wanted to do it. So this is maybe participating as part of a school group. The other one that's on here is other which you can see in green and actually our survey didn't pick up everybody's motivations and so people listed some other motivations and these were very, very diverse. The other thing to bear in mind is that people can hold multiple motivations and these motivations can actually change over time both within the project and over a person's life course. So for example career related motivations may be more important for younger participants than for older participants. So my second points about engaging with diverse individuals rather than trying to access people through groups is that you need to use these diverse motivations in your publicity materials. So bear in mind that people might be motivated for social reasons. They might be motivated because they want to help science because it's a valuable thing to do, whatever. So you can use little vignettes, little stories about existing participants who you can anonymise or not depending on whatever you prefer and these can be useful for highlighting people's different motivations. So you could do this via websites, newsletters, on publicity posters etc. So time is an important barrier for many people for participating in citizen science and volunteering more generally. So if you have tasks that require tiny amounts of time make that really, really clear in your promotional materials and you will try and attract, you'll manage to attract a wider range of people. So be diverse in your publicity as well. This is really, really important and this is due to a theory called homophily. Basically that people are more likely to socially interact with other people who are like them. So if you want to attract people of certain ethnic minorities make sure they're represented in your publicity materials. There's quite a lot of research from groups such as Ben, the Black Environmental Network, that black and ethnic minority people feel excluded from the countryside because it's depicted as a place full of white people because we only use images of white people enjoying the countryside. So think about that sort of thing when you're doing your publicity. Thinking about other people who might feel excluded from the countryside, for example, if your project can cater for people in wheelchairs, or pictures of people in wheelchairs in your promotional materials. The last tip relating to recruiting participants is don't be afraid to ask your existing participants to publicise the project for you. They are your most passionate advocates of your work and research has shown that many people start volunteering because somebody else asked them enthusiastically to do so. So your existing participants can be a really good source of enthusiasm for your project. So I wanted to just go through a few quick examples of some of the work that we've done within OPAL in Yorkshire and the Humber relating to some of this work and I'll try and link it back to the tips that I've already given. So here we've done some work with Shabeen so that Shabeen are Sheffield Black and Ethnic Minority Environmental Network. So our contact, our key contact, was a staff member on the OPAL advisory group. So we were already in there, that was good. Shabeen already worked with several youth groups in Sheffield and they wanted resources and help to teach young people and other groups about the wildlife in local parks. So they had lots of work going on in local areas but they wanted some resources to help use them with groups and they wanted some other activities to do with groups. So we ran a series of sessions for them looking at water quality and climate in parks across Sheffield. Another example of some work we've done is working with a project called Down to Earth Allotment Project in Bradford. This is an example of a project which doesn't have a website. They've got very limited contact details available online. Their staff are very busy and therefore very hard to get hold of but I met one of the coordinators at a workshop in Bradford and I followed it out by email and asked if we could work together in some way. I was told that they had these sessions working with homeless men and women on an allotment and they were working to grow vegetables. I was told just turn up to one of our sessions which is not how I was normally working. I was used to planning things way in advance and things but anyway so I just turned up and I ran some series of sessions for them on soil and earthworms which obviously has a really close link to allotments. Earthworms being really important for soil formation and also did water surveys in the tiniest pond that I've done a water survey in. I found the sessions really rewarding and I think the participants found them interesting too and they were really keen to show off their projects to an outsider. So the reason I wanted to highlight this is because many allotments and community gardens are running in urban areas and many of them have schemes for people with learning difficulties or physical disabilities and mental health problems so if you have a project which can relate to gardens or growing in any way try to get in touch with them. So other places who might you could get in touch with relating to allotments and community gardens are NHS so many of local NHSs have gardening schemes, the charity Mind, the Royal Horticultural Society and then obviously your local council and private allotments might have schemes running on them as well. So the last example I want to talk about is actually work led by my colleague Steve Cinderby here at SEI and this is where we're using maps and aerial photographs to talk to people about their local green space using participatory mapping approaches. So although this work isn't strictly citizen science I think it can be a great way of starting conversations with people capturing knowledge about sites which can then later inform where your citizen science projects are going to run and in our experience people love looking at maps. As long as you can help people find where they are on a map and their aerial photograph they can start to talk about the spaces around them and looking at maps doesn't require high levels of literacy so it can be really good for working with people who have trouble reading or writing on people whose first language isn't English. Participatory mapping at SEI we do it in two ways one is a very rapid way so called rapid appraisal participatory mapping which is where we ask people for example what species they've seen and where they're least favourite or favourite areas of parks which paths they use or it can be done in a more in depth workshop setting. So the rapid appraisal we tend to do on site with literally just some maps, a table and if the weather's bad some sort of cover but the workshops we do these more in depth sessions and these are really really useful for uncovering details of site history so you can find out from people what happened on sites and when and obviously that can be really important for understanding the current ecology of the sites. So on the slide you can just see there's a few pictures of some activities that we've done so we've got some work that we've done in Wakefield looking at mapping the historic uses of brownfield sites in the middle we've got some work with a group of elderly people who are attending a coffee morning in York and on the right we've got some rapid appraisal participatory GIS going on in a park in York and here we were trying to understand people's use of space and which sites they like to best and things. So this can be a really really useful way of starting to talk to people who might be around your site that you want to work on about the site and then you might be able to persuade them to get involved in a citizen science project later which is exactly what we did in Wakefield so after we'd done this participatory mapping in Wakefield many of these participants came on and started doing B in Bumble B and butterfly surveys for us as part of our project. So I just wanted to summarise some of my key points really here. So I don't think that hard to reach groups are necessarily hard to reach. It's all about finding the key contact on the gatekeeper and persevering and realising that the first person you contact isn't necessarily the right person to contact. You need to think about what might motivate people either groups or individuals to take part in your project and hopefully I've given you some tips there about what might motivate people. Building up contact is time consuming and may require lots of patience. What is the right time for you to contact people might not be a convenient time for them so when you first make contact with somebody ask what time of day, what day of the week etc what means of contact is the best way of getting in touch with them. Be really clear about what you can offer for groups and individuals who participate. What are they going to get out of participating in your project? Lastly, if you want to engage with diverse people you need to be diverse in your publicity. So you need to advertise in a variety of places you need to show diversity in your images and don't just rely on the internet word of mouth can be really really important. So thank you for listening Sorry I couldn't be there in person do get in touch with me if you'd like any information about any of the other projects that I've talked about in this presentation or if you have new ideas for research and citizen science. Thank you very much.