Find out about upcoming events and view materials and recording from past events

We host workshops and webinars on current themes to help develop the community engagement field and generate new ideas and partnerships. We also share materials from externally planned workshops that are relevant to Mesh users. If you would like to use Mesh to share resources and learning from an event that you are planning please contact us.

2024


27th August 2024


Webinar: Global Strategies for Policy Engagement: Insights from Kenya, Argentina, and India 

Join us for what promises to be a rich and insightful webinar on the subject of policy engagement — how researchers engage policy-makers and the policy-making process in order to encourage the creation of policies and laws based on evidence. Our speakers represent three different institutions in Kenya, Argentina, and India with a strong legacy of work in this field. They will share their approaches and learnings from their policy engagement work.


10th July 2024


Webinar: Harnessing Community Engagement for public Health Research Success in East Africa 

This is an interactive and insightful webinar delving into the critical role of community engagement in global health research and its significant impact on public health in East Africa. The speakers will explore practical strategies and the importance of involving communities in research initiatives to ensure relevance, sustainability, and ethical considerations. Learn how meaningful partnerships with communities can lead to impactful research outcomes and influence public health policies and practices. Whether you're a researcher, healthcare professional, or community health worker, this webinar is designed for you.

21st and 28th May 2024


Webinar: Empowering Communities - Innovative Approaches to AI Health Research and Engagement 

This series of webinars aims at exploring the ethical aspects and considerations for AI in health research. The authors present practical ways of addressing the challenges through recognised community engagement approaches.

 

9 April 2024


Webinar: Engaging children and youth with health research: Case studies from Brazil, Kenya and Vietnam

Engaging young people and children in health research can increase their interest in science while simultaneously familiarizing researchers with the issues and concerns of our communities. In this webinar, three schools engagement projects in three countries are showcased: The Brazilian Health and Environment Olympics hosted by Fiocruz in Rio de Janerio, Brazil; Oxford University Clinical Research Unit, Vietnam’s Schools and Youth Engagement Programme; and the School Engagement Programme of the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya. Learn more about this exemplary work and to consider what learnings the experience of schools engagement might have for community engagement practitioners as a whole.

2023


6 Feb 2023


Webinar: Public and community engagement in health research-openings and obstacles for listening and responding

E-book launch! This e-book explores approaches taken by engagement practitioners, engagement scholars, social scientists, and researchers to promote listening and responding to community voices in research processes. It seeks to understand the challenges that obstruct meaningful integration of community voices in research design and responsiveness to expressions of needs and aspirations for change, in low-and-middle-income countries. The Research Topic draws experience from numerous majority world countries and explores multiple global health challenges and research approaches

2022


13 Oct 2022

Webinar: Community Engagement with AMR: Responsive Dialogues in practice

To address antimicrobial resistance (AMR), community engagement needs to be combined with stakeholder engagement across sectors. The Responsive Dialogues approach provides guidance for this, generating practical steps to tackle AMR at community and policy level. This webinar included speakers from Malawi-LiverpoolWellcome Trust in Malawi and Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Thailand, who shared insights from two country pilots.

 

 22 Sept 2022

Webinar: Voices from the Pandemic: COVID-19 experiences in Asia

Jointly hosted by Mesh and CONNECT, this webinar introduced digital diaries - short films and photographs - created by community members in Nepal, Indonesia and Vietnam reflecting on their experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Speakers, including a film maker involved in the project, described the practicalities and challenges of engaging with communities and reflected on how the digital diaries method can be an empowering tool.

 

Dec 2021 - July 2022

Webinar Series: Community Engagement within Research Uptake

in partnership with our sister hub ARCH  

If research is to deliver its maximum impact and positively change health outcomes, findings from health research should be translated into recommendations that are relevant to communities and can be implemented within policy and practice. ARCH and Mesh are working in partnership to present a new webinar series exploring the role of community engagement within the process of research uptake.

Webinar 5: Sexual and Gender Rights | 21 July 2022

Webinar 3 & 4: Antimicrobial Resistance | 12 & 19 May 2022

Webinar 2: Mental Health | 23 March 2022

 18 May 2022

Taking relationships seriously: Findings from a realist review of community engagement

Watch this webinar on the REAL Community Engagement Realist Review where the research team shared some of their fascinating findings.

The REAL project aimed to provide more conceptual clarity around how engagement works in practice and looked at published papers and engagement work within malaria research in low- and middle-income countries. The review highlights some key relationship and power dynamics at the heart of engagement work and a range of factors that enable and constrain it.

2021



Dec 2021 - July 2022

Webinar Series: Community Engagement within Research Uptake

in partnership with our sister hub ARCH

If research is to deliver its maximum impact and positively change health outcomes, findings from health research should be translated into recommendations that are relevant to communities and can be implemented within policy and practice.

ARCH and Mesh are working in partnership to present a new webinar series exploring the role of community engagement within the process of research uptake.

Webinar 1: Maternal & Child Health | 2 December 2021


Sept - Nov 2021

Workshop Series: Connectors in Engagement

in partnership with Eh!woza and Interfer in South Africa

Connectors supports discussions about the key role that engagement professionals, creatives, community groups and other organisations play in bridging the gap between research and communities. These ‘Connectors’ often have unique skills and experience, existing ways of working with the public, and can be essential in a successful engagement project. We hosted a three virtual workshops in 2021 with the aim of identifying challenges and opportunities, generating new ideas and enabling new collaborations.

2020



Sept - Oct 2020 

Workshop: Trusting, Collaborating and Listening - Engaging Public and Communities with Vaccine Studies

A theme area has been created following a four day Mesh workshop exploring public and community engagement with vaccine research. This area shares videos, exercises, projects, links to published literature, and many free guidelines and tools. It explores the topic through four themes:

  • The role and nature of trust
  • The value and challenge of collaboration
  • Listening to public and communities
  • Supporting strong engagement practice


Sept 2020

Webinar: Engagement at a distance - Sharing Lessons from experience


This extended Mesh learning webinar explored the possibilities for community engagement with health research when we cannot meet in person. We heard from engagement practitioners who have run successful projects that did not rely on meeting face-to-face. Participants learnt top-tips on designing and facilitating virtual events and tried some tools that can be used to enhance interactivity online, whilst meeting other participants in the process


July 2020

Webinar: Public Engagement and Involvement in Health Research: How well are we doing?

This webinar from July 2020 was organised through a collaboration between the International PPI Network, the NIHR Global Health Programme and Mesh.Speakers asked how well do we really 'do' public engagement and involvement in research in different parts of the world? The UK has a long history of these type of activities, but do they provide the benchmark for best practice? Researchers in South Africa are making significant efforts to tackle the nation’s health challenges and community engagement plays a critical role, but are they approaching it the right way? What can we learn from each other to help us improve?


Jan 2020

Webinar: Why is it important for health researchers to engage school students?

Launching the Mesh School Engagement theme area and Research In Focus lecture series, Dr Alun Davies, Schools Engagement Lead at KEMRI | Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya, outlines the goals, methods and outcomes of school engagement as a “win-win” engagement approach for both researchers and students. This lecture draws on experiences and reflections from KEMRI | Wellcome’s School Engagement Programme and from an international practitioners workshop held in 2018. 

Visit our School Engagement theme area for futher resources across a range of approaches and methods

2018



Vietnam | Oct 2018

Taking it to the Next Level: How can we generate leadership and develop practice in engagement?



This Wellcome International Engagement workshop focused on how the field of engagement can be developed through strong leadership and evolving capacity. The workshop explored different strategies, roles and types of leadership within engagement and looked at the successes and challenges faced by the international engagement network

2017



Kenya | Mar 2017 

Evaluating Community Engagement: Workshop



This workshop aimed to move forward the debates surrounding evaluation by drawing on practical experiences of conducting and documenting how evaluation of CE/PE across diverse settings is conducted, and reflecting on the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used


Kenya | Mar 2017

It’s Complicated: Navigating scientific complexity in public and community engagement


This workshop explored the theme of complexity in modern science and the challenges it raises when designing activities to engage the public with health research. What are the best ways of making a complicated topic accessible, but not over-simplified, and what role does language, metaphor and participation play in the process?

2016



UK | Sept 2016

Ethics and Politics of Community Engagement in Global Health Research



This workshop explored the political and social dimensions of engagement activities in global health research by interrogating the everyday politics and practices of engagement


India | Feb 2016

The Art of Health: Exploring creative engagement with health research



This Wellcome Trust International Engagement workshop explored the use of creative and artistic methods in engaging communities with science and health research

2015



Botswana | Feb 2015
 

Global Food Matters: An appetite for engaging with research



This workshop explored public and community engagement with health research using the Wellcome Trust's fifth challenge area of ‘Connecting the environment, nutrition and health' as a starting point for discussion