Engagement Day 2024 Deep Dives

The Dilemmas Cafe will offer an opportunity to discuss the challenges we face in partnership work, and work collaboratively to uncover the correct ways to address the challenges. 

Dilemmas Cafe attendees will hear about real-life experiences of dilemmas in partnership working, before exploring them and coming up with solutions and insights through collaborative dialogue. As part of Public Engagement team's work developing guidance around Terms of Engagement for working with partners, the session will allow you to play an active role in Imperial's work around how to support ethical and effective partnerships.

Have you been building an engagement partnership for a number of years? Or maybe you’re at the beginning of your partnership journey? How do you know what’s working? How do you share your successes?

This session will allow discussion of a number of tools and frameworks that can help set clear aims of partnership working and understand the impact of these collaborations. It will be a chance to share how we tell the stories of meaningful partnerships, drawing from your own ideas and experiences. Partnerships can lead to diverse outcomes – sometimes unexpected, often gradual. Let’s come together to explore how good evaluation practice can help to measure, learn from and share our work. 

This session will explore best practice for initiating community partnerships and will address some of the challenges around doing so.

Institute of Global Health Innovation's Jodie (Public Involvement Officer) and Anna (Public Involvement Lead) will share about the recent partnership developed between Imperial College and the Marylebone Project, a local women’s homelessness service, which has resulted in an NIHR-funded project to explore the use of psychologically informed environments (PIE) to safely and meaningfully involve women experiencing homelessness in research. They will reflect on the environment which allowed for a genuine partnership to be formed, and will share the lessons learned so far about building trust and ensuring reciprocity. They will then run an activity which will prompt you to think about how psychologically-informed approaches could support your work with community and public partners going forward. 

Engagement Day's keynote speaker and director of Dialogue Matters, Diana Pound, will be hosting an interactive session exploring the importance and role of negotiation in partnerships. 

This workshop will introduce some insights into how people negotiate in partnerships and participation processes, and the key to finding win/wins for all involved.