Project Planning Through Case Studies

The Urban Science Futures initiative launched as a six-month collaborative project between a major UK university's public engagement department and a local community centre serving families from Turkish and Moroccan backgrounds. The university framed the goal as "increasing science capital among hard-to-reach youth"; the project aimed to bring young participants onto campus for laboratory activities like a kiwi DNA extraction.

The university public engagement team set the calendar, agenda, meeting schedules, and project targets eight months in advance without consulting the community organisation. Operating from an institutional deficit* model, the university treated the local neighbourhood as lacking scientific awareness. To secure grant funding, the academic team depoliticised the project's core objectives to avoid friction: they removed community-requested goals on anti-racism, health inequality, and systemic exclusion and replaced them with sanitised, institutionally safe terms like "youth skills development" and "STEM outreach." The university held initial planning meetings strictly during academic business hours on campus, treating community leaders as reactive recipients expected to adapt to institutional availability.

The university retained full financial and administrative control. Although project budgets included university staff costs and overheads, the university allocated no direct, unrestricted core funding to the community centre. The project placed heavy administrative duties—such as participant recruitment, collecting complex consent forms, coordinating transport, and managing dietary requirements—on under-resourced community workers without financial compensation. The engagement design assumed the university laboratory was the only legitimate site of "science", dismissing local community spaces like the youth centre or parks as unsuitable.

For a summer science outreach day, families were invited to visit university laboratories. From arrival, structural barriers and hostile dynamics created an environment of exclusion:

• Surveillance and profiling: University security officers closely monitored and followed the youth group through corridors.
   
• Corridor gatekeeping: Academic staff repeatedly interrupted families with questions like, "Are you lost?" or "Can I help you?", implicitly signalling that they did not belong.
   
• Exclusive representation: Corridors and halls were lined exclusively with historical portraits and sculptures celebrating white, Western, male academic figures.

During the afternoon workshop, a parent raised concerns about the heavy security presence and feeling scrutinised. Rather than validate the concern, the white academic facilitator responded defensively and remained silent: "Security is just standard procedure for everyone’s safety." Later, when a participant noted how scientific disciplines' historical ties to colonial extraction affected trust, another contributor deflected by listing other forms of deprivation. The facilitator remained silent, leaving the racialised minority* participant isolated and exhausted.

In post-event reflection sessions, community organisers tried to discuss the emotional and psychological toll on families. The public engagement team interrupted to maintain their structured evaluation agenda, insisting participants complete quantitative surveys to meet funder KPIs. The university team logged the event as a "diversity success" based solely on attendance. Exhausted by surveillance, uncompensated administrative work, and invalidation, the community centre withdrew before the final phase. 

Months later, the academic team published a peer-reviewed paper analysing "low retention and engagement barriers in hard-to-reach minoritised communities," turning community harm into academic publication capital while leaving community trust shattered.

Extractive patterns are not just accidental oversights or harmless administrative hurdles. They reflect deeper institutional habits that prioritise control, convenience, and risk avoidance over real racial equity and meaningful power-sharing.

• Grant KPI timelines as gatekeeping: When institutions focus on securing grant funding and setting rigid targets, they often prioritise these goals over building real relationships. Setting project calendars and targets months in advance means university teams control decisions instead of inviting community partners to help shape the agenda from the start.
   
• Inflexible academic calendars: Universities often expect community partners to fit into university term times and staff schedules, rather than adjusting their own ways of working to meet community needs and availability.
   
• Institutional risk aversion and Language Sanitisation: Legal and communications teams sometimes remove terms like "anti-racism" and "systemic exclusion" from project language, replacing them with safer labels like "youth skills outreach." This protects institutional comfort and avoids difficult conversations about power, but it also limits honest discussion and real progress on racial equity.

The Community STEM Collective was established as a multi-year partnership between an anti-racist community organisation in a neighbourhood with a large population of Pakistani, Arab, and Somali families, and activist scholars from two regional universities. Formed explicitly to resource local, youth-led civic action, the coalition centres heritage, lived experience, and community cultural wealth.

The cooperation began by taking off "academic hats" and entering community spaces to listen to the community's research questions and agree on air quality. The partnership adopted an asset-based* framework, starting with local history, lived experience, Elders' knowledge, and existing community assets; it co-created agendas and meeting structures in open, flexible spaces driven by community priorities. When defining grant proposals, academic partners refused to sanitise language: they explicitly wrote anti-racism, structural equity, and community autonomy into project charters, anchoring institutional commitments in policy. 

To prevent resources from getting trapped in university bureaucracies, the collective secured core operational funding routed directly to the community organisation's bank accounts. This granted the community group full operational autonomy to create paid youth leadership and peer researcher positions. Academic collaborators took on redistributive labour*—absorbing behind-the-scenes administrative tasks such as room-booking logistics, formal compliance paperwork, diary coordination, and grant application drafting—so community leaders were not exploited or overburdened by institutional bureaucracy. 

Activities took place in trusted local venues—such as community centres, boxing clubs, and GP surgeries—rather than expecting families to navigate university campus barriers. Hands-on maker sessions brought Elders, youth, and professional scientists together to explore topics ranging from artificial intelligence to local environmental health. 

During facilitation, academic partners acted from a position of active solidarity:

• Systematic intervention: When racial harm or deflections occurred during group discussions, facilitators intervened immediately to validate the affected participant and recenter racial equity as a structural responsibility.
   
• “Safe spaces” for practitioners and public: The collective established explicit trauma-informed guidelines and boundaries, protecting racialised minority* facilitators and community contributors from uncompensated emotional labour or public backlash.
   
• Anonymous input: The partnership integrated tools like anonymous post-it Q&As and visual prompts into sessions, allowing participants to guide discussions without fear of judgment.

Evaluation focused on community-determined impact: building long-term community financial capacity, fostering youth agency, and establishing psychological safety. Feedback collection moved away from standard paper forms to creative, community-preferred methods, such as storytelling circles and visual charters. The community co-owned knowledge and research outputs: community leaders were credited as primary authors on public reports, and the community retained access to all data for local advocacy. Youth Researcher at the final event: "We didn't just learn how air sensors work; we built a monitor network that proved to the local council why our street has high asthma rates. This data belongs to our community."

The initiative established a permanent Community Research Advisory Group and a Community Engagement Charter. This structure ensures institutional accountability and sustained relationships that extend beyond short-term grant cycles.