LEAP wins Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation and Engagement Award 2022
At this week's University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation and Engagement Awards ceremony, LEAP was announced an overall winner for our two major public engagement initiatives: Meat Your Persona and Meat the Future.
The two projects were envisaged to open up conversations abut meat production and consumption with the general public. Meat Your Persona traveled up and down the country to encourage evidence-based discussions on the the current understanding of responsible sources of meat and its environmental and health impact. It was designed to help disseminate LEAP research amongst the general public, as well as build on the insights and data collected by the LEAP team and other researchers on meat, health and planet.
The installation launched in tandem with Meat the Future – a joint exhibition from LEAP and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, presenting cutting edge research on the environmental and health impacts of eating meat. The exhibition was awarded the Partnership of the Year Award at the Museums + Heritage Awards 2022 earlier in the year.
I’m delighted we’ve received this Vice-Chancellor Award. The LEAP programme has been an extraordinary inter-disciplinary collaboration across the university and through these public engagement events we’ve been able to connect with the public in ways which have shaped our research programme and, I hope, given research findings back to people to shape their own thinking. I want to thank all the LEAP research team, Lucy Yates who led the public engagement theme, colleagues at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History who created the Meat the Future exhibition and the team at Liminal Space who designed the Meat Your Persona installation.
- Professor Susan Jebb, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences and LEAP Director
LEAP's Public Engagement Coordinator Lucy Yates with the VC Award
Meat Your Persona empowered the public with accessible, research-based information and tools about the health and environmental impacts of meat consumption.
Working with The Liminal Space, a creative design agency, the LEAP team built a touring installation in a bright yellow horsebox to take LEAP research to six cities (Cardiff, Leeds, Newcastle, Blackpool, Redcar, Glasgow). This included a quiz, take-away cards containing key facts to fit with your ‘meat persona’, and plant-based recipe cards. This stimulated visitors to discuss food and planetary health with LEAP researchers and locally-recruited staff, to gain insight into the findings and ultimately to make better-informed choices about their diets.
Independent evaluation showed the touring installation reached over 100,000 people, and three-quarters said they would talk to others about the experience. The team compiled what they learnt about the barriers to meat reduction into a briefing for policy-makers.
Meat the Future: A partnership to feed minds and bodies, in collaboration with Oxford University Museum of Natural History, presented LEAP’s research in a thought-provoking exhibition about the societal challenges – and choices – we face about the production and consumption of meat.
Data was presented in a visually-stimulating way, and visitors explored the environmental and health impacts of their own diets through digital interactives. Between May 2021 and May 2022, it attracted more than 250,000 visitors, alongside a diverse programme of events engaging families, students and local communities, which involved 35 researchers and reached over 4,800 people. A new Eat the Future café at the Museum provided a largely vegetarian menu, implementing LEAP research by adopting innovative ‘ecolabels’.
