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Neighbourhood Futures Festival - June 2025

Dates: 26-29 June 2025
Timings: TBC (see link below for further details)
Location: Birmingham Settlement Nature & Wellbeing Centre, Edgbaston Reservoir, 79 Selwyn Road, Ladywood, Birmingham, B16 0SL

The Centre for Urban Wellbeing is once again supporting Birmingham Settlement to host their annual Neighbourhood Futures Festival. Our main task is to curate a stimulating programme of opening speeches, workshops and activities on day one of the festival, 26 June this year.

We want to extend this invitation to you to join us! Please consider proposing a talk or workshop for this community event. A chance to engage diverse publics with your own research or activities, combine this with participant recruitment, organise a project meeting outside for a change, collaborate with artists, make something, do a Q&A with civic leaders, start some citizen science…

The audience is usually local residents, community, arts, wellbeing and sustainability groups and other civic leaders and organisations. Last year the festival attracted over 1000 people with 250 on our first day. Generally the opening speeches attract an audience of around 50 people depending on the weather. Last year's opening talks were from Civic Square, Wild in the City, Midlands Forest Network and Intelligent Health, with over 30 different organisations providing workshops.

You could either do something on you own theme, issue or topic, or you can fit in with our main theme for the day, which is climate adaptation, risk and vulnerability, with the working event title: Neighbourhood Climates - stories from Birmingham's futures

Our aim for this theme is to: raise awareness of climate vulnerabilities, encourage people to care about climate justice, and involve people in climate research.

If you are able to present your research and engage with us and our local community in this way, we'd be excited to hear from you.

We are asking speakers/workshop organisers to send to urbanwellbeing@contacts.bham.ac.uk before 28 April:

  • A title: short and snappy!
  • Format: Workshop/talk (1 hour)/opening speech (5 mins)/other, please specify
  • 50 words outline of your topic and what you will do

We hope that you will consider getting involved in this special opportunity to do what you do best, in a lovely field close to the city centre, at Edgbaston Reservoir.