Colourful banner with the name and dates of the 2025 Collaborative Futures Academy

What is a place? The space around us... An event location... Somewhere we feel connected too... A community of people... A site of contested histories... Where we feel at home? In this year’s Collaborative Futures Academy (CFA), we take a deep dive into how places shape how we work.

Over three days, a global cohort of engaged researchers and practitioners will come together in a unique online space to develop skills and learn from each other’s experiences. We will hear personal stories from researchers and engagement professionals, investigate creative techniques that explore relationships to place and unpick some of the research that underpins place-based practice.

Interested? Read the full information below and apply by 15 April 2025 to join us for a vibrant professional development experience and help push the boundaries of Public Engagement practice.

Joining CFA'25 will give you the opportunity to:

  • explore the emotional, cultural, historical and social aspects of place and how these matter in engagement
  • practice your communication and active listening skills to develop a more empathetic approach, becoming more responsive to the complex ways people experience place
  • learn practical methods to create meaningful and caring spaces for exchange and dialogue
  • gain insights into how practitioners from across the world work with questions of belonging, connection and displacement
  • actively consider your own positionality and belonging within your engagement practice
  • build global connections to shape your own research and engagement work.

When is it?

CFA’25 will take place online 1 - 3 July 2025.

And will run from 9:30-15:30 UTC+1/BST (10:30-16.30 CEST/SAST) each day.

There will be optional mentoring and action learning sessions following the Academy.

What can I expect from the Academy?

The Academy is delivered as a live online learning community, and the working language is English. Each day includes a dynamic mixture of case studies, group sharing, workshops and personal reflection. We build on the expertise of participants, with input from international experts and practitioners. Over the course of the Academy, we will jointly produce a published output that collects and catalogues experiences and practical tools from the group.

To get a feel for what it is like to take part in CFA, take a look back at the programme of last year’s Academy, and our collectively created resources from previous years

We place a lot of emphasis on learning from each Academy and looking at ways to improve our practice. Read our CFA24 Evaluation Report for insights.

Who is CFA for?

The Academy is primarily aimed at researchers who want to develop their engagement practice but have little opportunity to do so. We also invite engagement practitioners who directly work with researchers and want to share and learn in this space. We are specifically looking for an international cohort of applicants.

We welcome applications from researchers who:

  • come with experience in public engagement or related activities (such as community or civic engagement, science communication, participatory research, public and patient involvement)
  • want to embed equitable public engagement into their research practice
  • are looking to become champions for engagement within their local work environment and inspire others
  • have experienced challenging situations in their engagement work and want to take time to reflect and develop new approaches.

And engagement practitioners who:

  • are directly working with researchers to develop public engagement or related projects on urgent and important topics
  • are working to build bridges between communities and researchers in innovative ways
  • have directly engaged with the topic of place in engagement and want to bring their experience to a peer community.

How much does it cost?

Places are funded by the host institutions and are therefore free of charge to participants. In return, we ask all participants to fully commit to the Academy programme (see our applicant commitment), and share their learning back to their home institutions, colleagues and collaborators.

How can I apply?

  1. Please read our applicant guide and applicant commitment carefully.
  2. Prepare a short 1-minute video on the question of "How does place shape (your) engagement practice?". More details, including advice on video recording and possible alternative formats, can be found in the applicant guide.

  3. Complete the application form and submit it together with your video before 23:59 UTC on 15 April 2025.

Fill in the application form here

If you have any questions regarding the Academy or the application, contact the programme team: BerlinSchoolTraining@mfn.berlin

Who is behind the Collaborative Futures Academy?

CFA is a collaboration between the Berlin School of Public Engagement and Open Science at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, the University of Cambridge Public Engagement team, Stellenbosch University, the Kavli Centre for Ethics, Science and the Public and Wellcome Connecting Science.