Spotlight on: Funded Engagement in East London

18 November 2025

Since 2012, the Centre for Public Engagement (CPE) has been supporting Queen Mary staff and students to engage with the public through the CPE grant programmes – offering grants of between £1,000 and £10,000. In 2024-25, over 50% of CPE funded projects were rooted in East London, with funded activities including a student placement in East Ham looking at the future of the high-street, free afterschool sports activities, and a wide range of patient and public involvement activities for groups including local neurodivergent young people, amputees, and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Supported projects showcase a fantastic range of creative and collaborative approaches to engaging locally, and just some of the ways in which Queen Mary's research and engagement is embedded in East London.

Find out more about some of the recent and live local projects funded by CPE grants below

Live local projects, 2025-26 

‘Tower Hamlets Active Communities’ is a project led by Harry Pape (QMSU) which, over the coming months, is training up around 40 Queen Mary students with professional sports qualifications to offer free sports activities in locations across the Borough – including combat sports, basketball, hockey, volleyball and netball, working with Tower Hamlets Council, local schools and grass-roots community clubs, from the Limehouse Laces to the Wapping Wildcats. The project is actively helping to fill a gap in local free sports provision, as well as upskilling students. 

In Havering, a project led by PhD student Jade Hunter (School of Society and Environment) is working with secondary school students from Drapers’ Academy to capture oral histories from residents of the Harold Hill estate – the start of a living archive of the community, showcasing the estate’s historical importance.  

In partnership with Spotlight Creative Youth Service and Kazzum Arts, Dr Heather McMullen (Wolfson Institute of Population Health) is leading a project exploring young people’s health experiences in Tower Hamlets. Over 20 weeks, a group of 30 young people from Tower Hamlets will work together to co-create creative pieces exploring health and illness topics. The project could produce anything from a podcast, to a video game or a theatre piece.  

Building on The Partnership for Black People’s Health, Dr Sara Paparini (Wolfson Institute of Population Health) is leading a project that will set up a Panel for Black People’s Health made up of over 200 Black community members from across London, Birmingham and Nottingham. Working closely with community partners, including Positive East, the project will see panel members organising workshops with Queen Mary academics to co-create new (or adapt ongoing) research projects related to Black People’s Health. 

And in partnership with arts centre and charity Rich Mix, a team of researchers from the School of Society and Environment are gearing up to work with a group of young researchers to document how East London communities have organised against racism and fascism across generations. The young researchers will be helping to collect oral histories from activists and community members and will co-curate a digital archive and exhibition. 

Additional local projects will be funded throughout the coming months, through our Small Grants programme. 

Recently completed local projects, 2024-25

In 2024-25, Professor Dominic Johnson (School of English and Drama) led a project to engage new audiences with the art of British-Pakistani artist Hamad Butt at the Whitechapel Gallery – in collaboration with Dr Rageshri Dhairyawan. Dominic collaborated with the gallery and with Positive East, London’s largest HIV charity, on a range of public programming accompanying the Hamad Butt: Apprehensions exhibition – commissioning a short film and holding seven events reaching over 270 people, including a community film screening, a performance, a panel discussion, and exhibition tours for local HIV service user groups. 

Dr Mel Ramasawmy (Wolfson Institute of Population Health) led a participatory research project in partnerships with PPIE contributors and local community development charity Social Action for Health, to co-develop two animations, one in Bengali and one in English, that explain how large language models work and their use in healthcare.  

Local residents were also invited to have their say in the future of oral health research, in ‘The Big Mouth’ project led by Dr Vanessa Muirhead (Institute of Dentistry) in partnership with Social Action for Health. This participatory project aimed to prioritise the voices of Tower Hamlets residents – especially those from seldom heard communities – in setting future research priorities that truly benefit the local community. Project activities included community conversation events, an online survey, a project mural, and the creation of the “Big Mouth” booklet. 

Dr Viet-Xuan (Elen) Williams (Wolfson Institute of Population Health) worked on a project aiming to help reduce stigma facing voice-hearers. Collaborating with a group of voice-hearers based in East London, in partnership with CoreArts, a leading mental health creative education centre, they have co-created a new piece of music that will debut at the Philharmonie Luxembourg in November 2025.  

And as part of the ‘Pedagogy in the Park’ project, Dr Jennifer Randall (Wolfson Institute of Population Health) worked with 20 Queen Mary students and alumni on a series of workshops, development meetings, and training around how to hold challenging conversations around social justice issues - including harm reduction, drug policy reform and debt justice. The project culminated in a day of action at Altab Ali park in Whitechapel and participation in a parliamentary lobby at Westminster, engaging over 350 people. As a result of their training, the students engaged can now also volunteer at the Harm Reduction Hub in Whitechapel. 

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Find out more about our Large Grants, Small Grants and Participatory Research Fund programmes.