On May 15 and 16, 2023 in Ottawa, the Falling Walls Engage Hub Canada organized a special bilingual event for science outreach professionals, called “The Power of the Pitch: A Funding and Skills‐building Workshop for Canadian Science Engagers.” The workshop was co‐designed by Under the Microscope, a non‐profit based in Nairobi, which promotes initiatives that advance science education across Kenyan and the African continent. The workshop received financial support from McGill University, the Falling Walls Foundation, Queen’s University, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) as well as through an Outreach Initiative grant from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).
The primary goals of the “Power of the Pitch” were as follows:
To provide a skills-building workshop for Canadian Science Engagement professionals to improve their ability to secure funding and excel in today’s funding landscape and to develop new skills to successfully engage their multistakeholder audiences.
To foster community building and networking opportunities among Science Engagement professionals from Canada and around the world.
To promote the inclusion of underrepresented groups in STEM through travel bursaries and targeted invitations to small organizations with staff of 10 people or fewer.
To enable participants to contribute their lived experiences to the first iteration of a global funding toolkit.
The Engage Hub Canada emphasizes diversity and accessibility in all its activities. “The Power of the Pitch” workshop and accompanying activities embodied this commitment, with workshop attendees representing 33 organizations in seven provinces and territories—Alberta, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan—as well as in Cameroon and Japan. Nearly all the organizations present at the workshop have mandates to work with equity-deserving groups, such as youth (girls, rural, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming), BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ Science Engagers, and Indigenous communities.
