Abstract:

Frascati Scienza is an association with the aim of spreading the scientific and research culture to the general public. It was funded in 2006 and now the association shows off an ever-growing partners network. It has been organizing the European Researchers' Night for 17 years all over Italy, coordinating a group of more than 40 institutes, between universities, research centers, private and public institutions.

In the period 2021-2023, Frascati Scienza received funds from the EU commission (MSCA-NIGHT-2020bis for 2021 and HORIZON-MSCA-2022-CITIZENS-01 for 2022-2023 edition) to organize a European Researchers Night project focused on EU Green Deal topics, under the name LEAF (heaL thE plAnet's Future). The main goal of the LEAF project is to increase the awareness on the importance of research and innovation proposing activities and events focused on the main topics of European Green Deal such as: Farm to Fork, Biodiversity, Circular economy, Zero-pollution, toxic-free environments, Health & Wellbeing, Energy and resource efficient buildings, secure energy, sustainable and smart mobility.

The aim of our presentation is to show the impact achieved by Frascati Scienza and its partners network on the society/general public of these two years project and the lessons learnt to improve the quality of the next 2023 edition both in terms of reached public and outreach activities.

As requested by the EU Commission, the main aim of these events is to make science and research accessible and fun to everyone. So, involved researchers had to deal with non-scientist and/or expert people in order to spread and generate a practical understanding of how to cope with climate change issues.

We are going to report about the activities organized for several target people and realized specifically for schools or for the general public. By way of example, we will present some "pop" events specifically prepared and delivered inside schools to promote science and research (Researchers@Schools). As required by the EU commission, the impact assessment is a mandatory aspect of the project and a very useful tool to evaluate the proposed activities and the whole organization.

We are going to report about the data collected in about 30 Italian cities during the LEAF project’s activities and the results obtained through both a qualitative (dedicated events) and quantitative (more than 3000 questionnaires) analysis.

The overall result is an increase in the awareness of the researcher's work relevance as well as the benefit for society and for the current and future Planet’s heal.

Keywords:

ERN, Research, Science, Dissemination of scientific culture.