Abstract:

LEAF - heaL thE plAnet's Future – is a project promoted by the Association Frascati Scienza aimed at organising a European Researchers Night project focused on EU Green Deal topics. Indeed, 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.

The main goal of the LEAF project is to increase awareness on the importance of research and innovation by 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.

Frascati Scienza has the goal of spreading the scientific and research culture to the general public. It was founded in 2006 and now the association shows off an ever-growing partners network. It has been organising the European Researchers' Night for 18 years all over Italy and beyond, coordinating a group of more than 40 institutes, between universities, research centres, private and public institutions.

The main topic of the proposed presentation is to show the impact achieved by Frascati Scienza and its partners network on the society and on the general public through these three years project. This will be the starting point to evaluate the lessons learnt and improve the quality of the next proposals, both in terms of reaching public and outreach activities.

As requested by the EU Commission, the main aim of these projects is to make science and research accessible and fun to everyone. So, involved researchers had to deal with non-scientist and not expert people in order to spread and generate a practical understanding of how to cope with climate change issues and research in general.

Description of the activities organised for different targets (children, teenagers, and adults) or realised specifically for schools or general public will be reported.

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 organisation.

The data collected in 34 Italian cities during the LEAF project's activities, as well as the results obtained through both qualitative (dedicated events) and quantitative (more than 2500 questionnaires) analyses, will be presented. The analysis of the data collected will also be based on their comparison over time, i.e. over the three years of the project.

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.