This application to work with All Our Stories (AOS) projects builds on the University of Hertfordshire's commitment to academic-community partnerships in history and heritage. Over the last three years, the University's Heritage Hub (HH) has supported research and development work essentially connected to and shaped by the communities the University serves http://heritagehub.herts.ac.uk/. Phase 1 Connected Communities funding allowed us to expand and accelerate our activities, taking University researchers to museums and community events, and bringing members of local history groups, schools and individual researchers into the University. We are now in a position to consolidate this experience. Through a partnership with AOS groups in Smallford, Sopwell and Wheathampstead, we will explore new ways of doing collaborative research and embedding skills and knowledge across regional and academic communities. The first strand of activity, a programme of bespoke training and mentoring, has been determined in consultation with the AOS groups. Two early career researchers (ECRs), experts in oral history and archival prospecting, will lead this aspect of the project. With support from the PI, the team will enhance the initial training in oral history for which the AOS groups have already budgeted. In particular they will mentor groups throughout the research process, developing skills (the art of questioning, an ear for the telling story etc) and building confidence. Through partnership with Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) a similar and responsive programme of activities will be provided around archival resources. The project re-affirms our commitment to break down divisions between researchers inside and outside the University. We believe that the University can play a vital role in connecting projects and research across the region and beyond. Our ambition here is to go beyond a 'local for locals' framework and encourage participants to feel part of an (inter)national endeavour. For that reason we include two further strands of activity, both of which are designed to enrich the AOS groups' research contexts and will also be relevant to AOS projects across the region and beyond it. Digital story-telling (via DigiTales) and digital mapping (via Historypin) can make research into a multi-way, international conversation. Community and University researchers will participate in a genuine process of knowledge exchange, as close to equals as the structures allow, creating new forms of spatial and relational knowledge with public and academic value. AOS funding has empowered many community heritage groups. The University's HH will provide this project with a channel to share that experience with those who did not apply for AOS funding or whose bids were unsuccessful. Through shadowing and, where appropriate, sharing activities with successful projects, other organisations will gain practical skills and confidence to participate actively in exploring the region's heritage, perhaps developing their own funding applications. Digital storytelling and Historypin are two specific vehicles for exchanging knowledge and building ambitions. Through creating material they will enrich research collaborations and expand the opportunities for participants, including AOS groups, to locate discrete projects in variegated regional and global contexts. Our intention here is to give substance to a notion of communities connected in a shared historical landscape. This stream of the project will also address issues of fragmentation and sustainability beyond the formal life of AOS activities. The project will create additional AOS outputs, specifically in the form of digital mapping and storytelling, and build capacity, resilience and sustainability. The process will give the ECRs in particular a close insight into working with community groups, while also creating substantial knowledge about local and global histories.

Despite rapid social progress LGBTQ+ adolescents often still experience distressing bullying and victimization. Mistreatment and socially hostile environments in turn negatively impact on their mental health (e.g. they are more likely to be depressed, self-harm and attempt suicide) as well as their physical health (e.g. they are more likely to smoke cigarettes). A pressing public health challenge is addressing the adverse effects of the social violence these adolescents experience on a day-to-day basis in the United Kingdom (UK). For example, Amos and colleagues' paper from the UK's nationally representative longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study of almost 10,000 14-year olds reported that sexual minority (e.g. LGB) adolescents had twice the odds of being verbally and physically assaulted in the past 12 months compared to their heterosexual peers. Less has been reported on the experiences of transgender and gender diverse adolescents, but studies have consistently documented a high prevalence of adverse health and wellbeing outcomes for these adolescents. In 2017 the UK Government conducted a survey of LGBT people and received responses from over 100,000 LGBT individuals who reported numerous examples of victimisation, bullying and discrimination. This survey has now been used to set an agenda for change, entitled the "LGBT Action Plan". This plan supports action in schools, health services and communities so that LGBT people can live safe, happy and healthy lives without fear of discrimination. Typically, LGBTQ+ adolescents cannot simply leave harmful social environments due to the practical constraints around their schooling and their economic dependence on their families. Many are geographically isolated away from the LGBTQ+ charities or support groups clustered in large urban areas and most will not have parents who are LGBTQ+. Further exacerbating the challenges is that LGBTQ+ adolescents are thought to be 'coming out' earlier and as a result they frequently have not yet developed the more sophisticated psycho-social skills that LGBTQ+ people who come out as young adults possess, which means their older LGBTQ+ peers may be better equipped to handle harmful social environments. Hence, there is an urgent need for widely accessible and targeted help to assist these adolescents to develop the best possible skills to thrive. Strategies have been employed to recognise and improve harmful social environments, such as anti-bullying interventions delivered by LGBTQ+ organisations in secondary schools. However, the 'Inverse Care Law' demonstrates that health systems' policies often inadvertently restrict needs-based care in populations with the poorest health and greatest levels of disadvantage. This includes LGBTQ+ adolescents, not because they are hard to reach, but like other under-served populations they will be easy to neglect. Although LGBTQ+ adolescents are a 'high risk' population, and despite sexual orientation and gender reassignment being protected characteristics in the Equality Act, few evidence-informed interventions have been developed for them. Two recent systematic reviews of psycho-social treatments identified only a single tested online tool to support the mental wellbeing of LGBTQ+ adolescents, which was developed in New Zealand by Lucassen (i.e. 'Rainbow SPARX'). Coping strategies that are evidence-based for the general population but are fine-tuned with LGBTQ+ adolescents in mind (e.g. with strategies that assist them to manage LGBTQ+ stigma and victimisation) proffers considerable potential. This is especially so if they are delivered online in an engaging manner and focus on enhancing coping skills and building resilience.

This application creates a team of researchers who are committed to community engagement. Their previous experience ranges from scholarly publication to innovative ways of presenting research and engaging with different audiences. They bring practical heritage experience and offer a distinctive interdisciplinary mixture: history, art history, creative writing, digital media and tourism studies. As members of the University's Heritage Hub network, the researchers will tap intellectual resources across the University and already have strong working relationships in the fields of cultural geography, education and film studies. Through this project they will share expertise with one another and with community groups. As well as history societies and museums, collaborations will include inter-general activities and previously marginalised groups to reflect Hertfordshire's demographic profile, the University's social responsibilities and the capacity of heritage to foster a sense of identity and belonging. Through the University of Hertfordshire's Heritage Hub (HH), the University has made a start on these engagements and is currently looking for methods to increase their impact and reach. This application therefore captures a momentum that exists for exactly this sort of initiative. Individual HH members have delivered successful partnership projects (funded by KEEP3, AHRC and HLF, for example) and community interest has been stirred by events around 'Remembering the First World War'. The University, HH and History Department are also gaining ground as groups begin to appreciate the enthusiasm and support that exists in their local academic community. Without financial investment, current initiatives could fail to reach full potential, while new ideas may not emerge. The HH network was formed in response to a real and urgent demand for outside engagement. What has been achieved already has demonstrated the enormous potential locked within the University, from digital storytelling to policy making, knowledge of local histories and analyses of tourist sites, and the scope to interest and address the needs of community groups. External groups often lack capacity or expertise to make the most of their resources or explore possibilities for partnership working or further research or marketing. The project would provide access to additional support, advice and networking as well as tangible results in terms of research activities, case studies, oral histories and other outputs. On their side, community groups have an impressive record of heritage activity and specialised research. We have been working in an ad hoc way with those groups that have managed to locate appropriate experts in the University, but this project would allow us to expand, democratize and systematise such activity. The University of Hertfordshire's entrepreneurial approach and unusually outward-looking perspective have shaped our ambition to carve out something new in terms of outreach, public engagement and partnership working. Three of our proposed collaborative projects - Remembering the First World War; Low Carbon Pasts; Low Carbon Futures; and Instant Oral Histories -- are designed to provide a flexible framework to hold both academic and community research. By opening the University and taking it out into the community through project open days we intend to forge greater understanding on both sides of the relationship. This will strengthen support for projects that are initiated by community groups and brought to the researchers for practical or historical advice. But it will also create new relationships. These might explore hitherto unstudied material held by groups and organisations around the county and investigate innovative methods of reaching both academic and general audiences. They have the potential to bridge a gap between academic research and its popular dissemination, create sustainable collaborations and enrich knowledge of local heritage.

The Climate Change Committee's third Risk Assessment (CCRA3) set out a comprehensive analysis of climate-related risks. In response, UK Government published the Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3). However, there is a large gap between what we need to be doing to protect the wellbeing of the environment, people and the economy in the UK and what we are doing. Further, we should be looking to leverage the co-benefits of action to improve wellbeing outcomes through adaptation. The Maximising UK adaptation to climate change hub (the Hub) will help catalyse existing knowledge, especially that existing in the Devolved Administrations, to advance progress in the UK towards the Government's adaptation programme. The Hub links UK national and regional adaptation networks and knowledge exchange organisations with multidisciplinary researcher expertise across eight HEIs, to produce a UK-wide research network on adaptation, and to deliver rapid policy- and practitioner-responsive research. This powerful new science-policy mechanism will be a new national capability for an effective and transformational programme of adaptation. Key to the Hub is leveraging the activities, networks and knowledge of existing adaptation partnerships and knowledge exchange organisations who are already doing the work. These organisations identified five priorities, based on their current bottlenecks and frustrations: Assess and address barriers to awareness and engagement with adaptation; Explore the efficacy of Welsh and Scottish approaches to wellbeing and future generations for adaptation for UK wide justice-oriented approaches; Increase understanding of system complexity by establishing an inter-sectoral community of practice; Address aspects of policy, legislation and regulation that hold back the adaptation vision proposed in the NAP; Enhance the accessibility and understanding of climate model results for decision-makers. Working in teams of universities and knowledge exchange organisations throughout the UK will carry out activities that can help increase levels of capacity and knowledge to address these challenges. We will: Carry out training and capacity building on adaptation as the means to network and bring different communities of practice together; Generate more useful data by integrating different risk and exposure models together, and working with end users to provide the data they need; Funding collaborations of researchers and practitioners to trial transformational adaptation in order to collect data on what works; Address policy challenges in real-time, supporting UK governments to accelerate adaptation; Bring together adaptation researchers who will be funded under the same research programme to improve how we do, and communicate, adaptation research. Research related activities will involve: i) place-based research in each of the Hub's spokes (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales); ii) the delivery of a programme of grants, across the sector, through a Flexible Fund, encouraging academic and practitioner collaboration on climate adaptation at local and national scale, and focusing on implementation projects to generate insight into what works, and projects that analyse, so as to overcome, institutional and policy barriers to action; and iii) coordination with UKRI's wider transformative adaptation programme, to synthesise findings from research and maximise their translation into actionable insights. At the end of the three years, we will have produced integrated sectoral pathways to a well-adapted UK, a better understanding of the policy landscape and new advisory mechanisms to support policymakers, accelerated action on adaptation by starting projects that were in the pipeline, and better ways of embedding vulnerability and justice-oriented approaches into adaptation priorities.

The proposal integrates the expertise of the research centres and project partners in transport policies and planning, design, operations and evaluation. The UK government, European Commission and other agencies rightly emphasise the importance of socially inclusive and sustainable interventions. As yet, however, there is a dearth of comprehensive 'toolkits' and resources to support those who are working to reduce social exclusion in journey environments. The shared vision is to produce rigorous methodologies for sustainable policies and practices that will deliver effective socially inclusive design and operation in transport and the public realm from macro down to micro level. Three Core Projects will develop decision-support tools that will establish benchmarks and incorporate inclusion into policies, and support the design and operation of journey environments and transport facilities. A real-world but controlled 'Testbed' facility will allow these to be piloted in the context of the policy intentions and constraints that shape implementation. Solutions will then be tested and transferred to other Case Study areas and sites. Phase 2 of AUNT-SUE will build on the suite of tools developed in Phase I and apply these to intensive case studies of transport interchanges, nodes and development areas. This will both develop and test techniques to design accessible journey environments (routes and facilities) and transport provision and planning, and consult on these with people who have been identified as socially excluded from travel. Three inter-linked research modules will be validated through integrated case studies outlined below, utilising a GIS-based platform supported by CAD, relational databases and both quantitative and qualitative social surveys.