Team:Northern BC/Public Engagement
Human Practices: Education and Public Engagement
Our team has invested a great deal of time in public engagement and education because we understand that including more people in discussions around synthetic biology gives people outside the lab the opportunity to learn and explore synthetic biology firsthand. From teaching youth about the basics of DNA, to providing university students and community members the chance to learn how to use a naloxone kit to save lives, we understand that our project can positively impact our community on a much broader level. Additionally, we have been fortunate enough to have many engagements within our community that have allowed us to gain feedback and new insights into our project.
Youth Engagement
As Nelson Mandela once said, “The youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow.” We have made reaching out to youth in our community a priority and we aimed to spark the imaginations of young children by encouraging them to explore the world around them and investigate the limitless realm of science. One day these children will be seeking ways to solve the world’s problems and we know that synthetic biology will be one of those tools. As leaders, it is crucial that we engage with youth today so that they are familiar with synthetic biology related topics in the future; there is no doubt that some of them are prospective scientists!
One example of our engagement initiatives includes Canada Day 2019. The Prince George Multicultural Heritage Society kindly provided us with a booth at the city’s Canada Day celebration in Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park. Our team used this opportunity to teach young people about the structure and function of DNA in an enjoyable and delicious way, as well as to discuss our program with members of the community. All day long, children of all ages (and some adults) would visit our booth and create DNA double helices using marshmallows, licorice strands and toothpicks. For some of the very young children, we explained DNA as being like the lego building instructions for our bodies that tell us what colour our hair, eyes and skin will be. Older children were interested in discussing the nucleotide patterns present in DNA and asked questions about the molecular makeup of DNA and what mutations were. In all, our involvement in this event allowed us to engage with the community and bring awareness to both our project and synthetic biology in general.
We had such a great number of positive interactions with youngsters that we were also able to partner with both the Bob Harkins and Nechako branches of the Prince George Public Library to put on similar events in July. At one branch we taught children about DNA and created tasty DNA strands while at the other branch we conducted solubility experiments and discussed solutes and solvents, as well as extracting DNA from bananas.
Lastly, we had the opportunity to visit the UNBC Active Minds youth summer camp in August and we taught the young participants about DNA and animal cells. The kids got to make their own cells from fruit and candies suspended in jello and DNA strands from marshmallows and licorice; they definitely had a great deal of fun!
Community Engagement
Without community engagement, we could not have fully understood the scope of the problem we are working to solve. Through our outreach activities, such as interviews with community stakeholders, we were able to affirm the relevance and long-term usefulness of our project to our community and country. The objective of human practices was to promote awareness surrounding the opioid crisis and to understand how our team can help mitigate the high prevalence of this crisis in our community. As such, we sought to recognize all elements of the opioid crisis: education, prevention and treatment in the case of an overdose. One of the ways we achieved this was by hosting a variety of events to create awareness about the opioid crisis and to provide free naloxone training in collaboration with a representative from a local pharmacy. It was also important to our team that we seek advice and assistance from professionals and individuals within the UNBC community when appropriate. One of our greatest considerations was ensuring that our project activities would have a far-reaching impact in our community while addressing the critical issue we are aiming to help solve: the opioid crisis.
One of the largest components of our community outreach was interviewing stakeholders from a variety of organizations. The team was able to interview School District 60 Superintendent Stephen Petrucci, Deputy Fire Chief C. Warner, a Fire Captain, two Advanced Life Support Unit Paramedics and one Emergency Medical Responder Paramedic who also volunteers as a Street Pastor. Some interviewees requested to remain anonymous. Interviewing these individuals provided us with immense insight into the opioid crisis in our community and also gave us ideas for future activities.
Paramedics provided details regarding how they dealt with overdoses and expressed that faster testing methods are needed for people because high risk users do not usually take the time to test their drugs. The deputy fire chief confirmed one case where an individual believed to be taking a different drug, overdosed, and later found out it had been laced with opioids, showing that people don’t always know what they are taking. Many voiced concerns that there was not adequate awareness or community knowledge about the crisis and that more people needed to be trained to administer naloxone, which later prompted us to host a naloxone training session. Lastly, the school district superintendent admitted that while overdoses did not take place at schools, students were coming into contact with opioids and other illicit drugs through friends, family and parties. He acknowledged that there could be more resources available to students regarding specific illicit drugs and testing methods.
After our discussion with the superintendent, we decided to produce a brochure with information regarding the risks of drug use, the dangers of contaminated/laced drugs and methods for drug testing that could be distributed in high schools to students. School District 60 has expressed their willingness to distribute our brochure to its students.
We believe that interviewing community members was incredibly helpful to identify the current gaps in the fight against the opioid crisis and we hope that through our integrated human practices activities we have filled some of those gaps.
Additionally, while our booth at Canada Day was mainly targeted for children, we had dozens of people come and approach us regarding our program and project. We received both praise and criticism of our approaches and the booth provided us with the opportunity to engage with community members to explain our project and clarify misconceptions about our research and the problem we are tackling. The team also put on a public drop-in presentation at the Prince George Public Library in early September to explain the team’s project and discuss the progress made in the development of our opioid biosensor. Attendees enjoyed learning about the applications of synthetic biology right from the source and were impressed with the research being done. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, better known as CBC, also attended this event and approached us for an interview. This lead to a radio segment on the project which can be found here, as well as a news article which has yet to be published. This allowed for us to reach audiences across the province and potentially across Canada. These events have given us new ideas with respect to how to approach public engagement in the future and how to reach wider audiences.
One thing we recognized was that people learn in a variety of different formats; sometimes, presentations and discussions are overused methods of getting information across, so the team chose to also run a documentary and invited a panel of professionals with first-hand experience dealing with the opioid crisis to talk about their experiences. Northern BC iGEM worked in collaboration with the Institute of Health Improvement at UNBC to put on the showing of the documentary Painkiller: Inside the Opioid Crisis in late September, which was well attended.
More recently, in early October, the team put on a naloxone training event on campus that was open to the public to attend. We were grateful to have Reanne Sanford, the regional nursing lead for Harm Reduction, visit to present interesting facts on the rise of the opioid crisis and explain the trends we are currently seeing. This informative session was followed by training on how to administer naloxone safely, and naloxone kits were also distributed to all attendees.
