LPF Kiddies Club CIC started as a holiday club in 2013 and has since grown to include after-school provision, workshops, a summer school. They currently work with 5-12 year olds, as well as parents.
The club rely on grant funding and fundraising to ‘keep afloat’ and were recipients of British Science Week Community Grants in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Carmel is a volunteer and the club is ‘a passion’ for her.
What events did they run?
The club’s British Science Week events explicitly focused on identity with an underlying theme that children are ‘STEM heroes’ taking on a series of challenges to understand the world they live in and get more connected to scientists “who look like them, sound like them, come from their background.”
During the activities, children had to choose whether they were a scientist, an engineer, a technician or a mathematician. They had to say why and at the end to discuss why they still want to be in that group, what they’ve learnt and what jobs they could end up in if they were working in those fields.
The events, attended by 40-50 children, aimed to help expand children’s aspirations. According to Carmel, the aim was “for them to understand that they can go on into these careers and be these scientists that they didn’t think they could be,” particularly in relation to race, gender and class.
How did the British Science Week Community Grant help?
The first British Science Week grant in 2016 helped to introduce new areas to LPF’s provision including coding and robotics which was their first science-focused activity.
From that, Carmel says: “We realised there was demand for it, which was amazing. The children and the families really wanted it. They needed something like that.”
In addition, LPF have managed to develop professional networks, particularly with black science communities.
Representation is important but “we had no idea where to look when it came to finding black scientists,” said Carmel.
After putting a call out on Twitter for support, Carmel was ‘inundated’ with responses. She said: “We’ve managed to build a lot of really good connections on the back of that. It’s meant that we’ve got into a lot of conversations with a lot of people in industry as well which is helpful for understanding how we can reshape our provision.”