Full disclosure – I am not a Blogger. For most of my life, I was not an academic, but here I am, and I’ve been asked to write a blog about our first Discovering Liveability event. So, bear with me as I try my best to share what happened on the 1st of September, when we held a soft launch of our Lived and Living Experience Hub – and it was amazing!
What Even Is a Soft Launch?
To be honest, when we started planning this event, I had no idea. The “hub” doesn’t exist yet and won’t formally be a thing until 2027. So, this event was really just a launch of the idea. Although we know what its core will be, we want to co-produce everything around it. That is why this early engagement event was important; we want to build it together.
Making it Real
The hub is this ethereal (not real, or otherworldly), intangible thing that was difficult for me to wrap my head around when I joined the project (not so long ago), so the thought of trying to explain it to lots of other people and get them excited about it was a little scary. Not only that, but the whole point of the event was to get input and ideas from other people about what it should or could look like and doing that in a meaningful way with a group of almost 50 people who hadn’t met before.
But thankfully, we have an amazing team, who each played their part in helping to organise and deliver the event. Firstly, a big shout out to Alice Hopkins and Asia Podgorska on drums and bass guitar – the beat of our band – working away in the background to make sure the stage was set, and we could perform. They organised everything from the Save the Dates and Bookitbee page to our IT and comms on the day!
How it ran…
We split the 90-minute online session into three smaller 25-minute chunks to allow short comfort breaks between our talks and discussions. No one wants to be staring at a screen for 90 minutes straight and it meant people were able to dip in out a bit more and stay engaged better.
First UP …
Amy Chandler our lovely leader (Principal Investigator) kicked things off by telling people about the Discovering Liveability Research project, and where it came from. Amy, and many of the others on the research team, have been working together over many years on lots of different research projects exploring how suicide is thought about, and understood, and what suicide prevention policies say about it and do (Links here to suicide cultures and suicide as/in politics). Amy explained how their previous studies had involved using qualitative research methods, getting out into communities to really find out about people’s experiences, analysing policy documents and using arts-based workshops to explore what these meant to people. All of this work highlighted how the main focus of suicide prevention was on saving lives and crisis intervention. The social and structural issues that can make life unliveable, although acknowledged, are not central to suicide prevention. So instead of asking how we can prevent people from dying, Discovering Liveability will explore what suicide prevention might look like if we focused on making environments and societies that are more Liveable.
Amy went on to explain that Discovering Liveability is an ambitious seven-year research project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, with partners from the University of Edinburgh, University of Lincoln and Mind in Camden. The work of the project has been divided into four main work packages:
- Work Package 1-centres lived and living experiences of suicide
- Work Package 2 – explores the role of community-based and peer-led services in creating and sustaining liveable lives
- Work Package 3- is about disrupting suicide and the role of activism in creating liveable lives
- Work Package 4 - looks at how the State (government, politicians) contribute to making lives more/less liveable
Our team will use lots of different qualitative methods to investigate alternatives to suicide prevention, including ethnography, in-depth interviewing, critical policy analysis, arts-based, and other collaborative approaches.
At the centre of our work, is lived and living experiences and – eventually – the ‘hub’. Amy talked about how most of our team, from our PI, researchers and co-investigators to administrators and advisory group members, have their own different lived or living experience of suicide. Throughout Discovering Liveability, we will grow and build further networks with organisations and individuals who have lived and living experiences of suicide, including practitioners, artists, and activists.
Drum Roll: Hazel introduces the hub
After a few questions from the audience and a short break, Hazel Marzetti then had the job of introducing people to the lived and living experience hub. And although I am biased, I thought she did an excellent job of explaining how although it will be a space for networking, knowledge exchange, and collaboration. Importantly, it will house six lived experience researchers,. with each of them given the time, funds, resources, training, and support to conduct their own co-produced suicide research projects; creating new knowledge.
Hazel explained that although it won’t launch officially until 2027 when we have our team of lived experience researchers in post, preparation is underway. To inform the development of the hub, the research team is researching how lived and living experiences have been and are being used in suicide research. We are doing a literature review, firstly considering how it has been used, defined, and experienced in academic research. We are also connecting with and visiting other research teams around the world who are also engaged in this work to learn from them and think about what works well and the challenges involved. Hazel told everyone how Sarah Huque had just returned from a site visit to Canada (WOW!), and that Hazel herself was going off to Australia on a site visit in November (Lucky duck). We have plans to visit India in 2026 to learn from community-based support and research projects there (hosted by the Mariwala Institute), and closer to home, Fiona Malpass will be visiting projects here in the UK.
All of this learning, together with our continued conversations and collaborations with a range of activists, community organisations, and people with lived and living experiences, will help to co-create a research hub grounded in and reaching out to those with lived and living experiences of suicide.
The best bit…
The whole point of the event was to hear from other people about what they thought the hub should or could look like, how they might want to engage with it, and the kinds of events and activities they would want it to deliver. We broke up into five breakout rooms, and were so pleased at how generous everyone was, sharing their thoughts, experiences, and ideas for the hub. Some of the main discussion themes were around:
- Knowledge exchange, and creating a knowledge bank – a resource to find recent reports / research evidence as well as different types of knowledge e.g., film, arts
- Safeguarding; creating a safe, trauma informed space that honors diversity of experience
- Space to connect, network and share experiences and learning
- Arts based sessions & creative methods of engagement
We used Padlets to capture the conversations and allow folks to add any thoughts they had afterwards. We have kept one open until the end of October 2025, so if you want to add your ideas or opinions, there is still time!
Feedback and Next steps
Overall, the feedback from the event was hugely positive. People were excited at the opportunity to be involved and connect with others involved in this work. We were really pleased to hear that the event had felt welcoming and that people felt they could share their opinions openly and were genuinely heard.
We loved that so many different people came, and we want to build on this. We want to create an open platform that everyone who wants to can access and engage with. We understand the importance of engaging with groups and communities whose voices are not always heard in relation to suicide prevention. If you haven’t signed up to be on our list of collaborators, please do! This link takes you to a short form so we can keep in touch about engagement opportunities, or if you want to know more, please contact us at discoveringliveability@ed.ac.uk.
Thanks for being kind enough to make it to the end of my first-ever blog! I hope you enjoyed it.
Watch this space:
This is just the beginning and over the next year we hope you will join us for a variety of engaging, and creative activities which might include things like:
- Fireside chats … an open space for lived experience suicide researchers to come together to connect, chat, and share the highs and lows of their work.
- International Site Visits Webinar: Sarah and Hazel get the chance to share all about their travel and learnings in Canada and Australia.
- (Maybe) A watch party – to be confirmed, but we are exploring fun, arts-based ways to keep the conversation going.
- By Lynne Gilmour
