To be fair to everyone who wants to apply, we have decided instead to capture the questions and our responses within this web page. It consists of questions we have been asked both in the webinar, or by email.

The website for the From the Personal to the Planetary initiative is at: https://personaltotheplanetary.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/ . This will give you an overview of the initiative's activities so far and its aims.

You cannot apply if you are a full time PhD student as these are aimed at full-time members of academic staff at the university. You could apply if you are part-time and have a role beyond the university that is relevant to the Fellowships (for example, you also work as a community activist, an artist or have another job that is relevant).

You cannot apply if you are a full time HPT as these are aimed at full-time members of academic staff at the university. You could apply if you are part-time and have a role beyond the university that is relevant to the Fellowships (for example, you also work as a community activist, an artist or have another job that is relevant).

You cannot apply if you are a full time member of staff at another university. You could apply if you are part-time and have a role beyond the university that you are employed with that is relevant to the Fellowships (for example, you also work as a community activist, an artist or have another job that is relevant).

The guidance says that to be eligible you must be based in Bristol or the surrounding area and happy to attend cohort meetings in Bristol in person. If you have a professional or volunteer-role link with Bristol and/or the surrounding area but live elsewhere, you are eligible. The aim is that the cohort will be able to actively participate in the cohort activities, hence asking for this requirement.

Unfortunately, no. This call is for individuals only. There is an opportunity to engage with others as part of the Fellowship, but this call is for individuals only.

No, having received funding from Brigstow Institute or Cabot institute previously will have no impact on this opportunity.

Well, essentially we don't have specific pathways but there will be four protected places for people within the university and four for people beyond the university.

And I think for this person, I would be encouraging applicants to think whether you want to have buy out from your academic time or whether you want to do it in your non-academic time. It's about you as an individual and where you feel your strengths are in relation to the Fellowship aims and then tailoring your application to that.

If you're working for a community based organisation and you'd like to apply, if you're successful, as a Community Fellow, this money could be used to buy out your time in your current role and the organisation use the money for backfill. This would have to be a conversation you have with your organisation though.

In terms of similarity,  we would expect there to have been an impact from that individual undertaking the Community Fellowship and in that sense, the Fellowship should be different to your day job.

There is no advantage to applying as a representative of an organisation rather than as an individual. We are funding the Fellows based on their skill sets, complementarity, interests and track record. Previous or current work in the organisation, or undertaken individually, may be relevant to this.

Applying as a representative of an organisation instead of an individual will simply mean different mechanisms of payment.

The first residential cohort day date is essential so we really need everybody to be available on that date. Therefore it could affect the success of an application. Our advice would be if you are applying and you know you absolutely cannot make that first date, then please let us know in your application.

The Fellowships are to support you as an individual, not for a project. While consulting with others, it emerged that the most important factor would be to support people’s time to engage, think, network and exchange knowledge with a diverse group.

To be transparent and fair to all applicants, you can only submit the information requested, so a covering letter and CV not exceeding three sides of A4 and no smaller than font size 12. Alternatively, you can submit via video - this should be no longer than 5 minutes and needs to be sent to us as an MPEG video file or YouTube private link. Any additional information will be excluded from the assessment process. Please assume that we have no previous knowledge of you or your work/activities, so please focus the information on that relevant to the call and explain your background, experience and professional interests.

Being as open-ended as we are poses some challenges for people knowing how to respond, but that is why we're happy to take submissions that are not just written - so you could submit a short video.

We want to hear about your passion and your commitment to research activity in this space. We want to hear about innovative ideas and future activities that might be inspiring you, what you think are the challenges in the environmental, climate justice arena. We're looking for your ideas and your particular approach and where you see there is work to be done, and what could be done in collaboration with others. We don’t want to shut down any possibilities that we haven't thought about yet.

Expertise sits and resides in lots and lots of different places and lots and lots of different ways. We're looking at a really broad range of expertise and it may be, for example, an artist who has worked with Community group around emphasising environmental degradation within that particular place based kind of area. It could be a climate scientist who has, you know, been working in £1,000,000 grants in a different part of the world who wants to bring some of that knowledge to bear in terms of how do we work together across those different scales of thinking about the climate.

Personal to the Planetary came from an ambition to bring the grassroots activist actions and concerns together with big climate, environmental science, and often recognising that there’s quite a disconnect between those two big areas of knowledge and knowledge production.

Yes, as long as you include the traditional content of a CV, how you present that is up to you. What we do want is for people to be judged equally and fairly, instead of having some very long submissions, and other short ones,  that is we have asked for three pages at 12 point type.

Yes, as long as your application length is within three A4 pages.

The Fellowships are for the person’s time only and we are not asking people to explain exactly what time would be allocated, just that we want you to be actively engaged in the cohort and some other activities. When working out how you might engage, you should base this on a reasonable allocation of your time and also include the cohort days that are published. We are not expecting anyone to engage with the Fellowships for less than their usual rate.

If you are an individual, you might, for example, want to consider what your hourly, rather than daily, rate might be an estimate accordingly what time you could allocate to these Fellowships.

It means that each the £5000 per person is cost limited. So this means that it's not £5000 plus the VAT, it's £5000 including the VAT. So If you are VAT registered, or if your organisation is VAT registered you will have to you'll need to factor that in and account for VAT within the £5000.

Those within the university: You will need to have a conversation with your line manager / Head of School about applying for this, because you're asking for a commitment from your School to cover some of your other duties so that your time is released for this. It’s important to have a conversation with your line manager / Head of School as every School will have differences. However, it might be that this funding is sufficient for them to buy out some of your time and buy in an hourly paid teacher to deliver some teaching or marking for you. You will then need to create a Worktribe costing.

Those outside of the University:If you are successful, pleaseget in touch with our lovely Julia Cassell (hello-brigstow@bristol.ac.uk)  who can ensure that you are paid appropriately depending on your employment status. So there's a number of different routes to paying. We have a good track record of making sure that people get paid on time whether you're self-employed or employed. There are different routes depending on your current status but it is most likely that we will be expected to set you up as a supplier, generate a purchase order and then pay you whether that's in one lump sum or a series of payments. This will to be decided with the individual in question.

Those beyond the university: We are not expecting a budget / schedule, we only ask for your commitment to attend at least the cohort days.

For those within the University: It is a University requirement that the budget template needs to be completed in Worktribe in order to cost buying out your time.

If you're not used to costing your time and would like some guidance, contact hello-brigstow@bristol.ac.uk. There are standard day rates that we can kind of suggest to you.

Many people will have a standard day rate, (for example £250 per day). So it would be a question of working out how many of your days would equate to £5000. These days should include the cohort days and some days of activity in between.

We are asking academics to complete a Worktribe including how many hours and days of work the £5000 covers.

No, this Fellowship is to pay for your time. In our initiative, activities so far we have heard that the crucial element if to have time properly costed in to spend with each other and take part in activities.

For those within the University there are other funding avenues appropriate for conferences.

The panel will consist of Debbie Watson (Brigstow Institute Director), Gail Lambourne (Brigstow Institute Manager), a representative from the Cabot Institute for the Environment, and  a representative from Close and Remote. There may be others but the final panel has not yet been confirmed.

Close and Remote will be involved in curating the first cohort day and maybe involved in further cohort days to be decided in conversation with the Fellows.

Yes, should you ask for feedback we will send it to you as soon as we can.

Yes. We started with the Large Blue butterfly as an example of a successful conservation initiative, and a really interesting success story. It isn’t that we were only interested in Large Blue butterflies, but it's through the lens of looking at this butterfly that we were able to have different conversations about conservation, climate justice, intersectionality, intergenerationality etc.  We are not putting any limits on the particular environmental arena.

Both. We don’t have any preferences. We have positioned these Fellowships within a broad environmental, climate justice space. So within your application and CV we advise you to demonstrate your track record within these spaces.

Applications will be judged on merit, but we will be looking to bring together a diverse disciplinary group both of people within the university and beyond the university. 

You might not name it as such, but you may still have a particular perspective or observation that you've made from where you come from. It's about making the case for why you know your approach is different or unique or how you would work as a cohort.

These are emergent themes that have come through the work that we've done so far. They're interesting areas that have been discussed and been brought up by participants. But we're really aware that there are many different issues out there that could enable these discussions across divides of knowledge or across divides of communities to come together in an exciting new collaboration. So that's what we're trying to enable here. We’re curating eight different people to come together around this global social, economic kind of challenge with paid time to pursue particular initiatives, activities, conversations, developments, but we're not framing these as specific criteria.

I think it could be a whole variety. It could be either and it could be anything in between and so you know it may be that the eight Fellows come together and identify one particular community that they want to work with one particular activity that they want to do, or they may splinter into smaller groups with different community groups. We're trying to be as open and as iterative as possible to what those possibilities might be.

This is a possible outcome, it may be that a sub group of Fellows work together on a public art piece, or communicate about a particular aspect of this space. We are open to all possibilities, but the Fellowship application assessment will be based on the individual, their track record and interest in the field and what they think they can bring to an interdisciplinary, co-produced cohort.

We do not know. The very nature of co-produced research is about taking a little bit of a step into the unknown: collectively, as a cohort, that is what these Fellowships will be doing but with a supportive framework. This is why consistent engagement with the cohort days is vital.

This Fellowship opportunity is about the people, we want to bring people together, people who work in this field to engage in collaborative projects of some kind. When we say projects; that might be developing a network, it might be working together on a large grant bid, it might be doing some public engagement work with particular communities. We established the cohort model is to bring the Fellows together at regular intervals so that we can assess where priorities are emerging, where people’s ideas are coming from, which is why we are saying we aren’t asking you to propose a project here. We are asking you to put forward your expertise in this space and work collaboratively with the other Fellows. It’s fairly time and budget limited, but it’s within those parameters that we hope that new ideas will emerge. We are trying to be as iterative and ground up as we can by not defining a lot of the specificity, but I appreciate that makes it quite challenging in its own way.

If you think your ideas for outputs would strengthen your application, please do suggest them which will give us an idea of where your interests lie. What we’re really interested in though is your background, experience, expertise and interests, for example when working individually, as part of a team etc. Our hope is that any outputs will be co-decided and co-created by the cohort.

While there may be some individual activity, the emphasis is on the cohort of Fellowships working together on the published dates.

Everyone who is appointed as a Fellow is expected to attend the first cohort meeting on 6th June 2024 and the other dates listed. 

The initial cohort days will be curated by Brigstow / Cabot and Close and Remote. But there will be lots of possibilities for Fellows to co-curate subsequent cohort days. For instance, a cohort day may be partly supported by a Fellow who has particular activities or discussions they would like to bring to the group. It is open ended.

The  basic commitment we are asking for is for the cohort meetings. Other activities will be discussed and agreed with the cohort. We currently have no expectations about how many extra days we never expect people to work. We will not expect any work that is further to £5000 / your day rate.

Day rates may differ among the successful Fellow, and therefore the among of working days may differ, but we will do our best to make sure it's as equitable as possible and that people aren’t feeling excluded.

The residential will involve activities on the 6^th June, an overnight stay, and activities for at least part of the morning of the 7^th June.

All cohort days will be in person.

Yes, we're very concerned to ensure that you know anything we do is accessible. So the cohort days, etc. will all be timetabled in accessible locations. And we will make sure that we check in with successful applicants about requirements for the residential and other activities.

Close and Remote will be starting with us on the first cohort days. Working in a creative producer context, they will facilitate the first residential cohort meeting. Close and Remote are talented at bringing interesting provocations and making participants think in ways that challenge. They will not be the only artist that we work with in this process, as there will potentially be Fellows who have creative practices and would like to bring their arts practice to the cohort days. We are interested in the successful Fellows’ suggestions.  Close and Remote are keen to work with us so we will keep a loose affiliation with them, but that shouldn't deter or limit anybody else's involvement.

Yes, there is some possible additional budget. We have a budget for the cohort days, for facilitation and also to be spent on activities proposed by the Fellows.

There won’t be such a thing as an “average day”. The cohort days vary from an overnight residential to half and full days. The residential will have a focus on team building. Beyond that there is no requirement that the activities outside of cohort days must be carried out in solid 9am-5pm working days. We appreciate that the Fellows will need to work around commitments and other work patterns.

This is funding to ensure you can attend the required cohort days. After this it's about recognising that people will be able to participate at greater, or lesser extents depending on, their other commitments, but also their day rates.

It's about working together as a group, and recognising that if one person has six work days that they're purposefully engaged with those six days and the other person may be doing quite a different task for the other ten days. We also have a team here at Brigstow to help with some practical arrangements. It's also about valuing a person’s time, irrespective of what their day rate is.

The in-person cohort model is important for the Fellows to buy in to. How do you work collaboratively and supportively and equitably so that you can work out some of these structural inequalities which are, inevitably, there already? It’s an important perspective to bring to it. These are some of the questions that the Fellows will be posing around who has the right or who has the ability to engage in these conversations.

You should be Bristol based in some way or within the locality; by this we mean being available to be in person for the cohort days. That doesn't mean that you couldn't focus activity outside of Bristol if those activities were beyond the cohort days, (for instance consulting the particular community groups), but we wouldn't envisage that one person is going to be much, much further afield from Bristol doing their own activity in between. It is the focus on the collaborative, that is crucial.